How to promote your services on your website effectively
The fundamental question on the minds of most visitors to your website is, "Can this tax professional give me the assistance I need?" By making it easy to find a clear answer to that question, you can improve your odds of converting site visits into new client relationships greatly.
Your website should prominently highlight the specific ways you help people and/or businesses, in terms that most people can understand readily. This article explains the basics of creating service lists and descriptions that help attract the clients who will benefit most from your help.
Using appropriate keywords
Finding unique, clever ways to express ideas may boost the value of some website content, but service listings are not the place to unleash your creativity. To the greatest extent possible, use standard terminology recognizable easily both within the tax service industry and with the general public and do not expect site visitors to fill in gaps.
For example, tax professionals know that "tax preparation" generally refers to both completing and filing tax returns, but the average person might not. A list heading like "Tax Return Preparation and Filing" helps ensure that everyone in need of those services immediately recognizes that you provide them. Similarly, the listing "Business and Self-Employment Taxes" can help you reach the many self-employed people who do not realize the IRS classifies them as business owners for tax purposes.
Human site visitors will not be the only ones who notice your clearly worded service lists, either. Plain, direct word choices help search engines like Google more fully understand what you do, making them more likely to recommend your site to potential clients.
Formatting options for your services list and page
A services list may appear on your website in several different forms, and you may want to utilize more than one of them to cast a wide net. The most basic format is known as a standing list, which appears within the body of a page (most often a site's homepage) as plain text, with no dynamic elements like links to other site pages. For example:
TAX RETURN PREPARATION AND FILING
ESTATE AND TRUST TAXES
IRS PROBLEM RESOLUTION
A standing list can be very helpful for site visitors with limited tech skills. However, internet-savvy users will more likely look first to your site's main navigation menu to get the information they seek. Therefore, that menu should include a prominent SERVICES heading.
In the simplest site design, a visitor simply clicks on the SERVICES heading to jump straight to a dedicated page explaining the services you offer. Alternatively, your site could have an expandable or drop-down menu that appears when a visitor hovers over or clicks on the SERVICES heading. Like a standing list, the drop-down menu shows individual services but, in this case, the visitor can click on any specific service to go directly to a detailed description of it.
For large firms that offer a wide array of tax and accounting services, it could make sense to have multiple site pages highlighting different service categories. However, in most cases, visitors will find a site easier to navigate if all the service descriptions can be found on the same page. With that setup, links to individual services just lead to different sections of that one page.
Effective service descriptions
Regardless of the format you choose for service listings and menu options, your site should give interested visitors more than just summary service titles. For each service, provide a description, taking care to emphasize not just what you do, but how the service helps your clients achieve the best possible tax results. For example:
Tax planning: Minimizing your tax liability often depends on analyzing the potential tax impacts of decisions before filing season. Our tax planning services can help you see the connections between today's actions and tomorrow's tax outcomes. In some cases, making the right moves this year could even reduce your tax bill for multiple years to come.
Notice that without making any promises, this description focuses on potential benefits for the client. Site visitors might have some interest in the technical details of a particular service, but they usually care far more about how the service can improve their lives.
The appropriate length for your service descriptions depends on the nature of both your services and your clientele. For routine tax matters like filing individual income tax returns, a brief paragraph with 2-3 sentences should do the job nicely. For more niche services like industry-specific sales and use tax strategies, you may wish to expand to two short paragraphs.
A big potential return on a relatively simple setup
Service lists and descriptions can often be added to a tax professional website relatively easily and thereafter require minimal updating. Yet they have the potential to serve as one of the most powerful drivers of visitor-to-client conversion on your entire site. Given that cost-benefit balance, it makes all the sense in the world to take a little time to get your service listings, menu formats and descriptions just right.