In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting And Financial Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Capability
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways of improving your accounting website using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Financial 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 just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Leases
- Equity
- 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 widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 itemized invoices. It even 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 clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, viewing 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports international 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, 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 For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting firms. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can customize Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is developed specifically for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although it can easily fit 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.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help give your accounting business site a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed 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 adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a 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 web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi WP Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, blog, code, divider, gallery, map, post title, sidebar, social media follow, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all professional themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, six unique different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This theme was developed specifically to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investments or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
Tax Help was specifically developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 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, animations, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more information:
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 ways of improving your website using WordPress useful.
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