SEO tips for accountants
Posted by Marketing Man in Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,SEO | August 7, 2012
When it comes to marketing your accountancy firm on the internet we know that a lot of the time you need all the help you can get. With that in mind here are a few tips to improve your website’s SEO:
Regularly Produce Content
The old SEO saying goes “Content is King”, the search engines love unique content and the more relevant and unique content you have on your website the more opportunities you give to potential searchers to land on your website. Try to maintain a blog on your website and update it with regular posts to keep the search engine spiders coming back. If you are not sure what to publish on your blog, here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Get a lot of support emails or emails asking the same questions? Publish the questions and answers into an FAQ section of your website.
- If you have a lot of information in PDF format, get them written out into a blog post.
- If you are comfortable behind a camera why not start making brief videos to give hints and tips on certain accountancy issues, host them on YouTube and embed them into your site. If you have no desire to record yourself on camera consider asking customers for testimonials in recorded format.
- Keep an eye on Twitter and/or Facebook for trending topics in accountancy and blog your opinions on the matter.
Give it a personal touch
If you are a smaller accountancy firm then you have the advantage of being able to transmit a personal voice to potential clients through your website and social media. By making your voice heard you will stand out in the market and showcase yourself as an authority on the subject matter. Give a little to receive a lot, teaching is a great sales tool as, by teaching or educating clients on certain aspects of accountancy, you will build up a level of trust, breaking down one of the barriers to sale.
Optimise your website for local search
The odds are that you accountancy firm will benefit from an increase in local search traffic, by local search traffic we mean any keyword that is being searched for with a geographic term (i.e. Wolverhampton Accountant). Local search is becoming more and more important as ever increasing levels of local searches are conducted in the search engines, if you are not optimised for local traffic you are potentially missing out on a lot of business. It is frightening how many accountancy websites I have been on where you can find no mention of the company’s location on any page, how is a search algorithm supposed to rank you for a local search term if a human being cannot even tell where you are located when visiting the site?
Create content for people
It is easy sometimes to forget that ultimately the content on your website has to be readable, interesting and informative to actual people rather than just aimed towards ranking for certain keywords. Make sure that when you create new copy for your website that it is readable for human visitors, it needs to flow well and convince the reader to take the action that you want. If you write the content well enough you should have no problems in referencing your chosen keywords whilst still keeping it readable and interesting.
Refine your internal linking structure
Internal links (i.e. a link from one page of your website to another page of your website) can add a lot of SEO value, a fact that not many accountancy firms have taken advantage of with their websites. Having a good internal linking structure will mean that search engine spiders will find crawling your website much easier and give your pages a much better chance of being indexed. It will also allow you, through carefully chosen anchor text, to increase each pages SEO value for chosen keywords. For example, if you link from your homepage to a page about Self-Assessment Tax Returns and use the term “Self-Assessment Tax Returns” as the anchor text you are telling the search engine that you wish to link to this page and that the page is about Self-Assessment Tax Returns.
Make sure all of your pages can be accessed via links, adding a sitemap is a great way of making sure all pages get indexed.
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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+
