In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting Profession
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve your accounting business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with new potential customers
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing 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 page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 lets you add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include width, height, background color, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, view reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This theme offers a variety of 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, SEO friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It 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 mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium WordPress theme was developed specifically for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, many colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession, 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.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help make your accounting website look professional while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include audio player, blog, circle counter, divider, image, map, person, sidebar, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax help. Adviser 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.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was specifically developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that provide tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business was developed for firms that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and lots more.
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, this guide has helped you learn ways to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
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