Looking for an explosion of new customers?

If you already have a site that gets some traffic but isn’t converting it into customers, then you’re I’m guessing that your site doesn’t have excellent reviews in the right places.

Why You Should Use Testimonials on Your Site

When potential customers are looking for an accountant, they want to find someone that they can trust. As an accountant you will be looked to as a source of knowledge about your client’s money and business, two things that are deeply important to most people. A potential client needs to feel that they can trust you before they will hire you.

It is really tough to build trust just from a website, however, there are a lot of customers who will base their decision on who to hire, solely based on the websites that they visit. Because of this, you want to make sure that your website shows, as best as possible, just how trustworthy you are. There are two main ways to do this:

1. Give out very useful information for free, such as free reports, a blog, etc. Doing this shows that you’re knowledgable and considered a thought leader in your field.
2. Show potential customers what your current customers have to say about you with reviews and testimonials.

Just a note that there are a few other small things that you can do, like including trust symbols on your site, however, the first two will have the largest impact on building trust.

How Do I Get Reviews?

Okay, so you’d like to put some review up on your site. To get reviews, I suggest asking your clients to leave reviews on third part sites, like Google Places or Yelp. There are two reasons for this:

1. Sites like Yelp have their own traffic and when customers are looking for accountants on those sites, you will be ranked higher if you have a lot of excellent ratings.
2. Reviews that have been posted on third part sites seem more believable, since you are not in direct control of what is posted.

If you’d like to see the step-by-step method that I’ve used to get reviews in the past, check out this article: How to Use Testimonials to Get More Customers for Your Accounting Firm.

What Part of the Review Should You Include On Your Site?

Now that some of your clients have left reviews on Google Places or Yelp, what you want to do is take some of the most descriptive and emotional sentences from the reviews, and highlight them on your site. For example, something like “Justin is a great accountant” sounds good but doesn’t really convince a potential client that I am any better than other accountants. A better quote to pull out is something like this: “Justin found $1000 in tax savings in our first year”, because it is specific. Another good example would be, “I really like working with Justin because I can tell that cares about me and my business”, because it shows emotion.

Now that you’ve gathered the most emotional or specific sentences from your review, you’re probably wondering where to put them.

Where Should You Put Reviews or Testimonials on Your Site?

I’ve found that a combination of the following two methods work best:

1. Put a testimonial or two right next to the places where your website visitors are going to make a decision to get closer to contacting you. A few places where this works is on your contact us page, on your home page (preferably next to your contact information or a button that brings you to your contact us page). Any other landing pages that you have built on your site where the specific purpose is to get a potential client to contact you is also a good place for reviews.
2. Build a page just with testimonials. This page should have a link on your main navigation bar and can list the different testimonials. I like to group testimonials about different topics on this page. For example, if you have some testimonials that talk about how good you are with tax minimization, then you should make a group for that. Below that group, you can make a section of testimonials that talk about how much you care about your clients. In between each section of testimonials, you should have a call to action, where you remind the potential client how they can contact you. It doesn’t have to be overly pushy, just a reminder that if they are looking for an accountant, how they can get in contact with you.

Got questions? Leave a comment and we’ll make sure to get back to you.

Along with working on Email Stopwatch, I have another small business that I run. When I went to find an accountant for my small business I started by asking friends if they had suggestions for a good accountant. I didn’t get any recommendations that I loved so I went to the web.

IMPORTANT: Reviews of Accountants are Few and Far Between

I was very disappointed to find such a small amount of reviews of accountants online. Since there are so few this is a huge opportunity for accountants to bring in a lot more business, especially those who work mostly with small and medium businesses.

Why Are Reviews Important?

There are three reasons:
1. Excellent reviews of your firm will convince potential clients that you are worth hiring.
2. Google will give your business a higher search result in some searches if you have a lot of high quality reviews.
3. Review sites, like Yelp.com, have their own traffic where people look for services. If you have high quality reviews, then it is more likely that a potential client will find you.

How to get reviews on third party sites

Getting reviews online is easy. The process can be started in less than 30min and can pay large dividends. All it usually requires is for you to ask. Not everybody is going to agree, but in a small business that I previously ran, about 60% of the clients that I asked would leave a review.

Step 1: Set Up Profiles on Yelp and Google Places

I’ve put together a video on how to setup an account on yelp.com in the video below:

Here’s the link where you can setup your Yelp! profile: Setup Yelp! here

I also found this video on how to setup a Google Places page:

Here’s the link where you can setup your Google Places page: Setup Google Places here

You now have a Google Places and Yelp account. Nice work! Make sure to note the url of both of your pages.

Step 2: Get Those Reviews!

Now that you a place where your customers can leave reviews, all you have to do is ask. I find that it best to ask right after you have successfully helped out a client with a problem, as they are likely to have a great feeling about your work. You can also just generally ask (the email below is written for just a general ask).

Here is a sample email that you can use to ask your clients for reviews:

Hi _,

I hope all is well!

I’m emailing for a semi-selfish reason. We’re looking to grow our business and one of the things that we want to do is get some reviews online from our current clients.

With that said, it would be greatly appreciated if you could leave a review on my Google places page: [put the url of your Google Place page here] or on yelp: [put the url of your yelp page here]. We’re hoping that you can leave us a review because these will help us convince other clients to hire us.

It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to leave the review. If you can’t think of what to write about, here are some ideas on what you could comment on:
– our professionalism
– how responsive or helpful we are
– anything else that you like about our services

Thanks again!

[Your Name Here]

I’ve used a similar email for the past 6 months and almost every person that I’ve sent it to has left me a review.

Just a note that there are a few psychological techniques that I use in this second email to make it work, but I’m not going to get into them. I just want you to know that to use it and the reviews will start flowing in.

Now all you have to do is implement. DO IT NOW!

Feel free to email me at [email protected] if you have any questions with this material.

I’d also love to hear about all of the awesome reviews that you’ve been getting.

Here’s a post on how to get more customers by using customer testimonials on your website.