In the above scenario and for Websites with, perhaps, less than twenty pages, a good approach: is to make your Homepage, effectively, your Why Use Us page.

This approach allows you to include a brief welcome message. It is always a good idea to thank them for visiting your Website, afterall, if they walked through your door, thanking them would be one of the first things you would do.

After carefully considering the reasons why most visitors will be visiting your Website i.e:

• Looking for new accountant
• Fed up with existing one
• Looking for more start-up expertise
• Worried about changing accountant and what is involved
• You are down here and they are up there etc

You can then address most of these issues in your Homepage. By addressing these potential issues, visitors will be impressed by your understanding of the problems facing them and will, most likely, want to visit other pages within your Website for more information. Essentially, you will be creating empathy, an important factor in any sales situation.

If your Website is small, then the above approach also enables you to include brief details of some of your key services within the content. These can then be linked to the relevant pages. For small Websites, there are no reasons why all your pages should not be accessible from your Homepage with a single click of the mouse.

Another approach, is to turn your Homepage into a summary page by including quick links to important pages within your Website. A good example is our own Homepage.

This resolves the issue of visitors having to navigate through your Website to find what they are looking for. This approach can also make your Website look more interesting to visitors by breaking up the page with bulleted lists, link graphics, different coloured links etc.

For the much larger accountant firm, their homepage, typically, is a “launch pad” for their Blog/News/Insight articles. They don’t need to explain who they are and what services they specialise in. Instead, they concentrate on writing articles, conveying their authority and at the same time,  keeping their homepage looking current and up-to-date.

Smaller accountancy firms, unfortunately, are not the best at creating additional content in the form of insightful articles. Our feeling is: this is about to change. With the advent of AI e.g. ChatGPT, accountants can now, quite literally, write articles in a matter of minutes with the aid of AI.

For example, ask AI what will be the three main issues facing one of your sector specialities e.g. Financial Services in the coming year. Ask it to then generate a xx number of words article, addressing how an accountant, such as yourself, can help Financial Service businesses overcome these issues. 

As a test, we asked AI exactly that. From asking the question, to getting the answer, to creating a News/Insight article using the WordPress platform, took less than two minutes!! 

Ok, if you still don’t want to spend five minutes per week/month writing an article, then why not consider having up-to-date news feeds embedded in your website from HMRC, Companies House, BBC and Government Business news. If this is something that you have been thinking of, please make sure to check out our Website Content for Accountants service. It is one of the most comprehensive in the UK.

It is always a good idea to include a page footer for all your Web pages. This gives you another opportunity of including links to your important pages and can be useful for visitors when reaching the bottom of pages. Instead of navigating back to the top of the page, they can, just as easily, navigate from the page footer. It is also a good place to put pages that do not form part of your navigation structure i.e. Sitemap, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy and Social Media links.

As an added bonus, it gives all your pages a good internal link structure, a feature, that is not lost on Search Engines.

Make sure to include prominent links to your Social Media accounts at the top and bottom of the page. You want to give visitors an alternative way of keeping updated on developments at your business. Also include Social Share bookmarks, to make it easy for visitors to share your homepage. Your contact telephone number and email address should also be visible, again, by placing them in the page header and footer. Consider including a highly visible Contact Form, towards the bottom of the page, as we have done on our own Homepage.