In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use this plugin to set up and run an online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select the department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes a number of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, typeface, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send 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, 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
You can 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 email notification templates, view 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different 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 – WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme 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 responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is created specifically for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, various color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it 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 is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s 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 and fast-loading.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. 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.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and change the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 professional themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation was specifically created to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 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 over 80 stunning themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The Adviser 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.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that provide tax services. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business was developed for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and lots more.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
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 how to improve your accounting website with WordPress helpful.
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