What Is SEO for Accountants and How Does It Work?
What does SEO for accountants mean? What are the techniques that you can rely on to get ranked on the right keywords? What are the right keywords? We’re going to be answering all of these questions and more in today’s post, so keep on reading!
Toward the end of our guide, we’re also tackling how much SEO for accounting firms might cost, so make sure to check out that section, too.
What is SEO for accountants?
Accountant SEO isn’t really all that different from other kinds of social media optimization. In fact, we’d argue that no matter your professional field, you can use the same golden SEO techniques to get your website to rank.
There are on-site and off-site improvements that you can do, SEO-wise, and we always advise starting with what you can do on your end for free or thanks to someone you’ve hired in-house.
You can have the most visually appealing website in the world, but if Google has no means of coming across your posts and pages, you have the worst internal linking strategy, and your website loading time is through the roof, all that’s going to impact the way you reach your potential customers.
On-site SEO for accountants
Your on-page optimization deals with everything that you can do on your website. If you have lots of technical issues on your site, you can build thousands of links without seeing any return on investment.
If you haven’t built your website, make sure you get the right developer and the right SEO off the bat so that you don’t have to make a lot of changes later on.
SEO keywords for accountants
Choosing the right search terms that you want people to use to find you largely depends on your location and the exact type of services you offer. Only you can perform the right type of keyword research.
When you start creating content for your website, it is very important to avoid using keyword stuffing. No one likes to read articles that are packed with keywords, especially if they aren’t used in a natural manner.
Start by looking at your competition. What are the rest of the accounting firms in your area doing? What keywords are they targeting? Ask yourself these questions, find out the answer, and then try to do better by using untapped keywords with as low difficulty as possible and by creating better content.
Better content doesn’t necessarily mean longer articles, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt if yours were more generous in information compared to those that your competition is putting together. Plus, with a higher word count comes more space for you to use your keywords of choice in.
Meta titles and meta descriptions
Both of these should contain your main keyword or at least a variation of it. You don’t have to be obnoxious and pack your meta title with search terms or synonyms of it, but you do have to somehow convince people to click on your search result.
Try to make your meta descriptions as enticing as possible. You can ask questions and tell Internet users that they can find the answers in your articles. Or you can use words like ‘tips’, ‘simple’, ‘tricks’ and so on.
Images
Your alt tags and the actual titles of your images can also make a difference when it comes to how you are ranking. Don’t be afraid to use your keywords in the image names, but make sure to avoid overdoing it.
Be a little descriptive when naming an image, and also use the same tip for the alt text, too.
Internal linking
This is where things start to get complicated. If everything is perfect from a technical standpoint on your site and you aren’t getting why you aren’t ranking for at least some keywords, it’s quite likely that your internal linking strategy is incorrect.
Whenever a search engine’s crawler ends up on your site, it first reaches the homepage. From there, it should get to as many of your posts or pages as possible.
Most people think that they should only link to important pages such as your About, Disclaimer, and other such pages. But the truth is that your crawl budget is larger than that, so why not use it to your advantage?
If you want people to reach a page and you want to rank for a specific keyword, it makes sense for you to link to that post from your homepage or at least an indirect link to it from your homepage.
Whatever you do, make sure that everything on your site doesn’t end up being at a depth of more than 3 to 4 clicks. Otherwise, the robots aren’t going to find that piece of content, so you aren’t going to rank for that keyword, and your potential readers aren’t going to come across it, either.
Site structure
Your site should have some essential pages, such as Home, About, Services, and Contact. A Disclaimer page wouldn’t hurt – where you tell people that you do not use the data that you collect in any way other than to run your website and that you don’t share it with anyone.
But your homepage and site structure can be a little different. You can break down your services into smaller pages or posts, such as on capital gains, forecasting, bookkeeping, payroll, and pretty much everything else that you do.
If you optimize all of these pages and your homepage is also optimized, you actually stand a chance against your competition.
Technical SEO audit
We have an in-depth technical SEO guide that you might want to check out if you don’t know what technical SEO is or what an SEO freelancer might be able to help you with.
But to give you at least some ideas of what we are referring to, the whole point of having a website is to have it run as best as possible. That means that you should have no crawl errors, no toxic links, a very low page load speed, no duplicate content whatsoever, and no broken links.
There are lots of tools that you can use to find these problems by yourself if you don’t want to hire someone else. One great example is SEMRush, with the assistance of which you can do anything from finding new and untapped keywords to analyzing your competition and discovering just what is wrong with your website.
SEMRush can even help you create better content or audit the one that you have already published on your site.
Last, but not least, your website should be mobile responsive. About half of all Internet users nowadays rely on their mobile devices for pretty much anything, including paying bills or paying at the store.
So if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of potential customers. If you don’t want to handle a lot of technical issues in this sense, you can get a custom template that actually comes with a mobile version off the bat.
Safety
You should have HTTPS (SSL) instead of HTTP on your site. This lets both people but also search engines know that your website is perfectly safe. As minor of a change this might seem, it means a lot.
Off-site SEO for accounting firms
Local SEO for accountants
Unless you offer accounting services strictly online, so you’d like to get ranked on several generic search terms, you probably do your business in a specific location and can help folks in a geographic region, such as a city or a country.
You obviously want to make sure that you’re ranking for ‘bookkeeping Las Vegas’ if that’s what you want people to find you by.
But a huge part of ensuring that your local SEO is on par is Google My Business.
You can set up your GMB profile all by yourself. You should create a profile, add your specific business name and address, as well as your telephone number.
Include your operating hours, your website URL (what do you know? You just acquired a link!), and pictures of your location or how people can get there (the buildings around it, for example).
Whenever you change anything about your business, whether your location, your telephone number, or even your website, you should make a goal out of changing and updating your GMB listing. This is hugely important.
Reviews
You should list your business name across as many directories as possible, both because those are basically free backlinks you’re getting (even though many of them might be nofollow), but also because they’re places where people can review your services.
And if you’ve had a great experience with a client, why not ask them to review you on Yelp or Google? The more (hopefully favorable) reviews you get, the better people will see you, so prospective clients are going to be more and more likely to want to try your services.
Backlinks
As much as some SEO gurus might tell you that getting backlinks isn’t all that important these days, this statement couldn’t be farther from the truth. Backlinks are still a ranking factor and they’re probably not going away anytime soon.
Here are some ways of acquiring backlinks, keeping in mind that you should aim at getting as many relevant ones as possible. If you are an accountant, getting backlinks from financial publications or financial bloggers might be the right way of going about things.
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Blogger outreach
Try to create a schedule where every week, you send out a number of emails and ask several bloggers whether they might be willing to accept a guest post from you or a sponsored link. Free links are pretty hard to come by these days, unfortunately.
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Sponsored links
Paying for links actually goes against Google’s policy and you have to somehow find a way around this rule. If you have an accounting or investing app, you can offer it for free instead of paying your hard-earned money for a link.
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Guest posts
Since you probably have no time to put together guest posts on your own, you can hire someone in-house to do your digital marketing and copywriting and one of their tasks could be putting together one guest post every two weeks or so.
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PR links
PR links tend to cost a lot, but you will be getting them from trustworthy and high-authority websites, after all, so they pay off in the long run. Plus, they can do wonders in terms of how your brand/company is perceived online.
How to tell if your SEO efforts are working
There are several tools that you can use to track your SEO campaign. Some of them, such as Ahrefs or SEMRush, are paid, and they do come with heaps of useful features.
Their interface is also pretty easy to work with, so you aren’t going to have a hard time learning how to use them.
But there are also free tools, such as Google Analytics or Google’s Search Console, where you can see what search terms people are using to find you, where you are getting most of your traffic from, and what pages are your most popular ones.
The downside is that Analytics does take a lot of time to get used to. The Search Console is by far easier to use but it also doesn’t give you all the data you might need. But if you get a toxic link, you can easily disavow it in the Search Console.
The point is that keeping track of what you are doing SEO-wise is important as it can let you know whether you should change your strategy or if whatever you are doing is working.
How much should accountant SEO cost?
It depends on several different things – the SEO’s experience, if it’s a company that’s offering a package that includes all of the services we’ve mentioned, if you have someone in-house that can take actions based on the SEO’s recommendations, and so on.
You can spend anything from $700 to $2,000 and more on SEO per month. Cheaper usually isn’t better for the simple reason that you will either just get the recommendations and someone will have to do the work (so you’ll end up paying two people) or the advice you’ll get just isn’t going to be good enough.
If you decide to work with a freelancer, make sure you ask them for their portfolio and have a look at what they’ve done before. You can even get in touch with other firms and ask how they’ve worked with that person.
Need help with your SEO or digital marketing efforts? We have lots of plans and courses available. Get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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