SEO Myths for Accountancy Website Optimisation
Posted by Marketing Man in Link Building,Local SEO,Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,SEO | August 6, 2012As an accountancy firm trying to optimise your website for the best search traffic possible you will have no doubt searched out SEO advice from various sources across the internet. Unfortunately there are a lot of myths and misconceptions flying around and this can make it extremely difficult to focus your efforts on what is going to have a positive effect. Here are a few SEO myths to be aware of:
SEO Is a One-Time Activity
I have literally lost count of the number of times I have heard someone say “we actually just finished up SEO’ing our website, it’s all done”! SEO is ongoing, just like a website should never be considered “finished” neither should your SEO efforts, you are operating in a dynamic environment where things change every single day. I can understand why people hope that they can consider their SEO “done”, the prospect of spending time and/or money on SEO on an ongoing basis might not appeal to a lot of businesses. However, a website needs regular attention to be an optimal marketing tool.
Reading the above may make you think that we are just pushing our own monthly SEO services but the simple fact of the matter is that Google (and other search engines) are constantly tweaking and updating their search algorithms, plus the fact that the competition will be investing in their websites too. If you start achieving top rankings for your keywords it is easy to relax and think “job done” and stop working, all you are doing there is giving the competition time to respond and catch you up.
I Will Submit Your Site To Hundreds Of Search Engines
This scam has been around for years and unfortunately there are plenty of small business owners who get duped into believing this rubbish. Firstly, can you name me hundreds of search engines? How about ten? Google, Yahoo and Bing are all you need to worry about at the moment. The simple, irrefutable fact is that you do not need to submit your site to the search engines, and you certainly do not have to pay anyone to do it for you. Back in the early days of Google they used to ask webmasters to submit their sites for inclusion in the index, you would submit your site with a few keywords and a crawler would then visit the site to include it in the search index. This process wasn’t scalable and was open to spam so these days, though you still can submit your site, it is much better to allow your site to be found naturally. You get found naturally by being linked to by a site already in the search index.
You will have no doubt received numerous emails from shady companies promising to register your site with “hundreds of search engines” to improve your search engine rankings. If you believe what they are telling you, then I may just have some magic beans left for sale if you’re interested.
Traffic Is The Only Thing To Worry About
All too often when asked “what do you want to achieve through SEO” the answer is “more traffic to my website”, i’m here to tell you that traffic is not everything. How happy would you be if your site was getting 100 visitors per day, after hiring an SEO your traffic dropped to 50 visitors per day? Pretty unhappy right? What if though, from those 100 visitors you were averaging 1 sale, from the 50 visitors you start averaging 4 sales? I bet you’re a little happier now? Obviously the figures mentioned are arbitrary but the point I am trying to make is that targeted traffic is better than lots of traffic and the most important metric you should be concerning yourselves with is conversions. Traffic that does not convert is useless, a waste of bandwidth.
If you’re not achieving a solid conversion rate, your time would be better spent fixing the problem(s) than attempting to drive more and more traffic to the website. Maybe your meta description is misleading – is the visitor expecting to see something on your page that isn’t there? Maybe your web content is insufficient or poorly written and you should seek the help of a professional copywriter, do you have a solid “Call to Action” on the page? Concentrate on improving your conversion rate and you will see a much better return on your investment.
Expecting To See Immediate Results From Changes
We all know that in business Time is Money but when it comes to SEO you are going to need a lot of patience or you will end up driving yourself mad. Success does not happen overnight and it can sometimes take weeks or months to start seeing the effects of your work filtering through into the search engine results.
One of the main things to consider when waiting for on-site changes to take effect is Google’s crawl rate. We recently had an email from somebody who had made changes to his site and after two weeks still had not seen any improvements so was about to undo all of the changes. When viewing his site in Google’s cache (i.e. the version of the site that Google has currently indexed) his changes had not even been picked up yet.
A search engine’s crawl rate is essentially how often a search engine spider visits your site to check for updates and changes and there are a number of things that can effect this.
- If you have very few links to your site then the chance of spider crawling a link and following it to your site is very slim.
- Where you have your links is also a factor. If you have links from a lot of sites who also have very few backlinks and thus are not crawled very often it is going to take a lot longer than if you have a link on high authority web page.
- How often do you update your website? The more often you add fresh content the more regularly you can expect to see your site crawled.
If your website is new or if you don’t have many sites linking to you, your crawl rate will probably be quite slow. This can cause a serious problem if you’re expecting immediate improvements from your optimisation efforts.
One thing you can do to help speed things up is ping the search engines to get their attention. Pinging alerts the search engines and other services that you have changes you’ve made on your site so they should come and check it out. This (potentially) speeds up the crawl rate of your site and gets changes updated in the index. Do not start pinging your site every 5 minutes, it serves no purpose, it won’t help your rankings directly it will just speed up the process by which your changes get recognised.
Additional tip, if you have been building links to your website then you will know (or you may not) that the links are worthless until they have been indexed. Speed this up by pinging the page the link is on. Try a free service like Pingler.
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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+
Nice post, very informative. Your final myth in particular was a good one.