UX Strategies to Attract Tax Customers Online

With so many options for doing taxes online now, having an intuitive, easy-to-use website can be the difference between retaining customers or losing them to competitors.

This article provides 7 tips for optimizing UX for SEO in the tax preparation/professional industry. Following these best practices will help your website convert more visitors into customers by making key pages easy to find, understand, and use. The end result is higher customer satisfaction, more referrals, and better rankings in search engines over time.

Tip #1: Ensure Contact Info and Services Listing are Easy to Find

Clearly display contact details, office locations, and a full list of service offerings in multiple locations across the site including the homepage, “About Us,” and site-wide headers/footers. Feature this information prominently since many visitors will specifically seek out these details first. Easy access and multiple exposure helps build authority and trust signals with search engines while enabling visitors to quickly self-serve critical information, converting them into leads.

Additionally, share background details on your tax professionals and qualifications to establish expertise. Publish staff bios, credentials, years of experience, awards and recognition, professional memberships, etc.

Tip #2: Use Intuitive Site Architecture and Navigation Logical

Using consistent site architecture and navigation enhances the user experience. Key elements to focus on include appropriately descriptive page titles and headings, effective internal linking structures, persistent navigation menus, and a well-organized site map.

For example, separate practice areas related to individual tax preparation, small business taxes, estates, payroll, auditing, Expatriate taxes, etc. into distinct sections accessible through intuitive navigation. This predictable structure helps visitors quickly narrow down to the most relevant pages for their needs, resulting in lower bounce rates.

Tip #3: Make Forms and Checkout Processes Simple

Any online intake forms, questionnaires, appointment scheduling, payment tools or other conversion processes should have clear CTAs, minimal required fields, plain language descriptors, and provide contextual help where needed. For tax pros, this facilitates lead generation and sales of services.

Streamlining critical website forms reduces abandonment rates and increases conversion metrics while also signaling relevancy to search bots. Use page-level analytics to identify and optimize high-bounce landing pages.

Tip #4: Optimize Critical Service & Topic Pages

Conduct thorough keyword research around niche tax services and related specialties to determine terms potential customers use, such as “small business tax filing,” “expat taxes,” “amended tax returns,” “tax audit defense,” etc.

Ensure these specialty areas have dedicated, comprehensive pages on your site optimized with relevant keywords and content. These niche pages showcase more extensive tax expertise to visitors while also telling search engines you provide authoritative, in-depth information.

Tip #5: Publish Relevant Content Regularly

Posting blogs, guides, videos, and other informative tax resources demonstrates specialized knowledge to site visitors, establishing your brand as an authoritative industry source when ranking for informational keywords.

Helpful tax content ideas include filing deadlines, step-by-step processes, explanations of complex topics/credits/forms, tax tips tied to seasons/events, etc. Promote this content internally and externally to build more quality relevance signals.

Tip #6: Reduce Bounce Rates Where Possible

Analyze site analytics data to identify pages or sections with above-average bounce rates, which occur when a visitor leaves after viewing only one page. High bounce rates generally infer poorly targeted content or a subpar user experience. Make page-level enhancements to better engage visitors.

Improving user experience leads visitors to spend more time on site across multiple pages. More page views per session and reduced bounce rates are both positive ranking factors search engines want to see.

Tip #7: Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness With Google’s Mobile-First Indexing

With Google’s mobile-first indexing now the norm, ensuring a responsive, adaptable site design is critical for optimizing on-page SEO efforts. Content should dynamically size and arrange to create a consistent experience regardless of device.

For tax pros specifically, confirm forms, tax calculators and other conversion tools operate seamlessly on mobile to facilitate desired actions on-the-go. No business today can ignore advancing mobile usage trends if they want to sustain search visibility.

Following UX best practices positively reinforces SEO efforts by making a tax preparation website more findable, usable, and reliable for customers. This cultivates lasting search visibility and brand authority. Rather than viewing UX and SEO as separate pursuits, recognize how deeply interdependent they are for experience-driven industries like tax services.