The 7 Stages of MFAF: Fixing Your Website

March 21, 2024|

Your home base is the most important piece of your marketing puzzle.

For 95% of accounting firms, your website is your home base and is the heart of your marketing. 

It’s the place where all of your prospects go before they decide to set up a call with you or not. Even the warm referrals you get from your current clients will check your website before they talk to you.Your website has the potential to make or break the sale. Plus, there’s no point in sending good traffic to a bad website.

You also have a handful of other “outposts” that you should clean up (social media profiles, business directory listings, and your email signature), but the website is the big one. That’s your home base. That’s why today we’re talking about what you need when you’re fixing your website.

Your Checklist:

  • Fix your website
    • Update messaging
    • Update imagery and design
    • Answer the most important questions
    • Make it easy to use
  • Optimize your Google Business and other listings
  • Update all social media profiles
  • Update your email signature

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Fixing Your Website: Redesign or Update?

This section could be its own book, but that’s because it’s so important. Your website can be an incredible sales asset or it can actually be an impediment.

The first question most people ask is: do I need a full redesign, or could I just make some updates to the website I have? If your last redesign was more than 5 years ago, or it’s a template with boiler-plate copy from a cheap CPA marketing company, or looks like crap on a mobile phone, you probably need a full redesign.

If it looks good on mobile and desktops and you can make updates easily on your own, you can probably just make fixes to the existing site. So what do you need to fix?

Links to services and resources we offer for fixing your website

What is messaging? Why does it matter for fixing your website?

Messaging concerns the core “promise” you’re making with your website. The biggest mistakes firms make are focusing on features and technology instead of benefits and outcomes. Many firms also lead with meaningless statements like “Our Strength, Your Numbers.” That’s the first thing we’re concerned with when fixing your website.

Your main headline when someone first loads your website should say something like:

  • Get Accounting Off Your Plate And Focus On What Matters
  • Build the Business You’ve Always Wanted
  • Helping Doctors Run More Profitable Practices

We recommend the Storybrand 7-Part Framework as the best way to clarify your messaging. There’s a book, a livestream workshop, and a video course that you can take to help you with your messaging (or you can hire us and we’ll help you with it). 

Updating Imagery & Design

Words matter more than design (see the “messaging” section above), but a well-designed website makes it easier for your prospects to understand what you do. It reduces friction, makes an emotional impact on your visitors, and helps them trust you more, so it’s worth investing in a website that looks great. 

If possible, you should also replace most of the stock photos on your website with professional photos of  your people helping your customers. Your prospects should see “themselves” in the images on your site, and they should see the types of folks they will be working with on your website. This is an area where a bit of imperfection is best. You want to seem like real human people — even if you aren’t. (Just kidding, we just wanted to see if you were paying attention.)

Answering the Most Important Questions

People don’t move forward into ambiguity. Your prospects land on your website with a few key questions that they will want answered before they will book a call with a salesperson. 

  1. How much is it going to cost? 
  2. How long will it take to switch over and get started? 
  3. What does your client engagement and communication look like in an ongoing basis?
  4. Do you work with my software/technology?


There are more questions, but these are some key ones. If your prospects can’t find the answer to these questions on your site, they will go elsewhere to get the answers. 

The biggest pushback we get is from firm owners that don’t like to list prices on their website because every engagement is different because every company has different needs and complexities. My response is: You don’t have to list PRICES, but you have to be able to answer the question of how the work with be PRICED. If your answer is “it depends” then you need to have a few paragraphs that explain the factors that explain what it depends on (number of accounts, number of monthly transactions, cash vs accrual accounting, etc), so the your prospects can understand your pricing model and decide if that’s good enough to move forward with a sales call.

Making It Easy To Use

Most websites give their visitors too many choices and try to say too much simultaneously. Simplify your main navigation menu. Add white space between sections of text. Make sure it looks great on mobile devices. Make sure it’s ADA-compliant. Make your call-to-action buttons distinct and easily accessible. Link additional helpful info throughout the site. You want the user experience to be more like an Apple Store and less like a flea market. 

Ask a few folks who are not familiar with your website (or your business) to visit it as if they were a prospect doing research on your company. Let them tell you what is easy, what’s hard, what’s intuitive, and what’s not. Now fix those things. Easy, right? Or you could just hire us.

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