In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – 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 articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can 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 contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select the topic they are contacting you about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will 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 plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, 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:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Leases
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin offers several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, opacity, scroll speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin 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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also 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 your WordPress 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.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail 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, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can expand Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps 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. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with your purchase.
Visit the theme website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, various colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more information about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to make your accounting business website look professional while not looking dull. 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 services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their page without touching code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has accordion, call to action, code, divider, gallery, number counter, portfolio, sidebar, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation WordPress Theme was built specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 different color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This one was built to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was specifically developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms offering tax services. The theme is designed to show your services professionally to help establish 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 additional custom shortcodes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, 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, animated elements, and a lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more traffic with WordPress plugins and themes.
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