Can Your CPA or Accounting Practice Learn Anything from a Failed Business?

Borders’ chapter 11 filing came as no surprise to anyone who watches technology. The cause was their refusing to take up digital delivery.

For accountants, emerging technologies like websites and online networking can seem just as remote from their core business as they did to Borders. But learning from Border’s example can help ensure that accounting firms do not make similar mistakes.

Historically, communications didn’t change much until the last few decades.  Then, electronic communications quickly overtook print communications, making products and services much easier to find, access, and deliver. Increased access to information online means less paper production, which is more environmentally friendly.

Today’s world is online.  Almost every reading material you can think of is available electronically. Forward-thinking marketing approaches like compelling websites for accountants are simply imperative.

Not long ago Borders Books was at the top of its industry. It had a proven product, a strong brand name and enviable market position. But despite the technological changes over the last decade, Borders chose to pursue a strategy of business as usual. Borders turned up their noses at e-books.  They ignored electronic communications of all sorts. It simply wasn’t their world.  They didn’t bother to become technologically literate. This was a crucial strategy error. Even their proven marketing tools failed them.  Marketing cannot save a bygone business model.

Technology continued to advance and Amazon and Barnes and Noble were early adopters. It wasn’t long until their e-book and online sales added significantly to their bottom line.  Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble pulled ahead of Borders based on their electronic savvy.

Meanwhile, Borders slept.  Previous customers of Borders who became excited by the electronic possibilities had to use more accommodating booksellers. As in any industry, once a customer has made a switch to another company and finds it satisfactory, that customer is almost impossible to retrieve.

Even after Borders figured out that they were losing market share, they kept doing the same old thing.

Meanwhile new technological horizons kept opening up. Former admirers soon realized that Borders’ marketing team was behind the times, deficient in technological leadership and vision. Border’s heel-dragging continued.  It’s almost as if they feared technology.

Reluctance to embrace technology spawned a series of further marketing missteps. In an effort to shore up eroding profits, Borders raised prices in retail stores and online, antagonizing their loyal customer base. Customers revolted, moving their business to Borders’ competitors. This was the final straw for Borders Books, which was forced to file for bankruptcy.

So what does this have to do with your practice?

In every industry, businesses must adapt to a changing technological climate or become obsolete. Similar to any other business, professional accountants must follow and accept the evolving world of technology and newfangled web marketing tools such as good quality websites for accountants. That is the pith of Borders Books’ lesson for CPA firms.  Avoiding its biggest mistakes will help keep your practice .

For Outstanding Results, Leave It to the Professionals

Using a skilled video team ensures you’ll have a high-quality website video. It also makes sure that it passes on a message that is well-defined and succinct.

As you would expect, you need your CPA or accounting company to distinguish itself from your competition. Make sure that your video lifts you above the crowd. If your video is an introduction to your firm on your home page to give visitors a taste of who you are and what you offer, you may want to consider a budget to pay a professional. What kind of service portfolio do you offer? You can add a lot of personal character to your videos to connect to your audience. Make sure to use a tripod so that your videos don’t give your audience vertigo. Make sure your video holds your prospects’ attention. If you think a pro will accomplish this goal, then by all means, create a budget for a professional videographer. Above all, hiring a pro to create your video ensures that your video’s quality is as high as it can be. You also want to make sure it is ready for your website.

It is possible to create great results yourself. Make sure you are using a high quality camera attached to a tripod. A high quality microphone is a good choice. You will also need software to encode your video. Good lighting works best. Be sure to use backgrounds that are plain.

Plan Your Video
You will need to create a strategy before your video shoot begins. Make sure it is well planned. Budgeting is very important; the longer the video, the more your video is going to cost. Best practices for videos are debated by many. As a rule, a minute to two minutes is plenty. Viewers will click away after five or even four minutes. Make sure your video is not that long. You will also need to decide who is going to be in your video. You will want to effectively sell your CPA firm’s services. This can be accomplished without a partner in the video. As long as you feel that your employees can be a positive representation of your firm, you will likely pay them less than you’d pay professional talent.

Impress and Hold Your Audience
Most importantly, your video needs to deliver useful, relevant content that captures and maintains the interest of your viewers. There are literally hundreds of competing websites for accountants vying for your audience. To make yours stand out, make sure your video captures and holds visitors’ attention. You should also consider the tone of your video. Do you want to use humor? Do you want your video to appear more serious? Both methods can be effective. Either way, what is important is that your video is realistic. Videos that bring qualified visitor traffic to successful websites for accountants allow prospects and clients to connect with your firm on a personal level. A personal connection is a great way to build trust. It also creates a call-to-action that converts a prospect into a customer. A video that sounds like a sales pitch is going to flop. You will not convert visitors into customers with that strategy.

Distribution and Marketing
When your video is finished, make use of it with sharing sites. Market your firm with your video! Your video should be distributed to video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. They can be embedded right on your home page. This not only exhibits your video, it grants a convenient link between your video on the sharing site and your website. Your site will benefit from the domain authority of the video distribution site, which will favorably list your video on search engine results pages.

A really good video can be  a great asset on your website and can actually help to promote your company before you ever meet with or speak with a prospect.

In  the 1990s, video cameras were bigger than a shoe box, weighing more than 10 pounds, and required a group of experts to make a good video. As such, videos were prohibitively costly for a typical small business. Modern video cameras are a lot smaller and cost much less, so it is possible to create excellent videos without a professional team.  Numerous video distribution websites also provide opportunities for everyone to share their videos.

Be cautious about how videos are presented on your site.

Sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo have risen in popularity.  These sites simplify the process of distributing videos online. The ease with which videos can be shared has on occasion resulted in some degree of laxity where discretion is concerned.  While homemade, funny videos have a home on the internet, they really don’t belong on practical websites for accountants. Monkeys flinging fecal matter and movies of dogs talking don’t really have a place on most professional websites no matter how funny they are. Make sure that videos really add to value to your website.

In addition to providing value for your prospects and current clients, an online video is a great opportunity for search engine visibility. When you post your video to sharing websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, it associates your video with your desired keywords, providing you the benefit of their powerful search engine authority. Use the code to embed your uploaded video onto your website pages.  This will increase the search engine rank for your video’s keywords.

Why should you use a video?
A well produced video is a powerful addition to a website, but not all CPA websites need to have video on them. For example, a video can take the focus away from the important points you’re trying to make on your website, so it is important to create a video strategy that effectively promotes your business and/or adds value to your current clients. In the competitive landscape, videos offer a great advantage.  Creating a solid marketing identity online is boosted greatly by a high-quality video.

Marketing:
Introducing your CPA firm with a website video is a great way to visually appeal to your prospects.  This is a powerful combination with the messaging of your site text. Adding a video to introduce a CPA firm can be transformational.  It can turn an otherwise plain-looking CPA site into a dynamic web presence. A video can present your firm and is a chance to provide important details about your services.  This gives you a chance to present your firm as an expert in the subject matter of accounting. Videos also provide an opportunity for visibility beyond your local area, while keeping the personal interaction of viewing the face(s) associated with the firm.

Offer Value to Your Clients:
A website video gives you a chance to provide value-added services to your customers.  Your satisfied customers can then act as advocates for your brand, which helps bring in new customers. A potential subject for a video is demonstrating to clients how your firm offers its services.  This is also applicable to potential clients, as well. Your video topics can be diverse, such as how to prepare tax organizers to take to accountants.  It could also be really specific, like how to track car mileage. Online videos offer around-the clock support to your customers, which makes them an immense boon to your company.  Without a doubt, they are also a continuous source of publicity.

Next time we’ll talk a little about the benefits of hiring a professional to help you produce your video.

Generally accounting and CPA firms have little alternative but to use website templates to get their business a site. Custom websites are preposterously expensive. Very few small to medium sized firms can honestly be expected to create a site from the foundation up. A superior, fully loaded custom CPA or accounting site can cost thousands to make, whilst most templates sell for around fifty dollars per month.

So why would any accounting firm shell out thousands of dollars for a custom website?

In a word: “Google”.

Website templates have been around for years and they’ve always been an inexpensive and effective alternatives to expensive custom sites, but they’ve traditionally had problems getting good rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. In order to make them quick and easy to use the companies that provided even the best accounting website templates tended to sacrifice certain technical niceties that would make it exceedingly difficult to really optimize a site for good rankings.

The problems templates often have are:

• “Duplicate Content”
• Dumbed Down Meta Tags
• I-framed Pages

As the web has become more competitive some of these template providers have shifted gears, successfully overcoming these limitations without substantially increasing the complexity of their content management tools. Others have not, and are still selling templates that are not adequate to proper “SEO”, or Search Engine Optimization.

Before we go on, if you have one of our CPA Site Solutions Accounting Website Templates you have nothing to worry about. All our site designs considered these factors. If you’re a CPA Site Solutions customer and you have questions about how to take advantage of your accounting website’s advanced SEO features feel free to give your designer a call!

Now… if you’re still shopping around for a website, or if you have a website with one of our many fine competitors you are probably thinking, “how do you know what to look for if you want to find accounting website templates that are SEO, or ‘search engine optimization’, friendly?”

Here are a few pointers…

Can You Edit & Add Pages?
All professional accounting website templates come with large amounts of standard content. This content is identical between all the websites from a given provider and this creates problems getting pages “indexed”, or “listed” by Google. Search engines don’t want duplicate results coming up in searches, so as a rule they will only list such a page ONCE and they ignore every page they see after that with the same content. Customizable pages can overcome duplicate content issues. Make sure your template provider allows you to modify and add pages freely to your site. Nobody expects you to modify all 600 pages on a typical accounting website template, but it will make a huge difference if you personalize as few a five or ten pages.

You can edit and add pages to your CPA Site Solutions site using the Site Manager tool.

Can You Edit Individual Page Titles & Descriptions?
Another common problem with templates is “universal meta tags”. On sites like this there is only one setting for modifying a sites meta tags. This means every page on the site must have exactly the same tags making it impossible to optimize more than one page on the site. To properly optimize a website you’ll need to be able to assign different meta tags to different pages.  When shopping around for accounting website templates make sure the one you choose allows you to set the meta tags individually for every page on the site.

You can edit page titles and Descriptions on your CPA site Solutions website using the site manager tool. There is also a universal meta tag setting for folks that don’t want to spend the time optimizing their site or who need to make major title changes (very handy if you move your office to a new town or open a new branch office) but we strongly recommend optimizing your important pages individually.

Are You Getting Important Content Delivered as “Inline Framed Links”?
I saved this last issue for the end of the article because, quite frankly, it can be hard to identify. You may even want to retain a website professional to help you get the answers here. Many sites use a coding trick called IFrames, or inline frames, to deliver content to your website. Template providers like I-Frames for a lot of reasons, but their primary advantage is that using them makes it very easy to keep site content updated and make changes to hundreds of websites at once. Unfortunately search engines don’t much care for sites that use them. Search engines will see pages with inline content as basically blank. They can see the content, but they won’t consider your website the source of it. They will follow the inline content in very much the same way they might follow any other link. This means if the content gets indexed it will be credited to the template provider rather than you. Since it can be hard to tell whether or not a website is using these “framed links” you might want to ask but verify. Find out from the provider if they deliver content using inline frames, but before committing to a site have a web professional examine their product and make sure that they aren’t using them.

CPA Site Solutions does not deliver content to your site as i-framed links.

Don’t settle for a casual observation of a sample site to find out if a template is search friendly.You may not be able to tell. Take the time to contact providers and ask specifically about these issues.

A first class website needs to be well designed inside and out. Being good looking, content rich, and easy to navigate is important but it’s also important that the site can be properly optimized for the search engines. An SEO friendly site with a lazy owner may not be taking advantage of a template providers search features. For example it will often appear that a site has universal meta tag settings, when in fact the owner just hasn’t bothered to change the title of any of his pages.

I wish I could say, “you get what you pay for” but I’m afraid that’s not even true. There are some very expensive “premium” accounting website templates that are actually pretty lousy in terms of their SEO potential. If your vendor hasn’t specifically addressed all three of these issues Google won’t be likely to take your site seriously. Occasionally this isn’t really a problem. If you’re the only accounting firm in your town with a website you can probably do all right without ever optimizing your site, but keep these factors in mind when measuring the value versus the cost. An accounting website template that can’t be optimized for search engines like Google could become a huge liability to your company in the future if your circumstances should change.

As CPAs, we serve the unique needs of governments and non-profits, individuals, and businesses from every corner of the private sector. They all turn to us to help them resolve some of their most complex, vexing, and urgent issues.

Of course, clients retain CPAs because of our experience and expertise in knowing how to save them money and grow their assets, but most CPAs also know that there’s something more that underlies all of this.

Our clients entrust us to provide solutions to some of the biggest problems they face because we offer them peace of mind. CPAs are paid to be flawlessly organized, trustworthy, and responsible in resolving client issues, and equally so in handling sensitive client information.

Why We Need Client Portals

The unique level of responsibility that comes with acting as stewards of our clients’ most sensitive information has made the use of secure, Web-based client portals an absolute necessity for all CPAs. Client portals allow a secure, streamlined, and customizable alternative to email for the transfer and storage of sensitive information, as well as an interactive platform in which to engage and collaborate with clients.

Since their introduction, client portals have been used to:

• quickly and easily transfer large files, including QuickBooks files;
• a way to receive client source documents and make completed tax returns available to clients;
• invoice clients and collect credit card payments; and
• provide a real-time environment in which to update payroll information for payroll clients.

The Question of Security

Using a password-protected client portal is tantamount to having a safety deposit box for each client’s files that only the client and his CPA have a key to. Many client portals include the same impressive 128-bit SSL encryption used by banks and other financial institutions to ensure that only authorized individuals have access.

Portals are also extremely reliable, usually offering the assurance of network uptime in excess of 99.9%.

CDs and Thumb Drives: A Real Advantage?

The transfer of traditional hard copy files to digital media has been in practice for years, and it’s a great way to reduce storage space, save cost, provide an environmentally responsible alternative to paper files, and add redundancy for backup purposes.

However, digital media of this kind has always had the same intrinsic flaws: information on hard drives, CDs, and thumb drives cannot be easily accessed or updated by individuals in different locations.

And because most email won’t allow more than 10 MB of data to be transmitted, larger files stored on CD or thumb drives have had to be sent by courier. This has meant a lot of extra expense and often unacceptable delays, not to mention the inherent security risk.

Due to these limitations, digital media has NOT been a great improvement from the archaic paper filing systems used years ago.

But with client portals, both the client and his CPA have immediate access to files anywhere in the world, as well as the ability to make real-time updates.

Client Portals Get Rave Reviews

Since most clients are familiar with Web-based systems – taking advantage of similar systems that have been in place for years to review bank statements and pay invoices –  they are quick to embrace and adapt to the use of client portals when working with their CPA.

In fact, they are so widely used now that many clients have come to expect client portals and show a strong preference for them over more archaic and less secure methods of payment, data transfer and storage, and real-time collaboration.

Find more accounting information, like details on how to become an accountant and CPA requirements, on AccountingEDU.org.