The days of trawling through Yellow Pages to find new clients for your business are long
gone. Today, with the entire world on the internet, information is available to all in a few clicks and it only makes good business sense to utilize this to grow your accounting, bookkeeping or CPA business.
In this dynamic, SEO-driven marketing environment, your clients have access to loads of information about you and your competitors at their fingertips, which they use to make decisions.
The ease of accessibility plays a huge role in the clients’ decision-making process and
the search engine results that show up right on the first page tend to get more clicks than those on any other page.
Just as for any other business, SEO for accountants is crucial too. It enables accounting and financial businesses to harness the internet, attract new clients and convert them. SEO for accountants can help to boost your ranking in the search results, attract more clients to your business and enable you to grow your business.
Why Is SEO for Accountants Important?
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), the US has more than 1.4 accountants, as well as auditors, which makes this a very competitive industry. In such a scenario:
- Around 97% of the customers use online searches to learn about local accounting firms.
- Typically, searches for “accountants near me” throw up a search volume of around 33,000 searches per month.
- The top 5 “Accountants” results when people do a Google search get around 68% of clicks.
So, if you want to enhance the visibility of your accounting business online, with proper SEO for accountants, your business can rank on top of the search engine results, attract more clients, increase profits and grow significantly.
So, how should accountants use SEO? In this article, we’ll explore the various SEO
strategies that can help your accounting business.
Best SEO Strategies for Accountants
In this section, we’ll discuss some of the best search optimization strategies that can help your local accounting business.
On-Page SEO Optimization
Typically, Google determines the value your business website offers to customers when its algorithm crawls your site. And, when Google evaluates your accounting website,
it generally assesses the technical aspects of your website to determine factors such as keywords, URL structure, meta description, title tag, header tags and the external and internal links. An effective SEO strategy ensures evaluating your on-page SEO and identifying the best accounting SEO keywords so that it is optimized effectively.
Local SEO and Google My Business
Using local SEO can help to boost the online presence of your business in your local area and when people look online for “accountant near me” or “accounting firms in [specific city],” the local SEO helps to improve the ranking of your business in search results.
An important aspect of local SEO is to create a Google My Business profile for
your business and integrate it on your business website. Your Google My Business profile offers important information about your business to Google such as your address, services offered, hours, reviews and testimonials.
Website Content Development
Usually, search engines such as Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc. appraise your website content
and determine how much value it adds for its users. Without high-quality content, your website will not be able to rank highly against your competitors.
Generally, search engines would like to see current, fresh and updated content on their accounting website, probably blogs on topics such as:
- 10 Strategies for Estate Planning
- Financial Management for SMBs
- Tax Deadlines for Small Businesses
- Instagram Advertising for Small Businesses
By having a proper content schedule and producing high-quality content consistently, you can ensure that you get more users to your website.
Optimal User Experience
The thing that can definitely drive away visitors from your accounting website is poor user experience, which is why your accounting business website must:
- Have simple and easy navigation menus
- Be mobile friendly
- Work at top speed and must not have any pages that load slowly
- Have no missing pages (404 errors)
Types of SEO Services for Accounting Firms
As a business looking to expand and grow your online presence and also attract more potential clients to your accounting business, there are a few SEO for accountants services that your company can use such as:
Local SEO
As discussed earlier, local SEO can help your business to focus on people, as well as businesses in your local community. Local SEO can help to boost your business’ local presence in the local search results and in turn, help you to earn revenue.
Using local SEO enables your local customers to find you and ensures that your business is always top of mind when your customers are around in your neighborhood. And, this can be done by optimizing your Google My Business profile, creating more localized content, etc.
National and Enterprise SEO
National SEO can help your accounting business to reach both customers, as well as businesses across the country by improving its off-page, on-page and technical SEO.
Enterprise SEO services allow your accounting business to compete with the top competitors in search results in order to achieve your long-term business objectives.
Enterprise SEO can also help to drive sales, as well as revenue by maximizing the presence of your brand in search results, thereby reaching your target audience more effectively.
SEO Audits
It is extremely important to conduct regular SEO audits to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your business’ SEO strategy.
This is the best way to assess and determine why your site is not ranking as highly as it should be and how you can improve your accounting firm’s SEO strategy and maximize your online visibility by devising an actionable plan. The SEO audit must:
- Assess and analyze your website’s strengths and weaknesses and determine the SEO strategy accordingly.
- Identify off-page and on-page factors that affect the search rankings.
Parting Thoughts
In conclusion, today, SEO plays a key role in ensuring that your potential clients find your accounting business website first, which can, in turn, help to boost your business and ensure that you’re way ahead of your competition.