SEO for Accountants: Everything You Need To Know

Digital marketing is now a key part of the promotional strategies for those operating in the accountancy business. An accounting firm's website provides a vital shop window and so it is vital that it looks good, provides the right information, is easy to read and, most importantly, can be found by those potential clients searching the web.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is key to helping small businesses find your accounting website. Used effectively, SEO for accountants is an effective tool for directing relevant web traffic to your accounting firm via its website.

On this page:

Understanding SEO for Accountants

Key Elements of SEO for Accountants

SEO Best Practices for Accountancy Firms

Overcoming Common SEO Challenges for Accountancy Firms

Understanding SEO for Accountants

Search engine optimisation helps your website visibility on search engine results pages and generates traffic to your accounting website. A website with good SEO will be easier to find on Google and appear higher in a list of search results.

SEO doesn't have to be complicated and with a little consideration, it can provide your website with a much-needed boost online.

Search engines work by crawling billions of pages using web crawlers. Also known as spiders or bots, crawlers navigate the web and follow links to find new pages. These pages are then added to an index that results are created from.

Understanding how search engines function is crucial if you’re doing SEO. After all, it’s hard to optimise for something unless you know how it works. Most people click one of the first few search results, so higher rankings usually lead to more organic traffic too.

So, for accounting firm's there are many benefits to using search engine optimisation effectively.

A successful SEO strategy will organically bring search traffic to your website by increasing your online visibility and boosting awareness of your brand.

When applied strategically as part of your digital marketing strategy, local SEO allows you to get in front of people who are looking for your product or service in your target area. It gives your firm the ability to target website traffic and find potential clients that will enable you to get ahead of your competition.

SEO for accountants also generates leads cost-effectively compared to other marketing strategies. When you supplement organic searching with paid, inbound or outbound marketing, your SEO strategy may reach new heights. Since content is important, it’s good to keep a bank of written resources to create marketing materials that provide useful information and answer relevant questions.

Key Elements of SEO for Accountants

There are several key elements to a good SEO strategy. These include effective keyword research, on-page optimisation, off-page optimisation and a local SEO strategy.

Getting these key elements of your SEO strategy right can help you succeed online by showcasing your services and expertise and winning new clients.

Keyword Research

Search engines evaluate your website from behind the scenes - looking at the HTML of your website, assessing if keywords appear in your website content, URL, HTML tags and meta descriptions, and evaluating your XML sitemap. Much of on-site SEO therefore revolves around keywords. These are words or phrases that accurately describe the content on your web pages. It is important to spend time on keyword research and target relevant keywords to include in the right places on your website.

For example, if you are a practice based in Leicester looking to promote your accountancy services, some of the keywords you can use are 'accountants in Leicester', 'accountant in Leicester', 'accountants near Leicester', 'accountancy firm Leicester', 'best accountants in Leicester', 'Leicester accounting company'.

It is possible to take your SEO on beyond these basic searches by highlighting the specific services you provide to prospective clients using keywords, including:

• bookkeeping
• VAT
• payroll
• cloud accounting
• tax planning
• business finance
• company secretarial
• wealth management.

Another strategy is to use events and topical issues, like budgets and their resulting tax changes or self assessment deadlines, to generate keywords that potential clients are searching for.

You'll also want to make sure you include these keywords in the page titles, website URLs and website content.

On-Page Optimisation

For on-page optimisation content remains king. Creating quality content is the best way to not only rank for keywords, but also create positive user experiences.

Search engines rank high-quality content at the top of their results pages, as this provides its users with a better experience. To meet the definition of high-quality content it is vital to produce original, unique pages that provide accurate, useful information about topics and that users get what they expect when they click through to your accounting firm's website.

It is also crucial that you avoid duplicated content, automatically generated content or other low-quality content, particularly if it is over-filled with keywords but does not read well.

Meta tags play a vital role in SEO. If you type any keyword into a search engine, you’ll see how that keyword is reflected in the title for that page. Google looks at your page title as a signal of relevance for that keyword. The same holds true for the description of that page.

Off-Page Optimisation

Effective off-page optimisation revolves around building high-quality backlinks and backing those up by utilising online directories and social media marketing platforms.

Backlinks are links from other sites to yours, and they’re one of the most important SEO elements. Search engines are more likely to rank your website higher if there are a number of credible websites linking to your website. For example, linking your website to your social media pages, online directories and professional bodies such as the ICAEW or the AAT.

Another great way of generating links to your website is by creating fresh content on your website that you can share. Blogs and latest news pages are a great way to create content that you can share through your social media channels. You can link these posts back to your website to help generate more traffic.

Social media is one of the best channels for accountants to interact with their clients and flag up news from the practice as well as the wider worlds of tax and business. Social media can be very useful in reaching specific targets as well as promoting services by posting content such as images and videos.

You could also write a guest post for another website and link to your site in your post. Make sure the site is authoritative and relevant to your content.

You can check your backlinks with tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEMrush.

Online directories allow small businesses to be visible on a variety of websites as well as gather reviews from your customers. A good online directory presence and positive reviews can bring many prospective clients to your business.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of improving your online presence to get more business from local searches. Local SEO is important because many people use search engines to find local businesses.

According to Google:

• 30% of all mobile searches are related to location.
• 78% of people who search for something nearby on their phones visit the business within a day.
• 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase.

Google features local SEO at the top of its searches. The map pack (aka local pack) is a Google SERP feature that shows the top local business listings and a map. It often appears at the very top of Google’s search results for local searches.

In addition, the organic search results show “10 blue links” that appear below the map pack results.

Local keyword research is the process of understanding how people search for the local services you offer.

You can also consider optimising Google Business Profile listing or investing in paid online advertising through Google Ads or Bing Ads where you can pay for text ads to appear in search engine results and generate new traffic for your website.

All of these are worth considering as local SEO will be vital to your digital marketing strategy.

SEO Best Practices for Accountancy Firms

When accounting firms are looking at web design as part of their digital marketing strategy and considering SEO there are some best practices to take into account. Here are a few of the most important.

Mobile-Friendly Websites

Increasingly people are viewing websites via smartphones and tablets, so a mobile-friendly website is key.

A mobile friendly site helps ensure your site functions on mobile devices, mobile optimisation goes a step further. A mobile optimised site reformats itself for mobile devices. It not only makes sure to properly display on smaller screens, but also makes the site much easier to navigate. It reformats content, displays larger navigation buttons and optimises images according to screen size.

Optimising site speed, compressing images and avoiding pop-up windows are all good practices to follow when you create pages for a mobile-friendly website.

User Experience (UX)

Both SEO and UX are essential for a successful website. SEO brings people to your website, while UX keeps them on your site longer and increases conversions. When creating a new page or website, it’s important to consider UX and SEO together as a key part of the web design.

For visitors, it will all be about the UX and how easy your website is to view and navigate. Elements like easy-to-use navigation, fast page loading and mobile friendliness will all help achieve these goals.

Content Marketing

Your site's content should be unique, specific and high-quality. Keep your audience in mind when creating content. Be sure to both write in a style they can read and absorb as well as ensuring that articles contain valuable information that is relevant and useful to them. Use call to actions within each article to highlight how your accounting services can help.

Relevant news articles will keep clients updated with key changes in the worlds of business and tax. A blog post will enable you to comment on topical issues and help highlight ways in which your services can help your clients deal with them.

More complex topics can be handled in whitepapers, which will allow your practice to showcase its expertise with in-depth analysis.

Monitoring and Analytics

Once you have taken care of on-site and off-site SEO, you will want to continually monitor search results and assess your website traffic. You can gain valuable insight into your clients' behaviour - what they are searching for when they come across your website, how much time they are spending on your website and what pages they look at when they visit your website.

Most search engines offer a number of free analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools. With these tools, you can view which pages on your website are popular and receiving the most traffic. You can use Google's Search Console to find out if your website is working correctly or to view diagnostic analysis of your website. You can also use Search Console to look at the keywords visitors are using to find your website.

Overcoming Common SEO Challenges for Accountancy Firms

The accounting business is a highly competitive sector and standing out from your competitors is a challenge. Effective use of the SEO strategies discussed in this article will help. These include improving internal and external links, local SEO, high-quality content and excellent user experience. Creating and maintaining a Google Business Profile is another key to standing out from the crowd.

A local accounting firm that has expertise with certain specialised tax services or in particular business sectors can also use niche targeting. Niche targeting focusses your marketing budget on a smaller audience but focusses on quality. This means less competition but fewer potential clients, so targeting the right clients is imperative.

If you can provide expertise in your niche category, it will help attract more customers to meet their specific needs.

However, if your expertise is in accountancy it is unlikely that it extends to SEO too. In addition, many smaller businesses may lack the time and resources to create an effective local SEO campaign.

In order to maximise the impact of your SEO campaign there are tactics worth considering.

These include, expanding your keyword usage through your content marketing to include more diverse and specific keywords, as well as making sure you are targeting correctly. You can also develop a longer long-tail keyword inventory.

Finally, make sure to coordinate your SEO campaign with other marketing campaigns. This will ensure that you have a cohesive marketing strategy.

Final Thoughts

There are many benefits to using SEO for accountants effectively. It can form a vital part of your digital marketing strategy and tie in with other forms of marketing for your practice. SEO is a hugely cost-effective process with excellent returns available for the time and effort needed.

Well-executed SEO for accountants will help propel your firm up the search engine results pages, boost website traffic, increase your profile and ultimately drive new business to the business. It is therefore vital that firms of all sizes incorporate SEO into their marketing plans.

There are a number of free tools and resources online to help you create and execute an SEO strategy. Google offers a search engine optimisation starter guide. It’s advisable to register your website with Google Search Console while the firm's YouTube channel is full of useful advice about SEO.

In addition, firms like SEMrush and Ahrefs provide popular SEO tools, allowing you to perform keyword research, conduct backlink analysis and run site audits on your website.

It is vital that the modern accounting firm implements effective SEO strategies so that it can promote itself online and stand out from its competition when offering tax and business services.