How Accounting Websites Help You Acquire New Clients
Your accounting website should be a profit center for your accounting practice and generate a steady flow of qualified leads. If it is not, then something is wrong….
What most accountants really want to know, first and foremost, is how their investment in a website can be used to generate more leads and acquire new business. After all, at the end of the day, every expenditure needs to have some payback to justify itself.
Over the last 10+ years, most accounting firms that reside in a competitive market location created websites that were little more than online brochures. Calling cards, if you will. These types of websites would be nothing more than text on a page with no photography and poorly written content. Just the information, please.
Pretty soon, thanks to advanced technologies and higher connection speeds, all of us were introduced to websites that were rich in content, photography and graphic designs that were easier on the eyes – and websites evolved as various tools became more available and affordable. Today, whether you decide to design (or redesign) a website yourself – or use an external resource to create a new website, if you want to see higher traffic and improve the quality of your leads, you’ll want to concentrate on several key components.
Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization.
You really may be tired of hearing about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but you simply cannot avoid implementing SEO on your website IF you really want to reach prospects. Of course, some accounting firms have done quite well building their business on the golf course or at networking events, but nowadays, those activities aren’t going to be enough to find prospects and convert them to clients.
Technology is useful when it works – and in the case of SEO, it works very well. The simplest way to think of SEO is to think about a spider web with your firm smack dab in the center of the internet. Like a spider who spins a web toward the edge, SEO, if done the right way, works to ensure your site shows up at the top or very near the top of the search engine results page.
Here’s a simple exercise. If you haven’t ever searched in Google, Bing or Yahoo! for your accounting firm, try it – but try it in two ways:
- Search by your firm name. If you currently have a website, you are very likely to come up at the top or near the top because your firm name is so unique.
- Search by the words, “accounting firm” and your local city or area. Now you can see that there are many more results.
So, if you were a prospect who wanted to find an accounting firm in your local area, which firms are you more likely to contact – the ones that show up near the top of the page or your firm that shows up on page 9?
When done properly, SEO works like a charm by delivering quality traffic to your website, which in turn gets your phone to ring. The process of SEO generally takes 6-12 months to work effectively and gets back over time, like fine wine.
Pay up for Pay-Per-Click Campaigns.
Another great way to find clients is to conduct pay-per-click advertising campaigns. If you think advertising is only for the big dogs, think again. With pay-per-click campaigns, you decide how much you want to spend per month, and when you reach that amount, the campaign is no longer available until the beginning of the next cycle.It’s a fact that people are more likely to click on a listing shown in two places on the results search page, so if you create a combination of SEO and pay-per-click campaigns, you’ve just doubled your chances of having a prospect ask for more information.
How much to spend depends not only on your budget, but also on the time of year and the population in your local marketplace. Most firms increase their spending during busy season because that’s when prospects are more likely to search for an accounting firm.
Show Me the Custom Info.
We’ve become a society of scanners, not readers, so when prospects find your site, what they want to know is how you can help them solve a problem or find a solution.We’ve all become frustrated with sites that “hide” their information. Instead of creating a site that offers the most pertinent information on the home page, companies and organizations bury it deep down into their sites. Instead, best practices show that you want to directly address your audience’s concerns by customizing your site as much as possible.
For example, if you specialize in a certain niche industry such as manufacturing or retail, talk about that on the home page. Find a way to attract attention with images and brief copy. Instead of talking about yourself and your services, show your expertise by talking about the needs of a particular industry or an accounting service. We know visitors will only spend a few seconds on your page before they go elsewhere, so maximize your visibility by directly addressing you’re their needs.
Make an Impact.
There are many more areas of websites to cover; with always-on technology, the sky’s the limit with sites sporting everything from portals to social media marketing to video. Still, what matters most is to drive traffic to your site and provide the most useful content possible. Otherwise, your prospect will go somewhere else.Hugh Duffy is co-founder and chief marketing officer of Build Your Firm, a practice development and marketing company for small accounting firms and website development for accountants. Hugh teaches a series of Accounting Marketing Workshops; writes an email newsletter reaching thousands of accountants; and is frequently published in various publications. He can be reached at 888-999-9800 x151, or at hugh@buildyourfirm.com.
