A critical survey of the Web sites of the 50 largest U.S. accounting firms

You will learn:

• Why accounting firms look more alike than different online
• What five standards every Web site should meet
• When invention should overtake convention, and when convention should rule
• How your site can be designed to adapt to changing technology and screen resolution.

Simply put, accounting firms are failing to create Web sites that effectively market their organizations. Too many firms focus more on content and technology than the design of their sites and, in the process, fail to differentiate themselves from their competition.

The result: Among accounting firm sites, there’s an overwhelming sameness in both style and function. Puzzled by this phenomenon, Greenfield/Belser Ltd., a professional services brand design consultancy, and its market research subsidiary, The Brand Research Company, decided to review the Web sites of the largest 50 U.S. accounting firms from June through September. Our aim was to see if we could provide guidance to help firms revamp their sites to better serve their goals.

We chose to begin by defining and ranking the most common features on firm Web sites. We then evaluated additional features and functionality in order to gain a clearer perspective of what firms are doing to contribute to the quality of the viewing experience. For example, does the site highlight the unique qualities of the firm? How well does the site support the firm’s brand?

A Framework

To learn how technology choices and marketing approaches combine to provide the total user experience, we identified a framework for measuring the effectiveness of a firm’s Web site. We believe effective Web sites must serve the following five roles for the firm and its clients:

1. A REFERENCE TOOL

At its most basic level, a Web site should help visitors locate information about the firm and its services. The site should be easy to navigate and help visitors find information quickly. For example, consider whether a potential client would be able to gauge the depth of your firm’s talent and resources in any particular practice area.

An important consideration is whether your firm’s site is intuitive and easy to use. Studies show that people look first to the upper left of the computer screen. So it wasn’t surprising to find that 67 percent of accounting firm sites anchor their navigation bar at the upper left: 68 percent are horizontally aligned; 24 percent are vertical.

More than 70 percent of firms use the following three headers on their home page: About Us, Services and Careers (or Recruiting); and another 70 percent also provide a search tool on the home page.

Other common navigation links that showed up on firm sites included Industries (59 percent), News (35 percent), Events (30 percent), Offices (20 percent) and Alumni (6 percent).

While accounting firms seem to have more industry focus than law firms (20 percent of the top 200 law firms in the U.S. have industry navigation), just under half of the top 50 accounting firms do not have an “Industries” button. This is surprising because our research consistently shows that, all else being equal, a professional service firm’s industry knowledge factors into a client’s decision to hire it.

Another surprise: Fewer than 14 percent of accounting firms have a navigation link to a directory of professionals and biographical pages. Accounting firm marketers tell us that fear of poaching drives this behavior, but we wonder if the fear deprives clients and referral sources the benefit of finding a partner or manager and their credentials online. This is a relationship business, after all. Besides, we suspect recruiters will always find a way to contact your people.

Content: While many firms are using databases to manage their content, most do not fully leverage the database’s relational capabilities. For example, we were surprised to find that 59 percent of service area pages do not link to relevant content such as articles, updates, newsletters and the like. Eighteen percent of service area pages link to related news and articles while 16 percent link to professionals in the practice. The numbers get smaller for links to industries (10 percent) and related events (2 percent). Besides making navigation easier (they are a courtesy to your visitor), related links also present a marketing opportunity. If a client or prospect is on your transfer pricing page, why not have an animated link to a seminar on the subject or a profile of a new member of this practice?

Directions: Maps and/or directions are an important reason that visitors go to a firm’s site. About 59 percent of the top 50 accounting firm Web sites provide directions to the firm’s offices. But only 28 percent include a link to an Internet map, with the same number offering custom-drawn maps that were uniformly easier to read and follow.

2. A BRANDING TOOL

To be truly effective, a Web site must reinforce a firm’s brand (a promise of value based on a unique identity, different from others—even five degrees different). Accounting firms are woefully underperforming in meeting this objective. Only 51 percent of the sites surveyed display a slogan or tagline that summarizes a brand proposition. And in our opinion, even fewer have created a distinctive style and personality that is recognizably different from other firms.

Firms are homogenous even with respect to their choice of color. Blue or white dominate 56 percent of large accounting firm sites. Why? Studies have shown people associate blue with trust (that’s why bank logos are so often blue). Inexplicably, 22 percent of home page designs are dominated by black or gray, while 7 percent swing to the warm side of the color wheel with red and orange. Note: Color may cost you more in print advertising, but it is free on the Internet.

Tell a story: Our past research among professional service buyers has found that four out of five clients consider case studies “very important” because they reveal how a firm approaches engagements. Yet only 31 percent of the top 50 accounting firm sites offer in-depth case studies (a thorough description of the assignment and the results, not a bulleted list of clients), and only 4 percent put case studies on their home page. This is a missed opportunity to share what you’ve done, for whom and how.

A thousand words: Nearly 94 percent of firms use photography on their home page, and most, 84 percent, use images in color. Black-and-white photography can be stunning in its effectiveness but few of these black-and-white sites were.

Whether in photos or illustrations, people dominate the imagery on the top 50 firm home pages (86 percent), followed by stock accounting and business images, such as spectacles, ledgers, sheaths of papers and laptop computers (35 percent). Geographic symbols are also relatively common (31 percent).

One important note: It’s a very good thing that people dominate the imagery on home pages; again, it’s a people business. The people featured on the top 50 accounting firm sites, however, appear to be stock image models, with a few exceptions. As a result, many of the largest firms end up looking almost exactly alike, thanks to their use of the similar graphic strategies.

What’s in a name? Twenty-six percent of the firms use an abbreviation of their firm’s name as their URL. Good choice. That is what your clients are likely to enter in their search. Nearly 16 percent of firms use initials only such as xyzcpa.com. Fifty-nine percent use their full name. You can pay for any number of URLs with impunity but market only your street name. Be intuitive.

3. A RELATIONSHIP TOOL

Accounting firm Web sites should also help strengthen client relationships by providing information and serving as a means for online collaboration. A firm should aim to deliver its knowledge and services beyond the billable hour with extranets (password-protected client sites) and other methods of information delivery.

An extranet helps confirm to a client that the firm embraces technology and client service. Yet only 26 percent of the home pages we visited included a link to the firm’s extranet. Still another service that can be offered is the ability to personalize the Web page. However, this is really only appropriate for complex Web sites with constantly changing news. Unless a firm is a faithful publisher of new material, the promise of improved organization and usefulness through personalization is worthless, leaving the visitor disappointed.

Blogs and RSS feeds: In our review, only four sites had a blog (4 percent), but this number will grow as more is learned about the marketing potential of blogs. This is also particularly noteworthy because blogs can affect a site’s ranking in Google and other search engines. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) describes a simple framework to publish headlines from news sites or create an aggregated news feed on a single topic, such as accounting firm marketing, from many Web sources. They are also uncommon (4 percent). We know cognoscenti are excited about RSS feeds, but we are mystified as to why anyone would turn to an accounting firm Web site as their news source.

Alumni Relations: A small number of firm sites (6 percent) reached out to their alumni, an important referral and relationship source in the accounting industry, making “Alumni” part of their home page navigation.

4. A RECRUITING TOOL

A critical role for a Web site is to help attract students and laterals who would be a good fit for the firm. We know, from law firm research for example, that 44 percent of law students report that Web sites are their primary source for information on law firms, second only to personal contacts (51 percent). We assume the current generation of accounting and business school grads also rely heavily on the Web to gather information about firms. Nevertheless, 92 percent of accounting firms have not given their recruiting pages special attention—instead their recruiting pages are templated; that is, they look like every other page in the site. That leaves 8 percent of the accounting firm sites with unique online recruiting approaches.

5. A BRIDGE TO THE FUTURE

Firms should be using state-of-the-art technology and staying abreast of Internet technology trends.

Screen resolution, or a Web site’s canvas size, is important. Of the sites we studied, 69 percent were built to an 800 x 600 screen resolution. It’s smart for firms to design to this standard because a larger canvas leaves a sizeable chunk of your audience scrolling left to right to find the content that falls outside of their 800 x 600 box. For example, washingtonpost.com is designed for a larger screen display, but the newspaper’s core content still fits within an 800 x 600 resolution. Secondary content, such as banner ads, falls outside of the 800 x 600 box.

Larger screens are on the way—57 percent of viewers have 1024 x 768 resolution. But 25 percent of computer users still have an 800 x 600 resolution, so it’s important to design intelligently.

What about BlackBerrys, cell phones and other small-screen formats? WAP-enabled (wireless application protocol) formats? Discuss these issues with your designer/developer before you begin any redesign.

Standards: HTML is still the standard, with Flash commonly incorporated. A significant percentage (31 percent) chose to incorporate Flash (a multi-media graphics program) in some way, embedded on an HTML page or within an all-Flash section.

Do you SEO? Search engine optimization is the effort to design a site in a manner that improves its ranking on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. While this study did not delve deeply into optimization strategies, we did notice that when viewing services pages, 75 percent featured the service areas name in the title bar (or title tag) of the browser, a tell-tale sign of good optimization. Other key optimization strategies include site maps, keyword-rich content and shared links with other relevant sites. Some optimization strategies can be built into your content management system. Ask your developer and optimizer to confer before your project begins.

DEVELOPING NEW STANDARDS

Accounting firm Web sites are more alike than different. That’s not surprising given the industry reliance on standards. But it’s lousy marketing. Web site reviewers consistently astonish us in their narrow construction of what constitutes an award-winning site. Inevitably these judgments cluster around usability and little else. Navigation and information delivery are critical but do not by themselves define the sites where you consistently return.

Professional service firm Web sites should serve as a reference tool, a branding tool, a relationship tool and a recruiting tool. At the same time, the firm and its site must stay on top of, and anticipate, innovations in Web development.