Kenny Marshall | September 26, 2008 | no comments
Part 8 of our CPA Website Design Video series talks about the benefits of having a comprehensive tax information center on your Accounting Website design…
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Marketing Tips for Accountants and CPAs
Part 1: Making a Video to promote your Accounting Website.
It is becoming increasingly common to use Video to Enhance search engine listings. You can use this technique also to increase your CPA Website Design Search Engine Presence. We’re going to start out by showing you how to make your video.
This can get pricey if you do it wrong so let’s skip the high priced director, expensive cameras, and actors. We don’t need to make a commercial here. We just need a video.
The trick to making this into a video is using a screen capture video utility. My guy here uses Camtasia, but the price tag is pretty high. I found an easy to use screen capture utility on download.com called Easy Screen Capture Video for 10 bucks:
http://www.download.com/Easy-Screen-Capture-Video/3000-13633_4-10288385.html?tag=mncol&cdlPid=10288386
If you don’t have all the expensive trappings, however, there is one thing you DO need… Good Content. Give the viewer something for his trouble. Choose a topic that you know about that other people don’t. Choosing a subject is easy. You get questions all the time that serve no useful purpose other than to chew into your billable hours. How can I track my return? How can I change a vendor name in my QuickBooks? Whatever.
Come up with a question, then answer it. Make it a question you can answer by showing me how on your computer. Now all you need to do to make a good, informative video is use the screen capture utility to record yourself actually doing it. Work slowly. Its much easier to edit chunks of screen time out of your video than it is to stretch them out, and if you move your mouse around too fast the screen capture utility may not track it properly.
Be careful what’s showing on your desktop while you’re recording. You don’t want anyone seeing a social security number, credit card number, email address, password etc.
Next write your script.
Finally voice over your video (Screen capture utilities won’t record sound). I can’t get too bogged down on the niceties of making videos, but I have three words for you: Windows Movie Maker. If you have a windows operating system you likely already have this program installed on your computer. If you can’t figure it out turn the job over to any kid older than 12. It really is that easy. You can record your soundtrack right into Movie Maker. Everything you need to know is right here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/getstarted/default.mspx
If you don’t have a windows operating system you’ll need to find some equivalent application.
Next week we’ll take the next step. I’ll show you how to submit your new movie to video sharing web sites. This step alone can provide good exposure for you practice, but there are even more things we can do to get your CPA website design a better search engine rank.
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Introduction
There is an exciting new trend in SEO that can increase your search engine authority and page rank quickly and easily. Google and friends are spending a great deal of time and energy on indexing videos for competitive keywords. Looking to take the inside track on your market? My next few articles will discuss how to take advantage of Video in optimizing your CPA Website Design.
Why use videos?
People Search For Videos
More and more people are adding the search term “video” to their inquiries.
Video Gets Extra Prominence In The Search Engines
That’s right. Even if the searcher DOESN”T include the word “video” in their search videos are still highly likely to be ranked for it’s related keywords.
Video is Viral
Video consumers tend to be very computer literate and active. They tend to share content with one another. Unfortunately they also tend to be young, so the personal viral element is not likely to be too profound. Still, there is an automated viral element to video sharing sites. They tend to copy videos from one another.
Nobody Else is Doing It
Just ask Bill Gates. Doing it first means EVERYTHING. Apple invented GUI, not MS. Mac has a better GUI than MS. I love OSX. But I don’t use it. Never will. MS got Windows packaged and out the door first. The things I like to do on my computer, the things I NEED to do (Like provide first rate CPA Website Design and Accounting Firm Marketing Support), require Windows. That’s all it takes. Be the first to do it and you’ll be the first to reap the benefits! Sit on your hands and someone else will do it first.
This SEO Focus will have 3 more parts…
How to make your Video
How to Submit your Video
How to Publicize your Video.
As always, this series of articles will assume that you are working on an Accounting or CPA website design. If you are an executive search consultant, financial planner, or some other type of web owner in a completely unrelated field, you’ll need to extrapolate an appropriate strategy yourself but the basics of these articles will still apply to you.
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That’s actually a pretty long answer, but the short answer is…
“Meta tags aren’t a big deal.”
In 1995 having well organized Meta Tags could skyrocket a site right into the number one spot on Google even for highly competitive keywords. Those days are gone. When I started specializing in CPA Website Design in 2002 Meta tags were already the fading stars of SEO.
What META Tags Are
Generically the word “meta” is used in technology as “data that describes other data.”
In web design, be it an accounting website or a family home page, a Meta Tag is an HTML tag that identifies the contents of a Web page for the search engines. Meta tags are hidden on the page, but they (as well as all the HTML code on a page) can be viewed by selecting View/Source or View/Page Source from the browser menu. Meta tags contain a general description of the page, keywords and copyright information.
What META Tags Aren’t
META tags are NOT magic bullets that will get you website good rankings. They were once, and there’s an army of scam artists claiming that they still are. Don’t be fooled. The days when you can get a good ranking just by fiddling with your META tags are LONG GONE!!! If you want to get good rankings you’ll need to put some hard work into it until you have a unique CPA website design with a strong domain authority and plenty of relevant incoming links.
What META Tags Do I Need?
Title Tag
A page’s HTML page title is it’s most important tag. Failure to put target keywords in the title tag is the main reason why perfectly relevant web pages with lots of good incoming links may be poorly ranked.
Searchers WILL SEE your title tag in their search results, so a string of keywords won’t do. Make your document titles as keyword rich as you can, but it also needs to read like a “headline”. It’s function is not just to tell the search engines what the page is about, it must also get people to click on it.
Your title tag can be as long as you want it to be, but the search engines will ignore everything after the first 7 or 8 words, so be succinct.
Keywords:
There’s no point in a long list of keywords any more. If the word’s not on a page title somewhere on the site you’re wasting your time putting it in your keyword list. Likewise, if a word IS on a page title somewhere on the site, even if it’s on a different page, it should be on your keyword list. Sorry, but spelling counts here, as does grammar. Each keyword (or shall I say key phrase) must be separated by a comma and a space.
When choosing keywords ask yourself what people are likely to search for. If you are optimizing an accounting website your target keywords are (in order of importance):
- Accounting
- Accountants
- CPA
- Tax
Trust me on this. I’ve done a lot of keyword research on websites for accountants.
Your target keywords should always be at least two or three words long. Many amateurs will try to optimize to a single word, such as “accounting.” This means you’re competing with accountants, indexes, and accountant’s vendors all over the country and your odds of success are exponentially lower. Don’t waste your time fighting for rankings against sites that aren’t really in direct competition with you! Pick phrases of two or more words, and you’ll have a better shot at success. Combine your primary keywords with your LOCATION. For example: “Hoboken Accountants”, and “Hoboken Accounting” will be SUBSTANTIALLY less competitive than “Hoboken”, “accountants”, and “accounting”.
Another option is to optimize to an industry specialty. For example “car dealer accounting” or “funeral home accountants”. You can even do both, as in “hoboken restaurant accounting”.
Page Description
Search Engine Description is more important than it used to be. The search engine description is the block of text that will appear on the search engine when your page comes up on a results page. Treat your page description like a headline. The purpose of your page description is to get people to click on the link to see your page. Keep it short and simple and try to include your most important keywords.
What Will This Do for Me?
Not much. All you are doing is telling the Search Engines what keywords you want that page indexed under. That’s it. Finito. It is not a guarantee that the search engines will index you well, or even at all, under those keywords. In short… if you want to optimize your site then you should take the time to organize your Meta tags, but unless you take the next steps you haven’t really done anything.
Don’t Fall for META Tag Scammers
There’s a lot of services out there that will tell you that they can get you “Top Rankings in the Major Search Engines” just by fiddling with your Meta Tags. This is a scam. All these companies are really any good for is charging your credit card.
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Marketing is a state of mind.
‘Marketing’ used to be a dirty word in the accounting world, but that’s not true any more. Forget your instinctive associations with telemarketing and expensive advertising. Successfully marketing and growing your accounting firm is about developing the right attitude towards your clients, prospective clients and referral sources.
Accounting firms operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Gone are the days when ‘marketing’ meant a plaque on the door and perhaps a Yellow Pages ad. Now even small sole practitioners are setting up organized marketing campaigns, and extravagant CPA website design is a virtual requirement for success.
But before you hire a marketing guru like myself and you need to open your wallet, there are some simple, cost-free steps you can take to transform your approach to growing your practice. This will benefit you in the short run by improving your marketing mindset and in the long run, when you really do need my help, it will make my job a lot easier.
Here’s my top ten:
- Monitor your referral sources and organize your leads.
If you keep track of where your best business comes from you know how to invest your time in the future. Organize your referral contacts. Assign each a priority, high, medium, and low, then formulate a communications strategy for each group. - Never assume your clients are happy.
Delighted clients are your most important source of referrals. Survey your client base to identify those who are merely ’satisfied,’ then look for opportunities to convert them into fans. While you are at it, review everything your client sees, hears or touches. Is your reception area nice? How about your receptionist? When a client calls, are they likely to get a real person or do you make eveyone wade through your voice-mail? Are your accounts covers ? Are letters well-written and easy to read? Are your staff skilled communicators? - Get to know your clients vendors and professional service providers.
These referral sources very likely don’t know you and your firm, but they should. By getting to know your clients vendors and service providers you establish a referral source, cement client relations, and enhance your image and reputation. - Focus on your client’s profits (not your own).
OK, a lot of my colleagues will vehemently disagree with me on this one, but I sincerely believe that the best way to win the network marketing game is to be the best at what you do and doing it. Nobody is going to refer you if they feel gouged. There is a limit to the demand for tax return preparation, services and audits. There is also, however, an unlimited demand for accountants and consultants who can help clients improve net profits! If you are still focusing on increasing your chargeable hours, charge rates, or net fees, it’s time to reorient your thinking. It’s not about increasing your billable hours, it’s about increasing your services to the clients! - Develop a marketing plan.
Most partners and managers have only 100-300 hours a year to devote to marketing. Why not organize this time the same way you would a 300-hour client engagement? Focus on your desired outcomes, actions, steps, money, time, and a budget. - Talk about Value, not Fees!
When meeting prospects, focus on the value you offer, and on what makes you different from (and better than) your competitors. If the client agrees to the service, and if your terms are fair, you can assume the close. Fee terms should seem like an afterthought to the client. - Get to know your clients’ team.
Before the tax season starts, meet the financial teams of your ten best clients. These are valuable contacts. Build a great team for your client and you will build a great team for yourself too. - Don’t hibernate the tax season away.
Clients are never more interested in help with their business than when confronted with last year’s financial results and this year’s tax liability. Plan now to cross-sell to every client you meet during the season. Capitalize on this effort. Use press releases, articles, and mailings. - Learn to ask better questions and listen to the answers.
Asking the right questions is the foundation of being an effective adviser. The client doesn’t know what he needs, he only knows what he wants. Listen between the lines. You are failing in your duty as an accountant if you can’t sell a client on a service he really needs. Identify what your clients’ needs are and use what you know to help your them meet those needs. Ultimately this will benefit both you and your client. - Tomorrow is more important than yesterday.
Your clients are more worried about today and tomorrow than they are about yesterday (which is the traditional province of the accountant). You can really help most of your clients by helping them use financial statements as a cornerstone for making better business decisions.
Marketing is not a dirty word, and neither it’s not black magic. If you want to succeed in today’s market you need to change your attitude about marketing. Clients and referrals can have remarkable results in maintaining and winning business – and you can do it for less than the cost of a plaque and a Yellow Pages ad.
Kenny Marshall
Marketing Consultant specialized in CPA Website Design
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Ask Yourself Three Questions
- Where do most of your new clients come from?
- How do you know that your clients are happy?
- How can you effectively cross-sell services to your clients?
For most of us the answer to the first question is, “Most of my new clients are referrals.” Recommendations make up the bulk of new business for almost all professionals, not just accountants. Some people, however, find it awkward or overly forward (some even say ‘unethical’) to ask their clients outright for referrals. A survey built into your CPA website design can be a simple, non-pushy but effective method for gaining leads from clients.
Identifying happy clients is usually much easier than identifying unhappy ones. Clients, for example, will only refer your services or invite you to birthday parties if they’re happy with you. These clients can provide us with valuable information, though – you need to know what you’re doing right so that you can keep on doing it.
Unfortunately, many unhappy clients won’t tell you until it’s too late to fix the problem. A survey gives them a way to tell you what you need to improve in time to fix the problem!
Finally, a vital source of business is cross-selling new services to existing clients. But again, how can you go about effective cross-selling without being pushy?
A survey can be a very simple, cost-effective solution for all of these problems. A quick and easy client survey allows you to gauge the satisfaction of your clients, nip potential problems in the bud, cross-sell services and gain hot leads.
Few firms regularly survey their clients, and even fewer get surveys right. Typical reasons given for avoiding surveys altogether include: “We won’t learn anything we don’t already know”; and “We’re too busy serving clients to survey them”.
Behind these excuses lies a dangerous attitude: “We’re worried that we’ll hear something we don’t want to hear.”
Designing Your Survey
Even when firms do survey, the questionnaires are often too long, too complicated, and produce results that don’t really lead to any obvious conclusions or actions.
Avoids these traps. Keep it down to a few well chosen questions so clients are more likely to take the time to complete it.
Carefully word the questions to get straight to the heart of the matter and at the same time make them general enough that the client can say what he wants to say. A good survey will provide you with precisely the information you need to decide on effective follow-up actions.
Example
The Questions
- Can you suggest any ways that we can improve our service to you?
- Our mission is to help you achieve success on your terms. To what extent have we helped you do this in the past year?
- We are here to help you achieve your personal and business objectives. Where do you want to be this time next year?
- What would it mean to you to achieve these goals?
- What more can we do to help you in the next year?
- Is there anyone you know that you feel would benefit from our expertise? If so, you may wish to use the space to provide contact information. We always appreciate your referrals!
What the answers can tell us
- This question gives clients an opportunity to express dissatisfaction, but forces them to do so in a way that gives you constructive feedback and an opportunity to fix the problem.
- This is a chance for the client to give you positive feedback, but it requires them to be specific, enabling you to identify areas where things are really working well. If this client appreciates a particular service, so will others.
- Questions 3, 4, and 5 are all about positioning yourself as a trusted adviser. This question will help you identify your clients goals and judge the feasibility of your clients expectations.
- This will help you understand your client. There are very few “selling points” (things that people really want). This question might help you identify what selling points are most important to your client. Does he want power? Security? Status? Acceptance? Is he just looking for a good time? This question often provides us with insight as to what this clients best selling point is.
- These answers allow you to further identify the right services to cross-sell. The answers will give you an ice-breaker when calling the client: “I noticed that in our survey you said you wanted to cut down on the time you spend on routine admin work. Did you know that we can help?”
- This is a great, non-pushy way to gain strong leads, since it forces the client to think about specific contacts.
Adding the Survey to your Accounting Website
Every CPA Website Design provider is different. If you are already one of our clients adding a survey to your accounting website is free, and getting started is easy using our Customizable Online Feedback Forms. If you are a Gold or Platinum client just type up your questions and send them to support@cpasitesolutions.com and ask us to set you up with a Customer Satisfaction Survey page. If you are a silver client just log into your portal and click “Modify Your Site”. Go to “Add Page”. Select “Form Page”. Click next. You can rename the page and position it on the Nav Bar normally. To modify the form itself, just click on it.
If you have your website through a different CPA Web Design firm you will need to contact them to determine availability and cost for your online survey.
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It’s no secret that I provide websites for accounting firms. It’s what I know best and what I love, so obviously it’s what I write about.
I’ve noticed that when new clients come to me they are often myopically focused on Search Engines. This is a mistake! As you can see from our past posts there is SO MUCH MORE to internet marketing than just search engines.
Even I can lose focus from time to time, and a great article has appeared recently on Squidoo that has reminded me that there are tons of great ways to market your accounting firm that have nothing to do with your website. This new contributor to Squidoo bears watching. I can tell you for a fact he has a real passion for internet marketing, and best of all he plugs our blog!
His first ever article, however, has almost nothing to do with internet marketing. Instead the focus of the article is using the news media to grow your accounting firm. I recommend you check it out, especially the section called “Winning the Media Game”.
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I’ve been asked by a lot of Do-it-Yourselfers over the years what they should put in their cpa websites. At the bare minimum you need to provide prospects with enough information that they can find you so your site absolutely, positively needs the following pages:
- Contact Us – with your details and perhaps an email contact form
- Our Services – details about your core and added value services, plus contact names for specialist areas
- About Us – perhaps with a short history of the firm and details of the principal staff
- Firm Profile – explain why a prospective client should work with you
This is a brochure site. You don’t need me, or any other accounting website designer, to have a site like this. Just go to www.godaddy.com and set up a site with them.
A brochure site won’t land you new clients, help you retain your existing clients, or decrease your operating costs. All it will do is keep you from looking like a dinosaur when you are doing your traditional marketing and make it easy for your current clients to find your office and phone number when they need it.
If you are looking for a website that can actually help you increase your community exposure and bring new clients into your business you’ll need to add some real content to the site. Tax rates and facts, Budget summaries and business content give your site depth, extra value for clients and a reason for visitors to return to the site.
You’re going to need to find a real accounting website designer at this point.
News stories and free reports- whether they’re about the firm itself, client successes or general tax and business news – will keep your site looking ‘alive’. But be warned: if you have news, you need to keep it up-to date. A ‘latest news’ page that hasn’t been touched for six months or more is worse than no news at all.
Interactive features such as calculators, links, downloadable forms and PDFs will take your site to the next level and provide a genuinely impressive online resource that can be used to great effect as marketing tools by providing real, tangible reasons to visit your site not just once, but repeatedly.
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It doesn’t matter how good your CPA Website is if nobody knows about it. In order to make money off a site, people need to KNOW about it.
Once you have a website, you’ll want to publicize it as widely as possible.
We’ll be talking about these strategies a LOT! Put your URL on all your stationery, business cards etc. Also… Include it in your email signatures and ask your friends and clients to mention it to their contacts.
And remember the golden rule of website marketing!!!
Online directories such as Superpages, YellowBook, and City Search can also be useful ways to drive traffic to your site.
You’ll also want to consider search engines. There are various ways of approaching search engine optimization. Submitting your site to Google, Ask. com etc is easy, but getting to the top of the rankings and staying there is not and, depending on what you want to achieve, can be quite expensive. Google offers pay-per-click advertising for search terms, which can be very effective. This subject requires a whole fact sheet for itself – if you’d like CPASiteSolutions’ free guide to search engines, email a request to ken@cpasitesolutions.com.
Who’s Kenny Marshall?
Kenny is a vice president and marketing consultant with CPASiteSolutions.com, a leading provider of websites for accounting and CPA firms. He has been marketing accounting services for over 10 years and has been working almost exclusively with internet marketing for more than half that time.
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In all my years designing websites for CPA’s one of the most infuriating problems I have is when a new client comes to me with an existing website ready to take the next step and we find out that he doesn’t even own the domain name he’s been using for years!
Don’t be taken in by this scam. Many web hosts will offer to reserve the domain name for you, then turn around and reserve the domain in their own name in an account that you can’t access. And don’t think that dealing with a large company is any protection! My biggest competitor does this, and they actually charge people a $50 fee when they leave if they want to take the domain name with them!
When allowing a host to purchase your domain name ask them some screening questions:
- Will the domain be registered in my name?
- Will I be listed as the “Administrative Contact”?
- Will the domain be reserved in a retail account in my name with a control panel that I can access?
- Can I lock you out of that control panel if I choose to?
- Can I continue to manage my domain through this control panel even if I decide to stop hosting through you?
If the answer to ANY of these questions is “No” politely inform the representative you are speaking with that you will reserve the domain yourself.
It is easy to register your own domain and it will guarantee that you can keep control of your address even when you change website providers. Registering a URL is easy and usually very cheap (less than $15 a year).
My company provides a service that meets all these criteria and caters specifically to accountants and CPAs. When I do a client registration I set them up with a retail account in their name on this service. They can lock me out simply by changing their password and if they ever leave our hosting service they will be able to continue to manage their domain themselves. They not only own their domain, they actually have administrative control over it.
Your domain name is your real estate on the web. Make sure you actually own it and not your web host!
TIP
When you change your Email address always make sure you log into your domain name registrars site first and make sure they have the new email. It may save you a HUGE headache when the time comes to renew.
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