In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve 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 WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and run your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives 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 highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with other potential customers
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. 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 pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- And many 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 portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides a number of customizable ticker. 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 specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
It will display 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-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin 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 your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, accessing 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 WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, 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 and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best themes themes available for accounting businesses. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme developed 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can customize this theme by installing premium add-ons.
Visit this website for more details about using this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme has a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in the cost of purchasing.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s built specifically for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession you want it to, 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.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements 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 fully responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional website using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This one was specifically designed to create good-looking corporate websites.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with six different color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those offering tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally to help build your professional 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.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business Theme was designed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
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
Hopefully, you have found this guide on how to improve your accounting business online using WordPress useful.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
***