Local SEO for Accountants
Posted by Marketing Man in Local SEO,Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing | August 24, 2012Accountancy firms with a physical location, or those who service a particular area of the country, need to be aware of the need for local SEO. In this blog post we will aim to explain what local SEO is, why local SEO for accountants is important and what you can do to optimise your web presence to make the most of local searches.
If your accountancy firm gets some or all of it’s clients from the local vicinity then you should definitely consider investing in local SEO. Whilst it is not uncommon for a business or individual to have an accountant who is located in another part of the country it is far more likely that they would prefer to have one who is local. This means that when they come to search for one on Google they are going to be using localised search terms (such as “accountant in Bury”) and if you are located in that area then are going to want to be found.
In truth a lot of what you will do for regular SEO will also impact your Local SEO, things such as a well optimised accountancy website, links pointing to your website and social signals (i.e. Facebook and Twitter). However there are a few additional things you will want to do to optimise properly for the local market.
Firstly it is vital that you have your full address on your website, on every page preferably, and that you set it out in exactly the same manner wherever you post it. So, for example, if your business was located in 1 Main Street, Buckinghamshire and that is how you have it displaying on your website don’t shorten it to 1 Main St, Bucks when you put your address on other sites. Keep it consistent.
You will want to claim your business profile on Google (and other sites like Bing, Yell etc.) and optimise them appropriately. You will then need to start building citations to your business, a citation is anywhere online that refers to your company and uses your Name, Address and Phone Number, commonly known as your NAP. As mentioned above, make sure you keep your contact details consistent when building citations.
Another important factor in local SEO for accountants is getting reviews from previous clients, lots of them (and preferably good reviews!). One of the most important factors for having a well placed Google Places/Profile is the amount of reviews, don’t be tempted to submit a load of fake reviews yourself though as this will inevitably end in disaster.
One thing that is a little out of your control when it comes to ranking well in the Google Maps/Local listings is your company location in relation to the centre of the search area. For example if someone was searching for an accountant in Manchester there is a bias towards those who are located towards the centre of Manchester. If you are located on the outskirts you are going to have to work harder to get the results, this means more citations and more reviews.
How Do We Generate Reviews?
This is something I get asked regularly and unfortunately there is no quick and easy solution to this. There are places where you can buy reviews, obviously these are fake, but I do not recommend you do this as Google is getting better at spotting fake reviews and quite often it is apparent to the human viewer when a review is fake. What you need to do is inform all of your customers that they can leave you a review on your Google Places profile (or other review site), ask nicely for them to leave you a review if they were happy with the service provided. You can try to offer incentives for leaving a review, like a future discount, but make sure you stop short of actually buying the review and never stipulate that they have to leave excellent feedback to qualify for a discount.
At the end of the day if you want to compete in the local search market with your local competitors then you are going to have to invest some time and/or money into optimising your web presence. Just throwing up a website and hoping Google will find it and then rank it is doomed to failure.
If you are interested in getting your website optimised for local search, why not get in touch.
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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+
Great article and very good points. I want to stress the importance of citations and reviews. These, I believe, will do more to make your local listing relevant for Google then will traditional SEO like backlink building. You will want to do the later of course for your organic SEO, but the signals Google use to determine your relevancy for Local, Paid and Organic listings are different for each.
There are submission services you can use for the local directories. (Not to be confused with mass website directory submissions which are useless in my opinion). Using local directory submission will ensure your NAP data is consistent across the board.
This is VERY important. For one, it improves the confidence Google has the right citations, and the right address. Did you know, that even if you claim your local listing with Google, that they will change the data you submit if their system THINKS information coming from other signals is more accurate? I claimed a listing for a client, only to have google change the information months later. We updated it again, and again months later, Google changed it again. So it is best practice that you not only claim your Google local listing, but that you submit consistent NAP data to as many local directories as you can.
Hi Norm,
Thanks for the excellent comment. I fully agree with your point about maintaining a consistent NAP across the citation sources, it is something I always push for with clients.
Shaun
I made the mistake of posting up some reviews on my Google business page and they ended up getting flagged as spam. The thing is, they were real reviews that customers had emailed us, I just posted them online.
Hi Colin,
Thanks for the comment, the trouble is all of those reviews will have come from the same IP address which will probably have triggered a filter. Particularly if you were registering new Google accounts to post the reviews.
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