In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Essential Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Functionality To Your WordPress Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- 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 another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Users can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
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 like.
(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 a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include size, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin 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, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, display 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting firms. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically for accounting services. Kathryn provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). 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.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help give your accounting business website a professional look while not looking dull. 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 accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also 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 info:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional website you want using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, blurb, circle counter, email optin, filterable portfolio, number counter, portfolio, shop, tabs, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 stunning themes.
Go here for more details:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also has 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 beautifully-designed themes.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium WordPress theme was developed specifically to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that provide tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for businesses that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, 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, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a lot more.
Go here to learn more about this 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 business online using WordPress useful.
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