In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- 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 regular opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide 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:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create 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 several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports international 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 Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has 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-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed specifically for accountants. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession, 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.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to help make your accounting website look professional 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 services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include bar counter, blurb, contact form, countdown timer, image, number counter, person, pricing table, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
The Corporation WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six 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 beautifully-designed themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was built to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investing or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This one was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot 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
We hope that you have found this comprehensive guide on ways of improving your accounting website using WordPress useful.
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