Marketing Your CPA Practice- a Few Vital Website Basics

08/04/2011 22:34

While it can be a blessing to your company in countless valuable ways the primary use of well designed CPA websites is advertising your company, and it's essential to locate a designer who knows this. In the last 10 years, the net has become an enormously valuable and influential means of communicating with existing customers and acquiring new ones. With a far-flung client base, staying properly in touch and projecting a professional image is extremely important.

1. Keep it Personal:

Rather than posting a generic website a good designer will take the time to personalize it and show the world what makes you unique. The best designers know that it's important that your website reflect you. It's your personality, and company's, that really separates you from your competitors. Sure, people want to know about your previous professional experience, education, and accreditation. But the real key to marketing is getting a prospect to like you. This helps new prospects overcome their natural fear of of strangers and make the initial contact with you. Existing clients will really believe that you care about them and their businesses, and this will help you with client retention.

2. "Content is King":

What you say is just as important as how you say it. Make sure you website is offering real value to it's visitors. High quality website content is essential to ensure that readers understand the principles of your accounting business, but you also want to offer them generally useful information in the form of newsletters, free reports, and interactive financial calculators. Good content will also ensure your clients feel confident in your abilities as a company.

3. Visibility:

Another important factor in choosing CPA websites is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Websites require traffic to generate business, after all. SEO can be a fantastic way to get CPA websites placed at the top of the Google rankings. And don't forget what I told you about content! If a searcher lands on a badly written page it doesn't matter how good your search engine listing is; the visitor is going to "bounce". When a visitor takes one look at your page and then just leaves we call it a "bounce".

4. Tracking Your Results:

When you plant a garden, you water it, fertilize it and watch your produce grow. Integrating CPA websites into your marketing requires the same kind of attention. Monitor the traffic that's coming and going through your website is really important. There are a number of free tools for doing this, but my personal favorite is Google Analytics. Winners keep score!

5. Other Promotional Strategies:

The smartest, savviest, most successful business owners don't find their accountants by looking them up on Google. So how do you land these big fish? You land the best clients now the same way your ancestors have done for centuries. No matter how much technology changes the method for prospecting will always be the same: networking. You probably attend CPA conferences and try to gather useful contacts on an offline basis. Now it's time to transfer that to an online medium. Learn how to use social media to enhance your networking efforts. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are becoming big players in successful internet marketing efforts. If you blog keep it distinctive and update it a lot. If not, you should consider adding one to your website.

Taking these five points into consideration will most likely let you pass beyond the material world and move profitably into the cyber-sphere! CPA websites don't need to be complicated, just well planned, for success.