techhints 
The top CPA websites require a long-term perspective. Without that, you’ll have flashiness but lack the opportunity to harness your website’s full power.
Where Professionalism Meets Visual Impact
Accountants reviewing templates for their firm’s CPA websites can sometimes be misled. What your accounting firm needs in a website isn’t glamorous, so it is not necessarily what consultants will propose. Many template suppliers will ignore a website’s long-term promotional efficacy and try to sell you on an appealing vision of instant prospect closing. There are several reasons they’ll give, as you’ll learn.
Firstly, shallow websites are less costly to construct. Strategic thinking warrants sufficient specialized tools and features, which add up to design hours.
Turning Accounting Websites Into Client Magnets
Accountants new to website development also tend to fall prey to the holy grail of prospect conversions. Yet as anybody experienced at online marketing understands, this is a fictitious premise. It’s not likely that a significant portion of the new traffic to your website is going to be seeking the services of a business like yours. The vast majority of the people coming to your website are in need of information. It won’t make any difference how groovy your site looks or how inspiring your sales copy is. If you don’t offer a visitor the solutions they want, the overwhelming majority of visitors are going to go elsewhere without offering your website, your offerings, or you more than a glance.
Besides, how hard do you want to push to close a sale on the first visit? People seeking out your webpage for an accountant are already likely to buy. Coming across as pushy can turn them off.
Unfortunately, the reality is that not many of your visitors are going to be immediate buyers. Maybe our visitor already has an accountant he or she likes. Some can do their accounting right now. They may not have client potential right now, but what about the future?
According to market research, the average life expectancy of a client/accountant relationship is 6 years. If you take a six-year view of client development, almost 100% of your website traffic could be future clients. Maybe their accountant is at the end of his or her practice. They get married and move, change their practices, or go to work for companies. Any number of things could happen.
Plus, people don’t stay in the same income bracket forever. Income changes. Clients marry and divorce. They start businesses and buy property. At that first moment of dread when the 1040 long form becomes a necessity, you’ll be a known entity they can turn to.
Rich Features, Stylish Layouts: A Winning Combo for CPAs
The real key to using a website to grow your firm is providing not only the information the visitor wants, but also offering such an overwhelming quantity of high-quality content that the visitor will come back again and again. What we’re offering them isn’t just a service page and a contact sheet. What you offer is a caring compilation of valuable resources. Every time clients visit, they connect with your brand. Long-term marketing isn’t about making a sale; it’s about positioning yourself as the natural solution to turn to when the prospect is ready to buy.
Down the road, it’s a pretty safe bet that everyone will need an accountant, and if your website has been engaging and informing a prospect for months or years, when that time comes, the odds are you won’t even need to make a sale. The prospect will call you pretty much ready to buy.
So when you’re looking at templates for CPA websites, how do you pick the ones built for long-term marketing? It’s fairly simple. Look for content.
Financial guides and free reports are great soft-sell tools and are very effective at attracting return traffic. They also offer a great side benefit in that they can help you cross-sell your off-season services to your existing clients. Use these articles to showcase ways you can help your clients save money and position yourself as the expert who can help them do it. Make sure visitors can access them easily. Divide them up into categories (Business Owners, Home Owners, Self Employed, etc) and make them searchable to make it easy for visitors to find information of interest to them.
Encourage return visitors with other great features. How about interactive financial calculators? Tax due date pages? Downloadable tax forms and publications? Make sure to offer a newsletter.
Behind-the-times old-school “experts” will counsel you to make people jump through hoops for your content. DON’T LISTEN! They will recommend that you leverage it to collect email addresses for future contact. As soon as you begin demanding email addresses, you’ll turn away your very best prospects. Anything visitors can’t get from you, they know they can get from your competition.
A Modern Look for a Modern Accountant
So, in looking at templates for first-class CPA websites, keep long-frame planning in your sights. Include the high-quality techniques listed in the last few paragraphs in addition to standard features such as service listings, contact invitations, and a map to your office. You will see that sustainable website marketing not only can win you more conversions over time, but it should also bring in more desirable clients.
