In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section explores how to improve your accounting or financial services website using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads 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 content posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with a number of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends 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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, displaying 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 knowledgebase and support ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, 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 WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster by integrating 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 businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme 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, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can expand this theme using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Visit this site for more details about this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for accounting businesses. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, 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 is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their page without editing any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation was built specifically to make corporate websites look great.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 unique 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 professional themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investments or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This one was developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those offering tax assistance. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Visit this website to learn more about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and lots more.
Go here for more info:
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 ways of improving your website using WordPress helpful.
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