Want to have some fun and see how your website stacks up against your competitors? Follow our simple ‘recipe’:

• Take one meeting room.
• Add a selection of partners and staff, technical and admin (maybe all of them if you’re just a small practice).
• Set up a screen / TV which can access the internet.
• Ask those in the room to shout out the names of competitor firms.
• Then look at yours and each of their websites and compare:
  1. Designs and colour schemes – who stands out? Whose looks the most inviting?
  2. The information you all show (or don’t show) on your websites.
  3. The ease of navigation around the site.
  4. Partner and staff profiles and photos.
  5. The resources available for users.
  6. The use of photos and images to break up text around the sites.
  7. Who’s using videos and how useful and professional are they?
• Then open Google.
• Ask participants to shout out keywords and search terms that people may use to find an accountant or a specific tax or accountancy service.
• For each search term, see how high your firm appears in the Google rankings compared to others.
• From these discussions, draw up action points of how you could improve your website and your SEO (or is yours the best one?!)
• Speak to your website provider to make the changes.

This is a great way to get the team involved but is also a useful method of comparing websites if you are a sole practitioner.