Posted by Cameron Francis
on
30 Nov , 2018
in
Digital Marketing SEO Tips
Accounting is among the most competitive industries in the world. There are so many companies in competition with the same set of potential clients, and you have to find a way to stand out if you want your company to grow.
One of the most effective ways of standing out among your competition is making sure you are ranking high in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for your ideal set of keywords. Most of the internet users won’t look past the first page of the search results, and if you don’t rank highly, your site and company could be easily overlooked by potential clients.
For you to rank highly in the SERPs, search engine optimisation (SEO) is vital. On this post, we’ll cover what SEO for accountants is, and provide you with some tips on how your accounting firm can implement SEO on the site.
What is SEO?
SEO is ideally the process of improving your site such that it shows up more often for the sets of keywords that mean the most to your clients. This way, it will rank higher in the SERPs. Owing to the consistent results of SEO, it’s one of the most profitable forms of marketing available.
One of the main objectives of SEO is making your website easy on the search engines to read and understand. The easier search engines like Google and Bing can easily understand your site, the easier it will be to index it, meaning that it can be served as easily to the different users looking for your firm and the services you offer.
When a user searches something on Google, they typically enter a phrase or word referred to as a keyword in the search bar. SEO is implemented such that your site will show up in the top search results for the keywords relating to your niche and industry, such as “accounting firms near [city/neighbourhood].”
SEO entails roughly over 200 individual ranking factors that help a site rank online. These factors include things like coding your website properly and earning high quality links from other successful websites. For now, let’s just focus on why SEO is important for accounting firms.
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Why SEO is Important for Accounting Firms
SEO is an important component of digital marketing because it lets you reach the highest number of potential clients. When done right, SEO targets the customers that are looking for your services, and help you earn valuable traffic to your site.
To ensure that you can earn those leads, you have to use a few tried and tested SEO methods.
SEO for Accountants
The following tips are some of the best ways you can start optimising your site. There are a lot of ways in which you can improve your site, but the ones listed here will give it the foundation it needs to grow successfully.
Find keywords relevant to your niche
As mentioned earlier, keywords are the kind of phrases or words that search engine users type into the search bar to find what they are looking for online. This means that keywords are some of the key factors when it comes to determining whether the user views your website in the search results or not.
For this reason, you need to ensure that yours shows up at the top for the keywords that are most important for your business.
Using short keywords like “accounting firm” will be quite difficult to rank for if you’re a small business. That’s because they are highly competitive and the big brands have already capitalised on them. Furthermore, they are not exactly descriptive, and you don’t know the background or the intent of the person who was searching for it.
Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are perfect for small-scale accounting firms. This is because these keywords, such as “hire accounting firm in [locality]” demonstrates some intent of the searcher, which reflects their intent to become a client at some point. After all, why would they be searching for an accounting firm in a given locality if they weren’t looking to hire or employ one?
Long-tail keywords typically have much less traffic compared to the short keywords, since they are a bit more specific. But that’s not a bad thing, since they are also much less competitive, and allows you to dominate the search results much more easily. On top of that, you can be sure that the visitors you’re getting are potential clients meaning you’re mostly attracting qualified leads to your site.
To find the best keywords for your firm, be sure to check out Google’s AdWords Keywords Planner.
Build Pages about these Keywords
Once you have your keywords laid out, it’s now time to use them on your site. Build pages for each keyword the give the extensive, helpful information about that keyword. This way, if someone looks up for a “reliable accounting firm in [your locality]” you can create a page that talks about how long you have served clients in that area, you level of professionalism, and how well you have worked with past clients.
Those kinds of pages ideally build trust between you and your readers by showing your experience and expertise in accounting. This creates a candid connection between you and potential clients. The more helpful information you offer them, the more likely they will convert into paying clients.
Speaking of conversion, your pages should include some way for your visitor to convert. Use a CTA (call to action) at the end of the page, with words like “Call us today!” and offer a form field or a link that lets visitors provide you with their contact information. When you get this valuable information, you can contact them directly and nurture that lead into a paying client.
Aside from having pages of articles on your site, a blog is also a powerful way of providing great content to your audience. Blogs are important because they can be used to target the most valuable keywords, they can be shared on social media, and Google generally loves a website with a high number of pages.
List your Business in Google my Business
When you submit your accounting firm to Google My Business, you’ll show up in the results as whenever a user searched for accounting firms in the local context.
Google My Business ideally provides valuable information such as your ratings, address of your firm, and hours of operation. These results show up at the top of the search results, and if you’re listed there, you’ll be among the first firms that potential clients see.
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User Experience is Critical
User experience encompasses everything from web design and ease of navigating to things like load speeds. Such things can affect your search rankings positively or negatively.
When Google ranks your site for search results, they’d like to know that your site is one of the best possible results to serve to customers. But your site can’t be ranked as one of the best in the eyes of Google when it has a high bounce rate due to difficult navigation and slow load speeds.
To ensure that your visitors are getting the best possible experience, ensure that you have a navigation bar that helps them find exactly what they are looking for efficiently.
Your web design should be properly organised and clean, and ideally entice your visitors to stay on the page. You can attract more viewers with the use of multimedia like videos and photos.
