In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Ways To Improve Your 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 Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores how to improve your website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots 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 URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value information and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Tax
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms 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 clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, viewing 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 For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, 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 invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoicing)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting businesses. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This theme has a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site 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 (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is created specifically for accountants. It offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, a variety of color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit 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.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to make your accounting business site look professional while not 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here to learn more this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
To learn more about about this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without touching any code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was built specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme was developed to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help build your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
Finance Business was specifically built for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. The 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, animated elements, and a lot more.
Visit this site to learn more about using this WordPress 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 guide on ways of improving your accounting or financial services website using WordPress useful.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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