Google Local can Elevate an Accounting Website- Part 1

Few CPAs rightly grasp how to productively use an accounting website as a marketing tool. Accountants, as a rule, have a perfectly normal desire to get new customers quickly. The natural tendency is to focus on hasty conversions, but in fact a website is a long term selling instrument. There are certain ways to make a fast buck if you're familiar with the right tricks, and I'm about to educate you about a notable one, but if you genuinely want to appeal to the strongest customers you'll need to keep to the long game.

Not Many business owners are in the market for a new a new accounting practice at any particular time. Most of the people who need a CPA already have one, and the nature of the relationship between a client and a CPA naturally engenders a great deal of loyalty. Hitting prospects with a hard sell will very likely alienate them.

Well, the truth is that despite all the new technologies the best strategy for finding new clients hasn't really changed much.

Network. Take the time to get to know your prospects. Care about them and treat them as individuals. Post information to your website that will benefit them over the long run and use your email marketing system and newsletter to let them know when you post something they'll find helpful.

There's a downside to networking, of course. It's time consuming and labor intensive. Working a prospect can take months, even years. Market research tells us the average wait for a conversion is 9 or more contacts, and the average life expectancy of an accountant's relationship with a client is about six years.

I know that sounds like a lot of work, but please don't misunderstand my message. Take the time to do it. I've written about how exactly this can be done many times, and I'll continue to write about it for a long time to come. In the long run the prosperity of your firm depends very much on your networking efforts.

I had to say that. I don't want you to think that what I'm about to teach you can replace your networking efforts.

If you know where to look and how to attract their attention, there are some fast conversions to be had out there.

The nature of the web can be exploited to move traffic to, and generate leads from, your website. We all learned about the economics of scale in grade school. Well the web is big, very big, and for the first time it provides a venue for small businesses like yours to take advantage of the opportunities offered by having such an enormous resource pool to draw from. Economics of scale dictates that no matter how happy most business owners are with their accountants, if you can contact enough of them you'll eventually find one that's ready to find a new one. Even if 99% of business owners are satisfied with their accountants, if you contact a thousand of them with a soft sell you'll likely land 10 new clients. Like the watering holes and wells of old most of these people are congregating in one place, but now that place is the Internet.

Back in those days the most material ingredient in a company's prosperity was "location, location, location". This hasn't changed but for most businesses the physical location is much less notable then their location on the web, and this means their representation on Google. Take time to work on improving your accounting website "location". Your business will profit in both the long run and in the short term.

In Part 2 we'll give you a pragmatic step by step guide that will show you precisely how to get your firm listed in "local" search results, and how to draw your company's listing up the rankings.