Personalizing the pages of your accounting website is one of the first things you should do. It makes you stand out from your competition while making it easier for potential clients to connect with your firm. Here is a live example to get inspiration for personalizing your own accounting website.

The Website. The Summit CPA Group recently got started with their newly migrated website. The firm migrated for increased functionality and to have their website look better within current browsers. (Email support@cpasitesolutions.com if you are interested in migrating your own accounting website)

The Team Page. The Accounting Team page has a picture and bio of each person within the team. Each picture gives a professional look reinforced by the bio that talks about their business backgrounds.

The Individual Pages. When you click on the “View my profile” you are treated to full paged description. What makes this stand out are the caricatures done of each person in the office.

Personality In a Picture. Each picture brings out the office personality of the person. The caricatures’ personalities are reinforced by the picture title. Jody Grunden, for example, has a crystal ball with the title of “Visionary” while Adam Hale is playing with a Rubics Cube and the title of “Problem Solver.”

Bringing It Together. What The Summit CPA Group has done is bring together the usual description of a bio and added some fun with caricatures. Although you wouldn’t want to copy exactly what this firm has done you could do something similar.

Two Sides. Maybe your own accounting website might not have caricatures but you could still have two sides. You could have a page with the usual bio and then click through to a fun page that has your “wild side.” You might have pictures of you skiing, playing sports, or something similar alongside descriptions of some hobbies.

Do you already have some fun bio pages you are proud to share? Send a comment with link to the pages below.

Do you have a firm profile page on your CPA website? What does it consist of? Does it look and read like a resume, just a list of your educational and work background, perhaps with a picture of you in a business suit in front of a shelf of books? If so, you could be missing a vital opportunity to market yourself to potential clients.

Personalize. There are a lot of accountants out there and, as you may guess, there are a lot of accountant websites as well. Standing out from the crowd isn’t easy but personalizing your firm profile goes a long way. Don’t take the person out of personalizing; this is your opportunity to distance yourself from the hundred other accountants in business suits.

A picture where you are smiling and having fun can do more for winning over a client's trust than a list of degrees and awards.

The biggest fear about integrating personality into your site seems to be that it compromises your professionalism. It’s easy to think that if clients sees photos of you on a rock climbing trip or reads that you enjoy watching horror films, that they won’t be able to take you seriously. This fear prevents you from making a genuine human connection with your clients.

Connecting with Clients. It’s important to break out of this mindset. Your accounting website is filled with pages upon pages of articles, guides, and tools dedicated to showing that you know taxes, bookkeeping, and accounting. What potential clients are looking for on your About Us page is what sets you apart from everyone else in your field; a sense of humor, a common interest, or anything that allows them to form a personal bond with you.

Clients will be more trusting of you and feel more comfortable around you when they see you not as just a calculator or a reference book, but as an actual person. That is why making that connection with your clients is so important. If someone has to choose between several accountants, all with similar credentials, to trust with their finances and you are the one they feel most at ease around, who do you think they will go with?

More Than an Accountant. Remember that marketing on your website is more than just keywords and search engine placement; getting a client to come to your site is only half of it. You still have to convince them to choose you. If you can get clients to identify with you and see you as more than just an accountant, you’ve already got a head-start.

You know what backlinks are and what kind to focus on. Here are some tactics for understanding the backlinks to your accounting website.

Google First. You want to have a benchmark to show how many backlinks you have to your accounting website already. Google is a great resource for this. All you have to do is search using link:yourwebsite.com. Be sure to replace the words “yourwebsite” with your domain name.

Drawing Lines to Your CPA Website

Doing this quick search gives you all of the websites that link to your accounting website. If nothing comes up with the search,  you haven’t made a mistake – it just means no websites are currently linking to yours.

Open Site Explorer. Another free tool is Open Site Explorer. This gives you more data on the links to your accounting website. If you register you get unlimited use on up to 1,000 links per search. Otherwise you are limited to three searches per day.

Open Site Explorer gives you information not only on the links, but also on page authority, domain authority, and anchor text. The last of these, anchor text, is the most important for getting quality links back to your CPA website.

Anchor Text. Anchor text is the text used to link back to your accounting website. That friend you have linking to your accounting website? You may find, in using the report above, that the linking text they are using is just “my friend’s website.”

You want the anchor text to be keywords that people use to find accounting websites. You might email your friend and have them change the text to something like, “Sante Fe Accounting Website.” Using keywords in the anchor text gives the link to your website stronger relevance with search engines.

Spreadsheet. A spreadsheet helps you keep track of things like anchor text. Put in the website that is linking to you and the keywords used for the link. Try to vary the anchor text used in your links. Consider also having information on the contact person if you don’t already know them well. This makes it easier to maintain an ongoing relationship.

How has your process been in getting links back to your CPA website? Reply in comments below.

The first part of this series on backlinks looked at what they are. This second part continues the discussion of what backlinks are and starts into how to get them.

Getting Reciprocal Links. Have a friend who has a CPA website? You could exchange links with them and both benefit. Reciprocal links like these have value in quantity. Just understand their value from an SEO perspective is weaker. You are better off, over time, with quality one-way links, see below. When you are first starting out getting links these are better than none at all.

These are also easier to get as it is more of an exchange. The next time you are talking with anyone with a site, work towards setting up a reciprocal link.

Refining the Process. Over time you should refine the reciprocal link process. Start looking for link exchanges with sites that are closely aligned with your accounting website. This means looking for sites to link to that are about business financials, taxes, etc.

Getting One Way Links. These are links to your accounting website without a link back to the other site. Maybe you have a friend with a site who links to yours and doesn’t care if you link back or not. Most of the time though these types of links come from your accounting website having content worth linking to.

You might also be developing relationships with other people. Look for those who need an accounting resource or authority for their readers.

Getting Three Way Links. This is where you set up an agreement to link from your accounting website to another site that links to a third, and then that third site links back to you. This is supposed to mimic one way links but is really just an elaborate reciprocal link setup.

These may have slightly more value than regular reciprocal links with search engines. This type of setup is not as strong as a regular one way link. You are better off when going for quality, getting the one way links if possible.

Getting links back to your accounting website is an ongoing process. You should always be seeking more backlinks for your CPA website. The more you have the stronger your site. You also have a more stable setup in case a site stops linking to your accounting website for whatever reason.

The final post of this series, coming soon, continues with specifics on backlink resources.

Have you started your backlinking process? How has it been working out? Comment below.

There are several different ways to market your accounting website. Here is the first part of a series that expands upon using links to help market your CPA website. This series looks at what backlinks are, how to get them, and some of the best practices to use over time.

Backlinks Defined. These are links from another website to your accounting website. However not all backlinks that you get are of equal value. Getting quality links to your CPA website is an ongoing project. Luckily, if you are consistent about what you do each day, getting backlinks shouldn’t take a lot of time.

Links Are the Gears That Help Drive Traffic to Your Website

Starting the Process. If you are just starting out getting links to your accounting website then you may want to concentrate on quantity. That means getting any links you are able. Just be sure to avoid at all costs link farms and, in many cases, paying for links.

Link Farms. These are websites set up for the sole purpose of creating links with each other. The only real reason for these links is for the search engine benefit. Google does penalize websites associated with link farms. See this Google Group discussion for more details and stories behind link farms.

Paying for Links. See what Google has to say about paid links. It isn’t bad to pay for links as long as the links are not to manipulate the search engines. In other words, you shouldn’t be trying to link over for better page rank.

When you pay for a link, you are hoping you get people to come through just from the link. You are not trying to change your own page rank with Google. Before you consider buying links, be sure to read this article on paid links.

Quality Backlinks. The best link you could possibly get for your accounting website is from a website ending in .edu or .gov. Links from a university or from a local government website are really hard to get. One reason is because they are an authoritative source of information.

In general you want to get links from those websites that are ranked high with Google and other search engines. It takes some effort to get a high page rank with Google. Usually these types of websites have lots of traffic. Getting the attention of these websites via a link also takes some work.

The next post looks at how to get backlinks to your accounting website.

Do you already use backlinks? What kind of advice would you give someone just starting out? Comment below.

Great designs mean nothing without solid content

The copy on your accounting website is important. Your words are your marketing voice. You want to attract prospective clients by telling them what sets you apart from the competition.  A nice looking site alone can’t do that.  Here are some tips for making sure the text on your site doesn’t get overlooked.

No underestimation for your punctuation

Those grammar rules you learned so long ago STILL apply on the Internet. Do you know the difference between their vs. there vs. they’re?  What about your versus you’re?  If not, you should probably brush up, because being accurate adds credibility to your site.

If you promise me you’re going to do my taxes right, but you don’t remember which witch is which, then I’m less likely to believe your promise of carefully filing my taxes. You want to market yourself as a reputable and accurate CPA who goes the extra mile to get it right.

Put in the time to read over your site, ask a trusted friend to check it for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Show your clients that you’re willing to go the extra step to make accuracy a top priority.

The Break-Up

Even newspapers, known for their text-heavy pages, break up their paragraphs with spaces, bullet points, photos and graphics.  The same should apply to web writing, perhaps even more so. Online readers are accustomed to glancing at headlines, and are often drawn towards small blocks of text as opposed to larger ones.

Don’t overwhelm visitors to your accounting website with paragraph upon paragraph of text without using something to break it up.

• Bullet point information that lends itself to being in a list.
• Don’t be afraid to hit the enter key each time you being a new thought.
• If you’ve got a visual, throw a small photo or graphic icon on the page to break up all those words!

Some readers are turned off by a page of static text, no matter how well-written it is.  Take that same page of text and jazz up the layout just by using some simple spacing.

Why Should They Care?

Why should your potential client care what you have to say?  The answer should ring loud and clear throughout your copy (see point #3 in this post). It’s not about all the tools you have on your accounting website. It’s about why those tools save your clients time, money and energy.

You want the content on your site to excite potential clients. Let clients know, for example, that a secure file exchange system means instant access to their tax documents 24/7.  Now the client sees the value behind a service you offer.

Think about the “why should I care” idea each time you write about the services you provide. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and think about what they’d be most excited about if they were looking for a CPA and came across your website.

Any CPA website hosted by CPA Site Solutions has access to website statistics via the Webalizer. These stats give you reporting on such things as how many visitors you are getting to your CPA website. Google also offers reporting via Google Analytics. You now have access to adding Google Analytics code directly to your CPA website within the Site Manager.

Why Use Stats. Seeing what traffic comes to your CPA website helps you interact more with potential clients. For example, not everyone comes to your accounting website from the homepage. Website stats gives you a chance to see what website pages a visitor came in on, how long they stayed, and where they go next.

Responding to Stats. Having website stats gives your accounting firm a chance to respond to visitor habits. Your have the potential to keep visitors longer by making changes to pages that have a high “bounce rate.” Visitor reports lets you know which pages visitors are leaving right away and which pages retain visitors longer.

Free Analytics. Google Analytics is free, see a previous blog post that gives more details. You also have the website analytics from the CPA Site Solutions Webalizer.

How to Add. There is now a video and screen shot walk through in the help section. Each shows just how to add the code you get from Google directly to your accounting website.

Best Practices. Viewing your accounting website stats is addicting. You get to see exactly what visitors are doing and how many are coming. You really won’t get a good idea of trends until you let the data go for a number of months. After some time passes, get a much better idea of averages and make more complete and informed decisions.

Do you already use accounting website statistics? How has it worked to improve your own website? Send a comment below.

This is the last part of a three part series looking at using PDF files to get new subscribers to your accounting website newsletter. Part one looked at using PDF files and part two creating the PDF. This last part looks at linking to the PDF file in your Email Marketing System welcome message.

Uploading the PDF. There is a great video tutorial on how to upload the PDF document to your website. You need to do this before you are able to link to it from your accounting website newsletter welcome message.

Linking to the PDF. The key to linking to the file you created is to use the full URL. The help directions are for adding a file link to your website page. The newsletter is different so the link needs to be a full link. For example, the tutorial has the path as being “/images/NameOfFile.pdf” and you need to change that to “http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/NameOfFile.pdf”

Changing the Welcome Message. All that remains is to view the help section on changing your newsletter welcome message. You are going to add the link to the PDF file within the message. You also want to add some text that talks a bit about what is included within the PDF. For example, “Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter! Here is the link to the free PDF packed with information on such and such and such and such.”

Future PDF Content. Over time the information you gathered for your free PDF may need to be updated. There are always more articles to pick from making the overall process easy to duplicate. Just keep an eye out on the article websites.

That is the end of this newsletter series. If you have any questions about any part of the series please email support@cpasitesolutions.com or call 800-896-4500.

Do you have other sources of free online content? Share in comments below.