In Part One of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Readers can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, viewing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
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 accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy offers a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the price.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
Kathryn is created specifically for accounting businesses. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting business website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Visit this website for more information about using this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes audio player, blurb, contact form, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, login, person, pricing table, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek 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 all beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more details about this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
Adviser was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investments or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help was built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those offering tax services. It’s designed to show your services in a professional way to help build your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically designed for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about about 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 how to improve your website with WordPress.
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