In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to run your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section looks at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the department they want to contact. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients 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 And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Tax
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers several customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, text color, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, access reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple 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 customers and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This is an inexpensive 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 menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress 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, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy 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.
To learn more about this theme, visit this site:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
To learn more about using this theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help make your accounting business site look professional without looking dull. 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate 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 for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and loads fast.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was specifically developed to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 unique different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
Adviser was developed specifically to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
Tax Help Theme was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was developed for firms that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 comprehensive guide on how to improve your accounting or financial services website using WordPress themes and plugins helpful.
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