In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social features to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Accounting Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin comes with several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, font size, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with 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 clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, access 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, 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 – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. 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, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was created for accountants. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was designed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can 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. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using the page builder or beautiful 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 redesign the structure of their web pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, blog, circle counter, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, map, post title, sidebar, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
Go here for more information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation Theme was specifically created to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent 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 over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investments or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax services. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed for firms that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about this theme, 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
Hopefully, you have found this guide on how to improve your accounting business online using WordPress helpful.
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