The most desirable initial contact with potential leads for almost all small firms are successful CPA websites. Their most important function is that they they should give a good picture about your firm. Your website offers you around the clock prospecting for your practice. Even so, your sites’s content should always be up-to-date, and this takes consistent effort. This makes sure your site ranks high enough in search engine results pages (SERPs) so that possible clients can come across you.

This takes a lot of diligence. One excellent method is to work with a student to help you with your online marketing. College students and new webmasters are always looking for opportunities to try out their web marketing skills. Here are some pointers to effectively bring a student into a practice to help create and manage marketing programs and CPA websites.

Basic Skills

You actually don’t need an intern with a lot of accounting expertise for this position. Instead the most desirable candidates will already have some experience with online marketing. They need to be skilled in SEO (search engine optimization). They should also have SEM (search engine marketing) skills. It isn’t terribly difficult to increase your rankings, but it takes diligence and hard work. You want a steady stream of fresh content. It’s a big challenge keeping convincing CPA websites fresh and interesting. Ask your candidates for samples of their writing. The best candidates will have articles written about accounting and the field of financial management, but marketing and writing skills are MUCH more important. You obviously don’t have to spend time teaching them the fundamentals of your business, but you’ll have much more luck teaching a writer to sell accounting services than you will trying to turn an accouniting student into a writer.

As a CPA, you understand the importance of a professional and dependable image for not only your prospects, but for your current clients as well. Although your intern is not in a client-facing role, their work will be a direct reflection of you and your firm. It is a good idea to review their work carefully. Because they will be representing you online, you want to make sure the quality of their work is sufficient.

Your intern needs only a basic set of math skills to be able to create and monitor performance metrics for your website. An understanding of spreadsheets and basic statistics is all that is needed to measure the effectiveness of the marketing programs over time.

Integrating your Intern

You should work with your intern as you work with your permanent office staff. This applies even though your intern may only be a temporary employee. They will be directly working with your office staff, so it is important to consider their compatibility with the rest of your team. The content your intern creates is a direct reflection of your firm. It helps when your intern communicates effectively with your employees.

Campaign Performance

Because search engine programs can take several months to produce real, visible results, it is a good idea to let the intern make suggestions on SEO and SEM programs. They can make valuable contributions for your CPA website. It is a good idea to consider their input. Considering all your options is also a good idea. Your intern can contribute greatly to your firm’s revenue stream.

You may want to keep your business’ student past the scope of your firm’s original campaigns. They can add value for additional programs. College students and new webmasters can continue to bring value to your practice’s online success, especially in the competitive atmosphere of accounting websites.