As a reputable accounting firm, it's important that your business is visible to prospective customers online. According to GE Capital, 81% of consumers will research a product or service before choosing a brand, making SEO for accounting firms an extremely important piece of a marketing strategy. You may not be sure where to begin or are simply too busy to focus your efforts on optimizing your website for search engines - that's where Profitworks comes in.

We've created this simple guide to SEO for accounting firms to help achieve the website traffic and sales you're looking for. Contact our team for a fully managed, personalized strategy that will help you achieve your goals even faster.

Ready to start making the most of your online presence? Contact Profitworks to start getting the results you're looking for!

SEO For Accounting Firms

Just like starting a new home project, breaking ground on an ongoing initiative like SEO can feel daunting. That's why we've included 5 simple steps to help you get started.

1. Optimize Your Website

Optimizing your website for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing is the first thing that you need to do to start gaining visibility. To simplify this process, it helps to break up the steps in website optimization into two categories: technical SEO and on-page SEO.

Technical SEO is not related to the content that exists on your website, but it does enhance the experience that potential clients will have when they get there. For example, given the growing number of individuals that use mobile devices to browse online, it's important to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. It's also important to ensure that your site loads correctly across devices and that users are not landing on broken or error links.

These technical aspects of your website are all considered by search engines when they determine which pages are the best to direct users to.

Meanwhile, on-page SEO is closely tied to the content that is found on your website, including text, images and video. A major aspect of on-page SEO is keyword research. It's important for you to identify the keywords that customers are searching that are related to your product or service, and to create quality content that will allow you to rank for those keywords.

Important places to include these relevant keywords include H1 tags, meta descriptions, website URLs, image titles, and in the body of the text as well. This will improve the likelihood of search engines recognizing your website as having authority on the topics you are trying to rank for, bringing more potential customers to your page!

For more details surrounding on-page and technical SEO, feel free to download our free ultimate guide to SEO!

2. Publish Blog Articles

To help develop SEO for accounting firms, the publishing of regular blog articles can significantly increase your likelihood of ranking highly on Google.

For example, as an accounting firm, writing blog posts on keywords such as "accounting firms near me" and "why hire an accounting firm" will greatly increase the chances of Google recognizing your website as an authority in your field. This will mean that more users will be able to find your website when searching for keywords that are related to your business, and you'll have the opportunity to bring them onboard once they click through.

Make sure that you are publishing high-quality content that will be valuable for your readers. Search engines want to provide thorough, insightful answers to the questions that people are asking, and your ability to be considered for a higher ranking will depend on the quality of the content that you write.

This means it's important to be writing content that is unique, robust (i.e articles that are 500+ words in length), and scannable, meaning you're including images, videos and headings to make articles easy to review quickly.

3. Claim your Google My Business Listing

A Google My Business listing is one of the best ways to increase the visibility of your business in Google search results. With the rise of mobile usage and voice search, more and more customers are searching for location-based keywords such as "accounting firms near me." With a Google My Business listing, Google will recognize the location of your business and is more likely to share your brand as a result for people searching in your area.

Another major benefit of having a Google My Business listing is the opportunity for customers to leave reviews for your brand. With each review, not only will Google favour your listing over similar, unreviewed brands, but it will also signal the quality of your services to customers looking. Choosing a home builder is an incredibly personal decision for customers, and having the opportunity to read reviews from happy customers will solidify their perception of your brand.

Another important thing to consider in deciding whether or not to claim your listing is that unclaimed listings often create negative perceptions of the business' availability in the eyes of customers. For example, customers may think that your business is no longer running or is difficult to communicate with if a listing is not present when they search for your brand, product or service.

4. Use Google Analytics

Without the ability to measure and improve upon your efforts, successfully implementing an SEO strategy can be a tough task. Tools like Google Analytics are critical to helping you track website traffic from all sources - organic searches, referrals from social media, paid advertising and more.

In addition to tracking traffic from these sources, Google Analytics also provides insights into what customers are doing on your website, including their behaviour after landing on a page, how long they stay on the page, and whether or not they interact with your website through contact form submissions or direct purchases.

Using Google Analytics is also a great way to set goals for your website and monitor your website's ability to meet them through A/B testing.

For example, if your objective is to increase the number of contact forms filled out by customers looking to chat about their finances, you can set up specific conversion tracking on your website to monitor your success. If you notice that people are landing on your contact form but are not filling it out, you can modify the page to turn your traffic into sales for your business.

5. Generate Quality Links

One of the best indicators of your website's value to other people in the eyes of Google is the number of high-quality links it is receiving from other websites.

Every time another page adds a link to your website, it is a vote of confidence from that website that yours is worth visiting.

If you're not sure where to start in generating quality links, look for opportunities to request links from authoritative content, and include share triggers on your pages to make sharing them simpler for readers.

Keep in mind, however, that the number of referring domains is considered by Google. For example, although it may be easy to find 10 sites that are willing to link to you100 times, it's much more valuable to receive 100 links for 100 websites that all see value in your content. When it comes to links, the number of quality domains are more important than the links themselves.