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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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
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