In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Your Accounting Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your accounting site with plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and run a social network on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include speed, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for vehicle loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, display reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 most valuable clients and top grossing line items), and more.
For more details, go here}:
All In One Business Management Application
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With these themes you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
Kathryn is designed for accounting services. It comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to give your accounting website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
This is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create any type of professional site you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their page without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investments or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This one was specifically developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally to help establish your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more information about using this theme, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for organizations that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme website:
Avada
(Avada Finance WordPress Theme)
Avada is a fully responsive and versatile multipurpose theme that lets you easily build, configure, and run any kind of website you want without touching code, including a website for an accounting or finance-related organization.
To learn more about the Avada theme for WordPress, go here: Avada
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn ways of improving your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"I love the way your email series "Infinite Web Content Creation Training Series" is documented and presented. It is very absorbing and captivating. The links and tutorials are interesting and educational. This has motivated me to rewrite my content following the concepts I am learning from the email series." - Mani Raju, www.fortuneinewaste.com
***