In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run your own social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers several customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating automotive loans, real estate, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out 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, 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 lets you add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, view reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With the themes below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has 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-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme by installing premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This theme has a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the cost of purchase.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was developed specifically for accountants. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built 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 give your accounting business website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional site you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to create good-looking corporate sites.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design. It has six color schemes. It also has 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 over 80 stunning themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was specifically designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. 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 info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this WordPress theme:
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 or financial services website with WordPress helpful.
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