Accountants – Simply Having A Website Is Not Enough
Posted by Marketing Man in Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,SEO,Website Design | August 23, 2012In the process of carrying out some market research ahead of launching this service I must have visited hundreds of accountant’s websites. What surprised me more than anything was how many accountants had opted for a free website builder to showcase and promote their business. It shocked me that something that could be the first impression a potential customer gets of your company was left up to free web building software. More often than not these sites give off a “personal” rather than “professional” vibe and very rarely are they modified enough to highlight the particular company’s brand image or message.
The underlying message I got from this pattern was that a lot of companies see having a website as something they need to tick off a to-do list and, if they can do it for free then all the better. The obvious flawed logic in this approach is that, far from being just another task, your website has the potential to be your best marketing and client generation tool if you are willing to spend the time and money to make it so. A site built with a free site builder will very rarely rank for anything other than extremely low competition keywords (usually low competition because there is no search volume) as the majority of them are difficult to modify and optimise correctly.
Having a website should be an ongoing priority for any forward thinking accountancy firm. Living off referral work alone can be a workable solution for some companies but those businesses who want to grow beyond that level will need to invest time and money in promoting their business to potential customers and a well optimised website will be key to this process.
If you want your accountancy website to generate new customers for your business then you need it to be a professionally designed website to bring in traffic and convert that traffic to sales leads. Otherwise, the only traffic your website will get is from people who are already aware of you as a company. Of course, if your only reason for wanting a site is stay in contact with current clients then that is fine, most people however would like their website to help them reach out to new clients. If this is you, then you had better rethink your current method of promoting yourself through your website. It seems too many accountancy firms throw a website up on the internet and then forget about it from that point on, and then expect people to magically find them through the search engines. Think about how you use a search engine when looking for a product or service, generally you will click though onto a site on the first page of the results. Statistics show that rarely do searchers go past the first page of the results to click onto a website and it is extremely rare for them to venture past page 3.
Have you checked to see if your website is ranking highly at all for words that potential clients would type into the search engines? Do you even know what words or phrases people are typing into search engines to find a business like yours? Would you know what to do to move your website up the search rankings? Would you be confident that, if a customer landed on your site, your website looked professional enough and was laid out well enough to convert that visitor into a sales lead?
If the answer to any of the above questions is “no” and you would like some help to improve your online marketing strategy then get in touch with The Accountant Marketer and see how we can help. We will give you some free advice on how you can improve your marketing efforts along with a no-obligation quotation on our own services. What have you got to lose?
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About the Author – Marketing Man
Marketing Man is a superhero marketer hell bent on a personal crusade to improve the websites and marketing of UK accountancy firms. Check him out on Google+
