The Most Common Accounting Website Mistakes

How do you think about your firm’s website?

Is it a powerful sales tool that helps bring new prospects into your funnel on a daily basis?

Or is it more of a digital chore, adding one more thing to your to-do list and making your work day that much longer?

It’s sad to say, but too many accounting firms have the latter point of view on their website. However, in an ideal situation, an accounting firm website can be one of the most important branding tools available for organizations in the modern world of business. If you feel like your firm could be doing a better job at maximizing the benefits of your website, take a look at the common mistakes we’ve identified below so you can figure out how to solve them before they become too big of a problem.

Not using enough automation

One of the best things about a website is its ability to provide information without any manual effort or time from a person beyond the initial investment required to build and publish the site, a task lots of bookkeepers end up outsourcing anyway.

However, high-performing bookkeeper websites can provide another layer of communication: two-way interactions with clients and prospects with specific goals. For example, imagine a situation where a prospect lands on your site and has a question about the availability of services that aren’t directly listed. With the right automation systems—like a chatbot interface—a prospect can have this question answered without having someone at your firm manually write out an email or get on a phone call.

While you shouldn’t go overboard with AI or website funnels, setting up just one or two automated systems on your accounting services website will save time for your team and empower prospects to get the information they need without having to wait around for someone to answer an email or return a call.

Not tracking the right numbers

Most websites use some kind of standard web analytics to handle the normal metrics: visitors per page, traffic sources, clicks on specific links and areas, etc. These basic numbers are a great place to start, and you should work on implementing them if your accounting firm’s website doesn’t already have them set up.

We see a lot of accounting firms that never go beyond this initial stage of setting up and collecting basic metrics from their website. If you want to really maximize the benefits of your site, you should be gathering information about the specific things you want page visitors to do. Whether that means booking an appointment via an online form or downloading a content asset, the main goal of your website analytics is to get specific information about how these campaigns are performing. To this end, you can track numbers like:

• Bounce rate on landing pages
• Scroll percent
• Searches performed for specific terms

As time goes on and your website campaigns develop, these numbers may change. Be sure to devote some time to revisiting your analytics goals throughout the year so that you can continue to collect efficient data instead of generic numbers that may or may not be helpful.

Not having a dedicated client area

In an ideal world, our accounting clients would only make requests during normal business hours and never need anything when their accounting firm was unavailable to assist. If you’ve spent any time at all in the accounting field, you know this scenario is nothing but a pipe dream. Clients want to be able to access the documents, information, and project details they need at any time, even if it’s outside normal work hours when no one from the firm is available.

This is where a dedicated client portal system can be a huge boon to client satisfaction. Using this platform, clients typically use a login system to access a directory of files and folders with documents, records, contracts and other resources they may need. It’s easier than you may think to get this kind of client portal set up on your website, and the effort you invest into creating it for your clients will reap dividends in the form of saved time and increased client satisfaction.

Not integrating with the rest of your tools

Your website may be the foremost example of your brand on the internet, but it’s not the only one—at least it shouldn’t be. You’re probably also using social media, email marketing, and other forms of client communication, not to mention the internal platforms used to manage critical operations. Not having your website connected in one way or another to the rest of your firm’s tech stack adds unnecessary steps to publishing and gathering data from your site.

The best customized websites for accounting firms are built to seamlessly connect with the most common other platforms used for sales, marketing, and operations. One great way to ensure your site is well-integrated with the rest of your firm is to manage it using a centralized accounting practice management platform to bring several important areas of your operations under the umbrella of a single easy-to-use software tool.

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