How to improve your professional services website

The perils of Professional Services websites and ten tips on how to avoid the common mistakes.

As we continue to move towards an online world where more and more visits will come from mobile devices, we still have thousands of professional firms either with a poor online presence or even more alarmingly without ANY website at all.

In this post I'll talk about some of the common problems I see daily in professional services websites when benchmarking against competitors. Whether it's sites for accountants, solicitors, law firms or even marketing agencies and consultants, these problems are surprisingly common.

The 10 most common mistakes and how to avoid them

1. Mistaking Landing Pages with History Pages. Websites should be for the benefit of the visitor, not the client’s ego. Buyers of Professional Services have other concerns first before they care how long you have been in business, how many staff you have or how many foreign offices you have around the world.They DO want to know what it is you do, who for and what the results are of your service. Do not make it difficult for the visitor to work this out!
2. Poor Positioning - Talking process rather than result. People do not buy professional services, but rather the result of what they achieve. The majority of legal and accounting websites which I have seen provide lists of services offered.
   I know what Lawyers and Accountants do! What I want to know is why I should choose them rather than the next firm. People buy protection of their assets, protecting their families, convenience of service, protecting wealth and Peace of Mind.

   For every piece of copy you write ask yourself if it passes the ‘So What' Test.

3. No opportunity to capture visitor data. Getting traffic is only half the battle as financial rewards come only when conversion takes place. The majority of Professional Firms have a lousy record at this. Many resort to only having a feeble ‘Contact Us’ page buried at the back of the site.
   

   Every page should be offering free and relevant content in exchange for visitor data to use in an ongoing Permission Marketing campaign.

   Professional Services are rarely an impulse purchase and so your challenge is to convey your expertise over time so that you become a preferred choice in the future.

   Make white papers and reports available specific to the pages they will appear on - become a free information portal. Subscribe to our newsletter is no longer strong enough as original research is better.

4. Poor Individual Biographies of team members. People are your product in a service firm and so professional portraits, biographies and imagery are important. What practice areas and sectors are they an expert in and do they have thought leadership in their given area? Who do they work for?
   

   Provide case studies to highlight results. Hiring a P.I. Lawyer who has gained millions of pounds for thousands of clients in the clinical negligence field sounds more impressive than John Smith joined in 1984 and is now a partner.

5. Little or no 3^rd party testimony. Firms seem very reluctant to demonstrate who their clients are for fear they may be poached. If your relationship with your key clients is so vulnerable then you have some serious client service issues to address.
   

   Be bold and have some logos, quotes and even videos from satisfied clients. Remember, when you tell people you are good they don’t believe you because they expect you to say that. They need to hear it from someone else.

6. Little or no visitor engagement. Social media is still undervalued by many firms. LinkedIn is probably the best free Business to Business tool there has been for 20 years yet many professionals still have no understanding as to how to best utilise it.
   

   Twitter, Google+ and You Tube all offer opportunities for lead generation via demonstration of expertise and relationship building. Few websites have RSS feeds.

7. Dated or tired blog and news pages. This is a clear giveaway that you are not on top of your online marketing strategy. It gives the impression of lack of organisation and responsibility and is easy to fix if you implement systems for content generation. Don't have pages that have not been updated for months as it looks like you don’t care.
8. Dull branding. Does the visual appearance accurately represent the culture and personality of your firm? Is the colour, layout and imagery consistent throughout?. How about the tone of words on each of the pages?
9. Common Handicaps. Flash animation that takes an age to load is still common. Click to enter buttons are still in use. Many first sentences begin with ‘Welcome to….. we were founded in…..’ .Please stop. Also incorporate strong calls to action rather than ‘Feel free to browse our site and should you have any questions then…..’.
10. Little or too much optimisation strategy. Many firms struggle to nominate applicable keywords for title text, meta descriptions and more importantly URL addresses. Some just list at the bottom of landing pages a huge a mount of geographical locations which looks terrible and is not good for conversion. There needs to be a balance.

Give yourselves a Health Check versus the competition Name 10 competing firms and compare the strengths and weaknesses of their sites. Check SEO, branding and lead generation methods. Discuss your findings with your website provider. The opportunities are huge. Over to YOU.

Thanks to Alistair Marshall for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Alistair is a specialist in marketing for professional services including law firms, accountants and solicitors at Alistair Marshall Consulting. You can connect with Alistair on LinkedIn.