In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
How To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social network on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for car loans, real estate, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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, 2Checkout, USAePay, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, displaying reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has 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 expanded through premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This premium theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and fully responsive. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed specifically for accountants. It comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you want it to, 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 information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to help make your accounting business website look professional while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme built for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
Go here for more details:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This one from Elegant Themes was created specifically to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
For more information, go here:
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
We hope that you have found this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online using WordPress helpful.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***