SEO for Accountants: 3 Steps for Attracting New Clients on Autopilot
The whole purpose behind SEO, or search engine optimisation, is to generate consistent and high-quality leads for your accounting practice through a robust web presence.
Online search is more competitive than ever before, because once your website starts appearing in any of the top three positions for highly relevant keywords, your business can get a flood of clients coming in like clockwork.
Of course, if you want to compete better nationally and shift away from your saturated local market – with companies like Critchleys and M Group Accounting – then you need the right approach to SEO for accountants.
There are many different ways to bring in more clients, but SEO gives you maximum visibility online to generate new business for your accounting firm. In order to have organic (non-paid) traffic coming from search engine results 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, here are three tips on SEO for accountants we’ve put together.
Step 1: Find Keywords for Your Accounting Niche
There are more than 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, so it’s clear that there are a lot of things to keep in mind as you build your firm’s web presence.
However, if we had to distill it down, the success of any SEO campaign depends on the keywords you’re aiming to rank for. This is where SEO is not just a science, but also an art, because you need to figure out what your ideal client is actually searching for.
To do this, you have to consider both keyword topic areas and the funnel stage they correspond to. For example, informational content lives at the top of the funnel (the awareness stage).
- How long should I keep my business accounting records?
- Type of business structures in the UK
As you move down the funnel, you’ll get keywords that are more specific to what you offer. For example, in the middle of the funnel (the consideration stage), the keywords are more focused on researching different solutions to a problem:
- How do I start a limited company?
- What accounting software is best for a business?
At the bottom of the funnel (the decision stage), it’s almost entirely focused on comparing specific solution providers to make a final decision:
- Accountant Firm 1 versus Account Firm 2
- Accounting firms near me
It’s always easier to rank for long tail keywords (phrases of five or more words). They’re both less competitive and more specific to what you do, so you should use them for your different service pages, such as bookkeeping, tax accounting, actuarial, and any others that are relevant.
Creating content for each funnel stage in various topic areas will maximise your chances of attracting traffic to your firm’s website. To uncover and evaluate keywords, you should do your keyword research in reliable SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs – and don’t be afraid to “borrow” keyword ideas from your competitors as well!
Step 2: Create Relevant Content for Your Audience
The Google algorithm will always prioritise sites that regularly post new content in the search results, especially compared to stale sites that aren’t providing up-to-date information anymore.
That’s one reason why it’s so important to stay on top of publishing new content – but you also want to do it to take advantage of brand-new keyword opportunities! After all, the more keywords you can rank for, the greater your visibility.
There’s a lot to know about content marketing and SEO for accountants, but here are some of the highlights:
- Do keyword research to find relevant terms you can rank for
- Create and publish regular content based around these keywords
- Amplify your content through promotion and outreach
In the content creation stage, we recommend that you start with keywords that are “quick wins” or are closely related to your marketing goals.
Take the term “accountant in Oxford” as an example. If you’re an accounting practice based in the Oxford area or nearby, you can see that the keyword difficulty is currently 50 with an estimated volume of 480. That’s not an easy term to rank for, but it’s not impossible either, if you’re an established site. And what if you could get 100 visitors per month from just this keyword alone?
As long as you can keep up the quality, you should be publishing new blog posts regularly in conjunction with your keyword strategy.
Step 3: Amplify Your Content’s Reach
Publishing content online isn’t the same as owning a weekly newspaper that ships to households across the country. In fact, unless you’re determined to get the word out, publishing on a website is more like writing in your diary.
This doesn’t mean your pages and posts won’t rank on Google at all, but they tend not to reach the top of the search engine results page without a little extra push. Remember, Google’s algorithm isn’t a human (at least, not so far), which means it needs a little help from you to understand what your page is about.
So, after you’ve written a new post, you need to make sure it’s optimised with onsite SEO. This includes:
- Optimised page titles and meta descriptions
- Optimised permalinks with the target keyword
- Optimised title tags
- Internal links between posts
If your site is built on WordPress, you can use a plugin like RankMath or Yoast SEO to help you handle all of this onsite optimisation. By taking this crucial step, you’re making it a lot easier for Google to offer your content to searchers.
Aside from onsite SEO for accountants, there are other steps you can take to make Google more likely to rank your posts. These items can help amplify your content’s reach:
- Submit new posts manually in Google Search Console for faster indexing
- Promote new content to your social media followers and email subscribers
- Build links through outreach, press, guest blogs, and directories
If your ultimate goal is to have posts that rank on the first page of Google, promotion is a big part of the process. We recommend a link building campaign to get some high-authority links pointing to your home page as well as individual content pieces (ie deep pages).
SEO for Accountants Wrap-up
When it comes to SEO for accountants or any industry, you need to be in it for the long haul. Not only does it take time to get results, but those results are constantly shifting as Google changes its algorithm and your competitors vie for top positions with SEO campaigns of their own.
Other lead generating techniques like pay-per-click or sponsorships can get you accounting clients in the short-term, but content creation and SEO dollars invested today can continue to pay off for years.
With that said, imagine how different your business could be if your site ranked for a few hundred relevant keywords on the first page of Google, bringing in a steady flow of new clients. This doesn’t have to be just a thought exercise – our SEO agency has helped many businesses through our premium SEO campaign services, even against much bigger companies in their field.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today!