Surveys show that 85% of people are hitting the internet when they search for local businesses. The conclusion is obvious – you’re going to want your firm’s website to be in tip top shape in order to turn visitors into conversions. Let’s take a look at 5 quick tips that will help turn your website into a conversion machine.
Just the essentials (a.k.a. keep your design simple and to the point)
One sure way to lose visitors is to have too much visual information crowding your pages, especially your home or landing pages.
(Landing pages are web pages set up specifically to be where someone “lands” after clicking through a special event like a sale promotion on social media or the offer of a free e-book, etc.)
Your best bet is to put yourself in the shoes of someone visiting your site in search of an accounting firm. What specifically will they want to know right away?
They’ll want to know if you’re an accounting firm of course. They’ll also want to know what kind of accounting firm you are – if you serve a niche industry, if you’re strictly geared towards personal income taxes, and so on.
Your homepage should act like a gateway to other pages that hold relevant categories for information. For example, you’re probably not going to want to go in depth with all of the services you offer on your home page. Instead you can have a link to a services page or perhaps, along the top, a drop-down menu of pages under a “Services” banner.
These service pages in turn should give visitors the meat of that particular service in as straight-forward a manner as possible.
Keep your design simple. No flashy lights, a minimum of picture slideshows (you’re an accounting firm, will pictures really help?), and use a colour scheme and font that are easy on the eyes and legible on mobile devices.
This clarity and visitor-specific relevance also extends to your text. Don’t try to get too clever; if your text ends up obscuring what you’re offering it’s going to make it more difficult for visitors to figure out if they want to hire you. Make your call-to-actions and service names blunt, obvious, and to-the-point.
Offer a value that beats your competition (a.k.a your value proposition)
You can have the prettiest website in the world but if it doesn’t have anything to celebrate then you’re just trying to sew a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
If you haven’t already, your firm needs to figure out what it can offer that outdoes your competition in at least one major category. The most obvious is probably cheapest pricing, but going that route can often mean you’re doing more work for less money.
Do you have a specialist that the other firms don’t have? Can you put together packages that include extra services that your usual type of client wouldn’t normally buy on its own, but you can offer without adding too much to your workload? Do you offer a service that nobody else around you has on their menu?
Are you the go-to people for the restaurant industry? Are you made up of all women or a minority?
What is the most important thing to your visitors? Make that central to both your firm and to your firm’s website.
Make your firm worry-free
When people visit your firm’s website they’re looking to hand over their financial well-being to you. This can obviously be a source of great stress.
Relieving that worry can make a big difference in whether or not somebody chooses your firm over another. One way to convince visitors that your firm will ease their anxiety is to include testimonials and case studies from other clients.
These testimonials and case studies can all be in one section of your website, or you can include them within the page related to a certain service.
If you’re doing a case study, the idea is to identify specific problems a particular client had and then you outline how your particular service helped them get over those problems. This way visitors have the chance to spot problems similar to their own and how your firm was the hero that swept in and made everything better.
Testimonials can be text only, but they often hold more of an impact if they’re video. If you have some clients who are particularly pleased with your efforts ask them if they would be kind enough to put a testimonial on video. If you light them well (there are tutorials on the internet or you can hire a local video company) and throw in a lunch you’ll find that a lot of clients will be happy to appear on your site.
Also, there is going to be an extra wow-factor (and extra stress-relief) if some of those testimonials come from people involved with major well-known businesses.
Urgency sells
If you’ve bought from Amazon lately you’ll probably have noticed that almost anything you look at is down to three or so items in their warehouse – decision-time is over, you’d better grab that item before they run out!
In terms of accounting firms you can do the same sort of thing with certain packages. You offer the base package (the things your kind of client will always absolutely need) plus one or two bonus services they probably wouldn’t ask for normally, and then put a time limit on it.
You can put this package and its countdown clock on your front page at the top as a banner. When that time runs out you create a new package geared toward a different segment of your customer base (so your previous conversions don’t feel ripped off by a better package geared toward their specific needs), and then put a countdown on this new offer as well.
Test and test again
Your website is an ongoing experiment. When you try out different configurations of your website, try to focus on each area mentioned above as a separate entity. While sometimes the sum will equal up to more than the parts, you’re still going to have an easier time improving your site if you concentrate on one facet at a time.
