Getting your website to really work for you 24-7

 

I’ve long been an extremely firm believer in your accountancy website working for you 24-7. This is based on statistical fact (I ashamedly admit it here and now I love looking at usage stats of accountancy websites) and lots of anecdotal evidence.

 

One such anecdotal example includes an email I received on my generic fruit named phone (no not my Strawberry phone) last Saturday night at 11.05pm. Usually I’d ignore it but my wife is working in America and I thought it might have been a message from her so I reached into my pocket only to be somewhat initially disappointed.

 

I say initially because it wasn’t from her, but it was a notification email to say that someone had just registered on a client's website (I receive copies of all such registration emails for all our clients), and the disappointment soon turned to nerdish delight as the various permutations about real life prospects registering on an accountants website at that time of night, at the weekend, started to unfold in my mind.

 

As I said I get all of these notifications and this is far from being uncommon. Long before I joined PracticeWEB and I was just a client in practice myself, I had often eulogised about just how many registrations and enquiries I received out of hours, and my belief still is that your website can provide a powerful practice development tool for your firm 24-7, 52 weeks of the year.

 

What is essential however is that you ensure that your website gives you the best chance of converting a visitor into a registered user, or to make an enquiry or to take one of a number of predefined user journeys, or as is commonly referred to in the website industry you “make your traffic sticky”.

 

Getting traffic to stick is essential; after all we work hard to get traffic to our website in the first place.

 

And there are a huge number of ways to achieve this.

 

Understanding your potential users is step one. Who are they and what are they looking for?

 

Once you know this you can start to define specific user journeys with pre-defined calls to action, such as;

 

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Once you’ve identified the types of users, their journeys and then the possible pages which will be incorporated as part of that journey, it’s imperative that you start to add, one, two, three or even four, strong calls to action on each of those pages.

 

These may vary from page to page or by type of user or specific journey and that’s one of the fantastic benefits of your powerful and flexible content management system. Landscape gives you much of the control you need to add or make these changes on a page by page basis.

 

Helping our clients to get “sticky” is something that the Client Services Team are doing more and more, so if you would like some help in this area (here comes the call to action) then please contact us.