How to plan a high-performance, lead-generating accounting website

Most accounting firm websites adhere to the “basic digital brochure format”. While there’s nothing wrong with this format, the latest website design strategies offer potential customers a more interactive and engaging experience – and this can dramatically improve your lead generation ability.

Of course, optimizing your website for lead generation can feel like a daunting task, especially if you’ve never done it before. This article briefly summarizes the first three steps to planning a modern, high-performing, and lead-generating professional services website.

Once you have followed the steps outlined below, you will have a clear picture of what your website needs and how to proceed with your lead boosting upgrades. We will cover the next steps in our next article.

1. Rate your current website

In order to make your website a lead generation powerhouse, it’s important to understand what’s currently working (and what’s not). Begin the process by discussing your website with your team—especially your new business development team—to understand what they like and don’t like about the website in terms of design, images, messaging, and format.

Then talk to your target audience—especially your current customer base. Reach out to a handful of industry clients, partners, and influencers and ask them what they think of your website. This will give you many ideas for further development.

Next, evaluate your website’s analytics in terms of traffic sources, your top performing keywords, and what content is performing best (and worst) on each of your web pages.

Finally, create a “usability test” by asking five to ten people outside your company to perform specific tasks on your website. Make a list of tasks, e.g. B. “Find the latest news about our company”, “Sign up for the newsletter” or “Schedule a meeting with our team”. Ask them to share how easy it was to complete each task and provide feedback on the overall process.

2. Evaluate the competition

This step is all about getting inspiration from your competition. Do a quick Google search for relevant keywords to find your leading web competitors. Your web competitors might be different from your offline competitors. For example, search for keyword combinations like “accounting firm in New York,” “accounting for engineering firms,” “business tax returns in Los Angeles,” or something else that your audience will use to find you.

Now rate the highest ranked websites that show up in these Google searches. Answer the following questions about each website:

• What message does the website convey?
• How is the website structured and would it also work for your company?
• Which target group(s) does the website address?
• Does the website send different audiences down different paths?
• What do the images look like and how do they work?
• Does the site use specific words and phrases?
• What type of educational content, blog articles, etc. does the site offer?
• What are the calls to action and offers? Is there a call to action to request a quote, download educational content, or get something for free? Would these strategies work for your website?
• What else stands out that might work (or not work) for your accounting firm?

By going through the list and answering all of these questions for each website, you can identify important details about your competitor’s websites. By analyzing your top 3 to 5 web competitors in this way, you can develop a clear structure and sitemap for your website. differentiate your messages in a way that stands out from the competition; and leverage the most effective elements of your competitor’s websites to ensure your website is better than the overall ranking competition.
3. Define and segment your target groups

Your accounting firm likely serves many different segments (or types) of clients with different needs and vulnerabilities. It’s important to design your website to appeal to these different segments of your audience and customer base.

While you definitely want to communicate your company’s key message and brand position as soon as visitors arrive, it’s equally important to send different types of visitors down different, unique paths.

There are many ways to segment your audience in this way — and no strategy is necessarily better than the other. Despite this, you will likely choose one of the following highly effective audience segmentation strategies for your website:

• Role: This segmentation strategy takes into account the job level of your website visitors. The language and message that a corporate vice president responds to differs from the language and message intended for a mid-level manager. Because of this, you should send these people down different paths that you design just for them.
• Size: This segmentation strategy takes into account the size of the company or client you are working with. For example, does your accounting firm work with individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large corporations—or just one of those categories? You should develop specialized content for each of these audiences and guide them on where to go when they arrive on your homepage.
• Industry: Prospects like it when you’re known for working with companies in their respective industries. By sending each industry on your site down industry-specific paths, this is an opportunity to showcase your industry-specific knowledge experiences – and this will help you better connect with those industries.
• Service offer: Another way to organize your audiences is to segment them as needed. This includes listing your services or packages on the homepage in advance.

To help you choose one of the above audience segmentation strategies, you should identify the different categories of customers that your business deals with on a regular basis. You can do this by meeting with your team to answer the following questions about your customers:

• What types of customers does your company typically deal with (by function, company size, industry, service offering, etc.)?
• How do you treat each type of customer differently (if you treat them differently at all)?
• What types of customers deserve the most attention on your website?

start now

After these relatively simple steps, you are well prepared for the next phases of planning your newly optimized website. These stages—as well as the steps summarized above—will be covered in the next article. These next stages are: defining your conversion goals; determining optimal search phrases; Development of a general website structure; and developing messages and content that connect with your audience, demonstrate your expertise and differentiate your brand. In the meantime, you can consult this planning guide Details on this and the next phases.

Once you’ve researched and clarified your website optimization plan, you can begin the next and most important phase of the process: creating and implementing your new website. Countless businesses have radically changed their lead generation capacity after implementing a well-planned website upgrade like this one. With the right plan and an expert team to execute, you can achieve the same thing.