In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below 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 and posts for search engines)
- 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 SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social network on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and give them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
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 Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send 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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send 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, quote creation, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, access 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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 WP Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoicing, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting Services
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes 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)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can expand this theme with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
Accountancy Theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
Kathryn is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s built for accounting businesses. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, various color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it can easily fit 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.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This one was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to help make your accounting site 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Visit this website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was built specifically to make corporate sites look good.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 different unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme was built to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here to learn more this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme was developed for firms that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
For more details, 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
Hopefully, this guide has helped you learn how to improve your accounting or financial services website with WordPress.
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