Well, tax season is upon us and accounting website design may not be positioned all that high on your to-do list because your schedule is looking fairly full. Have you ever wondered how it is you work so hard each tax season and your firm just doesn’t feel like it’s growing as rapidly or as smoothly as it should?

You want grow your company, but how do you accomplish that when you’re working a six day work week between January and April? Well, the trick is clear cut enough: you need to start selling off-season services.

You’ve got three really great website features that will help you do this.

The first thing we’re going to look at is obvious.

When you design your website create a detailed “Our Services” section and use these pages to clarify your services. This is nothing new. This feature is pretty much standard even on bad site designs. Unfortunately just having a page isn’t good enough. The content on the page has to be good, too. Many websites go to great length to explain what a service is and how it works, but this is really relatively unimportant. What matters is how that service benefits the client! Instead of boring the respondent with details about how the service works concentrate on the practical advantages of what the service does. Put a contact form on each service page so night owls and users who might be too shy to call have an alternate means to contact you immediately.

Next, let’s take a look at your email newsletter. If you already have a site I’m sure you already have an online newsletter. It’s a staple feature in accounting website design, but not all newsletters are particularly well designed to actually draw off-season conversions. You don’t want to spend too much time on taxes. It’s understandable why most newsletters make this mistake: there’s a lot of tax news year-round and it’s fairly easy to use this information to “fill” a newsletter. Make sure each newsletter has one or two strong articles about your off-season services. Write it using the same marketing style you used on your service pages. Make benefits to the client the focus of each article. You don’t need, or even want, to tell them everything. All you need to do is present the benefit. This will position you as the expert to turn to when it comes time to actually use the information.

The last great cross-selling instrument in your CPA website’s tool kit is less obvious, but is arguably the most effective. Your website design should include a “free reports” section. You want this to be a large section, and you want to write these articles using the same marketing principles we’ve already talked about. While these pages won’t generate quite as much traffic as your service pages or newsletter, but the leads they generate will be white hot! Not only are people on these pages displaying a huge amount of initiative simply by looking over this information they very likely already use your services to some degree or another, so the accounting professional they turn to will almost certainly be you!

Make sure you have a broad range of these reports focused on a variety of financial interests, and make sure they’re well organized and easy to navigate. Include a “send this article to a friend” link on every guide page. You never know when a visitor will unearth an article that applies to one of their friends, and this can become an enormously powerful referral.

The copy writing on an accounting website is just as essential as your design. Check out your website. It’s a simple enough affair to examine your content to make sure that separate pages live up to the overall design.