In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Improving Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic 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 sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some 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 Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, opacity, scroll speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
It will display 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 you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, create 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, access 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 For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticket management system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, 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 invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes listed below you can have 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)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can customize this theme through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed for accounting services. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although it could easily suit any profession, 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 for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help give your accounting website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their page 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 mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
To learn more about about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This theme from Elegant Themes was specifically built to make corporate sites look great.
It has a page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has 6 color schemes. It also has 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.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
Adviser was developed to help those in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business 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 lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your professional reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was specifically designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and lots 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 comprehensive guide on how to improve your accounting website using WordPress themes and plugins helpful.
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