Are you losing out on local customers?
Posted by Marketing Man in Google Places,Local SEO,Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,SEO | September 5, 2012Local Search Engine Optimisation (hereby referred to as SEO) is an extremely important step for any accountant who hopes to generate new sales leads via the internet. It is probably even more important than you already think, and here is why.
If your accountancy firm is located in the Durham area than there is a good chance you will want to be found for terms like “durham accountant” or “accountancy practice in durham” however due to the nature of the business it is now more important than ever to be well optimised for local search.
Google is becoming more and more intuitive in how it serves up content to searchers, one factor that heavily influences the search results is your location, for certain search terms someone living in Newcastle will see much different results to someone living in Torquay. Google is now relating local intent to certain searches so that it can serve up the best results to it’s users, for example searching for “Italian Restaurant” while sitting in your house in Newcastle will bring up Italian Restaurants in Newcastle, you didn’t ask it to but it implied a local intent from the service you were after (why would you want to see Italian Restaurants in Cardiff if you’re sat in Newcastle?). This is also now the case for accountants and, as such, should make you increasingly eager to be well optimised for local search.
Check out this screenshot, as you can see all I searched for was “accountant”. I made absolutely no mention of where in the UK I would like the accountant to be but because I am located in Durham the search results are localised for Durham. The search results are not 100% local focused but the maps results which eat up a large portion of the screen real estate all show Durham accountants. If you have not been looking after your local SEO then this searcher has just found your competitors.
Looking at the screenshot above it is clear that having a well optimised Google+ business profile is an absolute must, alongside a strong localised optimisation of your own website including physical address on every page, mention of the local area or well known landmarks in your content and an interactive map on your contact page amongst other things. Check out our local SEO guide for accountants post for more information.
If you would like some further reading on the subject I can recommend this post, 12 quick tips on local SEO or this post on optimising your blog posts for local SEO.
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About the Author – Marketing Man
Marketing Man is a superhero marketer hell bent on a personal crusade to improve the websites and marketing of UK accountancy firms. Check him out on Google+
