Grow Your Accounting Business Online With WordPress

The information economy has not only revolutionized business globally, it has also created an increasing number of challenges and great opportunities for businesses offering accounting and financial services.

Challenges Certified Public Accountants Face Online

Now, more than ever, certified public accountants must find smarter ways to remain competitive, find new clients, and keep their current clients. Not only do you have to become more involved in the communities and industries your business serves, you must also develop a strong presence online. This includes having an effective website and learning how to better market your business services online.

In addition to spending dollars marketing offline, businesses in the accounting industry are now finding that increasingly larger amounts of their budget will need to be assigned towards developing and managing a website that brings in leads, engages visitors, outperforms the competition in search engines and gives them wider reach online.

This means that your site not only has to look great, load fast, and your site has to be easy to navigate, but even more importantly, your site’s needs will change over time and many aspects may need to be frequently updated. This requires a well-developed web and content management strategy in place.

One other problem that accounting businesses face with their websites (as do most other businesses for that matter), is that you have only about 30 seconds to provide visitors what they are looking for or they will go elsewhere.

“Websites have evolved into central information hubs where service information is still present but enhanced with web portals, hyperlinks to state and federal sites, and a variety of free tools.”

Michael Alter, http://www.accountingweb.com/technology/accounting-software/tips-for-improving-your-website

Online Opportunities For CPAs

As well as facing a number of business and technology changes, there are also many online opportunities available to accounting businesses that can adapt to meet the demands of the online economy and can think outside the box about improving their online marketing skills.

The guide below will help you uncover ways and opportunities to attract new visitors and improve your business presence online.

As well as providing useful website improvement tips, we also recommend that you consider using WordPress to power your accounting business website.

To learn more about the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress content management system (CMS), see the articles below:

• Learn How A Poorly Designed Website Can Lose You Business
• WordPress For Business Owners – A Complete Guide To Growing Your Successful Business Using WordPress

Useful Tips For Improving Your Website

Let’s start by reviewing some basics. In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your website and get better results. We will look at what web pages you need, what type of content works best for accounting websites, your navigation structure, etc.

If you need website planning assistance, see this detailed guide we have written: The Website Planning Process: A Basic Primer For Non-Technical Business Owners

How To Improve Your Web Pages

All websites need several basic pages. Let’s take a look at these.

Products And Services Page

It’s essential to have a page that describes your services and any products that you offer.

Your page will include services such as:

• Business – business planning, company structures, accounting, payroll, preparing financial statements, book keeping, financing, forecasting, budgeting, strategic planning, consulting services, etc.
• Taxation – preparation, planning, reviewing, auditing, advising, problem resolution
• Investment strategies
• Corporate finance
• Wealth creation
• Superannuation/retirement plan (401k) advice
• Audit risk assessment and assurance
• Quickbooks – setup, training, tune up, and support
• Specialist services – mergers, acquisitions, information technology, secretarial, rentals, trusts, fiduciary accounting, succession planning, selling businesses, transfers, etc.
• Lending and leasing

Make sure to list all of the services you provide. Provide your visitors with information that will educate them about what your services do and why they should book an appointment with you.

About Us

The ‘About Us’ page should give a description of your business and what it stands for, its unique approach, sponsored community projects, etc.

This page should mention any awards, recognitions, certifications, accreditations, publications, associations, etc., that could be used to promote your company and position it above the competition.

(List all of your awards recognitions, certifications, accreditations, publications, associations, etc. in your About page. Screenshot source: deloitte.com)

Team

If you are searching for inexpensive ways to sell more products or services online and get people to stay longer on your site, then something you can do, is make it easier for your prospects to get to know you, your team and your business better.

You want potential clients to relate to your business. A great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your people. This page should include a photo and a brief bio. Since most visitors won’t be familiar with accounting terms your bio descriptions should tell who they are and what their specialties are. You may also want to explain what those specialties mean. This page should even include social buttons so your visitors can follow your team members on their social pages.

In this page, make sure to outline each employee’s expertise and qualifications, why they are an asset to your team, and more importantly, how they can help add value to your clients’ business.

(Make sure to add a staff description page. Screenshot image source: deepsky.com)

We have created a detailed tutorial on how to create and add an easy-to-maintain simple team members directory in a WordPress site using a free plugin here: How To Easily Add A Simple Employee Directory To Your WordPress Site With No Coding Skills Required

Work For Us

List any career opportunities available within the company. It should include training, benefits, professional development, etc. You can include information about additional career opportunities in the accounting and financial services industry.

Also include a positions available section in your page. If there are no positions currently available, consider inviting people to return periodically to this page, join your announcements list, follow you on social media, etc.

Testimonials

Testimonials and case studies are a great way to show potential clients minimise tax, increase profitability, or grow strategically. By adding a page with reviews from clients and case studies, you are also helping to are also providing social proof online.

(Add a page to your site with case studies and reviews from clients. Image sourced from: pcg-services.com)

We have written extensively about using testimonials and reviews to improve your business results online. To learn more about this go here: How To Improve Your Sales Conversions With Powerful Customer Testimonials

Contact Us

Having a functional contact page is absolutely necessary.

Your contact page should include some or all of the following information:

• Company Name
• Your physical location
• Telephone number
• Fax number
• Email address
• Map and directions
• Website URL
• Contact form
• Contact name
• Links to social media networks
• Interactive chat feature

If your business operates out of multiple locations you should make this clear when showing the address and contact info.

You should also include a few links for commonly-asked questions, main pages, special offers, helpdesk, newsletter opt-in form, blog, etc.

Blog Section

A blog is a powerful business marketing tool. Many blogging platforms typically comprise of a content management system that is easy to use and allows you to promote your business using content such as announcements, product releases, educational articles and tutorials, informative posts, promotional videos, infographics, etc.

If you already have an existing website, then consider adding a WordPress-driven blog to promote your services.

If you don’t have a website yet, or your existing accounting or financial services site is hard to keep updated with new content or not giving you the results you want, then WordPress can be used both as your business website and blog.

Not many people know this, but WordPress can turn your web presence into an automated traffic-generation machine that will help begin to attract web traffic to your business, simply by publishing regular content to your site.

(An expertly configured WordPress site can generate traffic automatically to your site)

Go here to learn more about this: Web Site Traffic Blueprint – Learn How To Turn Your Website Into An Automated Web Traffic Machine

Legal Information

Having a website that complies will all legal requirements online is important, not just for establishing trust and credibility with prospective clients, but also to ensure that you are not contravening local, regional or federal laws and regulations wherever your business services clients.

Depending on what products and services you provide, adding the legal pages below to your accounting website will help keep you out of trouble with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers, and other potential legal threats and inconveniences:

• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms And Conditions Of Use
• Website Disclaimer
• Affiliate Agreement
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• DMCA Notice
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers
• Refund Policy
• Video/Audio Terms
• etc.

We have written a comprehensive article about adding legal pages to your website. Go here to learn more: The Importance Of Adding Legal Pages To Your Site

Improving Your Web Content

In today’s globally competitive economy, the sooner you begin to publish great content on your site, the faster you will begin to see results and differentiate yourself from competing businesses.

You will want to provide great content with useful information and tips that will get your visitors sharing your web pages and coming back for more information. This is the most effective way to educate site visitors and prospective clients about your business and about using your services.

For example, for an accounting or financial services business, topics can include the following:

• Explanations of balance sheets
• Overlooked tax deductions
• Duties and legal responsibilities of company directors
• How to present accounts for non-profit activities
• Business cashflow planning advice
• Business insurance
• Risk protection
• How to structure a self-managed retirement fund
• Dos and don’ts of … (e.g. purchasing insurance, setting up payroll systems, etc.)

You can also create a series of educational articles that will help your your readers understand accounting services, such as finance accounting, small business accounting, business auditing, reducing debt, understanding financial conventions, etc.

Remember to include keywords in your articles that readers would search for.

We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive a comprehensive series of training emails with actionable information that will teach you how to drive more traffic to your website or blog, save money creating high-quality content that will add value to your site visitors and grow your business online using content marketing strategies. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also completely FREE!

Tips For Improving User Experience

Improving your site’s user experience (typically referred to as UX) helps keep visitors coming back and engaging with your site. This section will show you ways you can improve your visitor engagement and UX.

Use RSS Feeds

An RSS feed provides lots of benefits for your website.

If you provide useful information, other businesses will want to syndicate your content.

Some of the benefits of having other businesses syndicate your content, include:

• All of your updates are kept in one place
• your content distribution doesn’t rely on email
• Your feed can be shared and picked up by other sites online
• Users can subscribe to your RSS feed
• A feed provides links to your site
• RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS directories
• There are several ways your readers can receive your content (e.g. users can read the content on their mobile device using different applications)
• It’s built into WordPress

There are also a number of benefits when it comes to adding syndicated content to your site from other websites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.

You can find RSS feeds with loads of useful content for your website by visiting sites of finance-related government departments and industry bodies.

Below we have listed a few RSS feeds you could consider adding to your website:

• Taxation Policy Center: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/press/rss.cfm
• Australian Taxation Office: https://www.ato.gov.au/RSS-news-feeds.aspx
• Canada Revenue Agency: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/rssfeeds/
• UK HM Revenue and Customs: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rss/rss.htm
• South Africa Revenue Service: http://www.sars.gov.za/Pages/RSS-Feeds.aspx

(RSS feeds can help to improve your accounting website’s UX.)

Adding Forms & Checklists

Checklists and forms are a great way to help increase user engagement and add value to your audience. Checklists and forms can give them step-by-step instructions and resources to complete a task. Checklists and forms are great business planning tools.

You can provide a range of forms and checklists (or links to these) covering topics such as:

• How To Set Up A Business
• Negative Gearing Checklist
• Fundraising Governance Checklist
• Disclosure Checklists
• Company Tax Checklist
• Capital Gains Tax Checklist
• Income Tax Variation Forms

Other Tools

Providing unique online tools, gadgets and applications for businesses on your website is a great way to increase visitor engagement and significantly add value to your potential clients. Calculators, such as loan and tax calculators, are useful tools for accounting websites. Other applications could include time cards, and retirement and interest calculators.

In part 2, we will be discussing a number of WordPress plugins and themes you can use in your accounting site that can help improve your search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.

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This is the end of section 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence.

Click here to continue:

• How To Successfully Grow An Accounting Online Presence Using WordPress – Part Two

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