If Google helps you make just about every decision about where to eat or what shoes to buy, good news: you're not the only one. Search engines process over 8.5 billion searches per day. These web crawlers help us find what we're looking for as we explore anything from "Italian restaurants in [city]" to "accounting firms near me."
Businesses with solid search engine optimization (SEO) efforts appear at the top of your searches as you decide where to go for dinner or with whom to trust your life savings. So, as people search "tax accountants near me" or "best small business accountant," wouldn't you want your firm to appear at the top of the list? If you're not there, your competition is.
SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Enhancing the SEO strategy for your accounting firm is crucial for boosting your firm's visibility, credibility, and profitability. Here's why.
Why SEO Matters for Accounting Firms
- It attracts local leads.
- Building a client base local to your firm allows you to develop a more personal connection with them. Establishing personal relationships with your clients increases loyalty and retention rates in the long run.
- Optimizing your website content to attract local leads lets you outrank nearby competitors in search engine results.
- It creates credibility and trust.
- As an accountant, you have your clients' financial health in your hands. This isn't a decision most make lightly, as you handle sensitive information and make high-stake decisions for your clients. Clients are likelier to choose an accountant they perceive they can trust. SEO is one more tool in your toolbox to increase reliability and credibility.
- Your clients are busy. They're much likelier to click through the first few results at the top of the search page than to comb through multiple results pages. However, these top spaces are highly competitive and require a strategy to reach. That's why improving SEO for your accounting firm is so important.
- It's cost-effective.
- Yes, running paid Google search ads is one of the best ways to place your firm in front of your ideal clients. But if you still need to be convinced of the magic of paid search ads, try taking the free route to increase traffic to your website. When done correctly, SEO attracts clients to your website organically over time. Here's how to do it right.
Optimizing Your Accounting Firm for Local Searches
When you use a search engine to discover anything nearby, a business's local listing is one of the first things you see. The most common platforms our agency utilizes for local listings are Google Business Profile, Bing Places for Business, and Yelp for Business. Think of these digital listings as a first impression of your firm, as they allow businesses to manage their online presence in these ways:
- Local listings display all the essential things a potential client would need to know about you up-front, from your location to the specific services you provide. Listings also link directly to your website, leading traffic to their next step in discovering more about your company.
- Listings allow people to leave reviews on your business. Positive reviews are a powerful word-of-mouth marketing tool, giving potential clients evidence of others' good experiences.
- These platforms also supply metrics on how people search for your business and interact with the content on your listing. For example, Google Analytics helps you track goals, identify traffic sources, identify top content on your site, and more. These insights help you understand what's working so you can focus your energy on those tactics.
- As a HubSpot Solutions partner, we use HubSpot software to track our web metrics further. HubSpot’s all-in-one inbound marketing solution provides integrated analytics and automation capabilities to our agency’s SEO strategy.
Conducting Keyword and On-Page SEO Optimization for Your Firm's Website
An SEO best practice is identifying and using industry-specific keywords on your website and throughout your content. Keywords are crucial because they help search engines take note and index all the content on your web pages. Your accounting firm can increase its potential for discovery and establish relevance in search engine rankings by creating high-quality content on topics you want to be known for.
As you conduct keyword research to determine which words and phrases you want to rank for in search engine results, there are countless questions you can ask yourself to get the gears turning. You can ask questions such as:
- What are my ideal clients searching for online?
- What does my accounting firm want to be known for?
- What unique services does my accounting firm provide?
Asking yourself (or coworkers and current clients) questions like these ensures you're not just stuffing industry-specific keywords on a page and hoping to rank for them. By being thoughtful and intentional with the keywords you include in your web content, you can attract your ideal clients looking for exactly what you offer.
For example, long-tail keywords for accounting services are "tax planning for small businesses" or "CPA for non-profits." Users typing these phrases in search engines are more likely to find your firm when you include these terms in your digital content.
Though this blog is not a complete crash course on SEO for accountants, we want to stress the importance of following SEO best practices for on-page elements such as meta titles, descriptions, and headings. Structuring your web pages for SEO improves your website's user experience and helps search engines understand your content and push it to the right audience.
Content Marketing for SEO for Accountants
Creating helpful, engaging content that your clients and audience can learn from is another masterful way to improve SEO for your accounting firm. Try these things:
- Write blogs that answer common client questions and position you as an expert in your field. Here are some topic ideas:
- "A Beginner's Guide to Freelancer Taxes"
- "Five Ways to Prepare for Tax Season"
- "What to Look for When Choosing a Qualified Tax Preparer"
- "Ask an Accountant"
- Create e-books and whitepapers to dive deeper into topics that require more explanation. Examples include:
- "A Glossary of Accounting Terms for Beginners"
- "Tax Tips for E-Commerce Business Owners"
- "How to Create a Financial Plan for Your Business"
- Send email newsletters to clients and leads to notify them about important financial news, updates at your firm, or helpful tips for working with an accountant. Film informative videos to educate clients and other users. Whether these videos live on a page of your website or your firm's social media account, video is a rising content format for capturing attention.
Content marketing is valuable because you can link blog articles, social media posts, and content pieces on other pages of your website. Internal linking like this helps Google discover your site content and establish relationships and relevance to your other web pages.
Once you have a library of content you’ve created, you can repurpose content that’s ranking high in search results. For example, if your video about financial planning for entrepreneurs is performing well on social media, you might consider creating a blog that further explains these same steps. You can also turn a successful blog into a series of additional blog articles or videos. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to content creation. Sometimes, it just takes some creativity to repurpose what you already have.
Common SEO Mistakes Accounting Firms Make
As you begin to explore how you can improve SEO for your accounting firm, be sure to avoid common mistakes like these:
- Cramming web pages with industry jargon alienates audience members who aren't fluent in financial shop-speak. If you want to use technical language, explain it and use it in a way that someone who is not an expert can understand.
- Ignoring mobile optimization for your website leads to high bounce rates, a metric that measures the number of users leaving your site quickly after viewing it. Most people search for solutions on their mobile devices, and if your site isn't optimized for mobile performance, you're missing out on a large chunk of potential leads.
- Not including call-to-action signals on your website leaves users lost. Cues such as "schedule a free consultation" and "contact us for tax help today" lead website visitors to their next step in reaching you.
Ready to Grow Your Accounting Firm with SEO?
We understand that SEO can be technical and time-consuming. That's one benefit of hiring an agency to handle the work for you. Our digital experts excel in crafting impactful strategies that boost your online presence and connect with your audience. Let us help you ignite your firm's digital strategy today.