If you want a reliable and easy-to-start way to boost your views online, use SEO for accountants. Whenever you publish content online that involves your firm, you could be missing out on extra views. SEO is one way to boost your views and establish a strong online presence.
In this guide, you’ll learn all about SEO for accountants. We’ll give you easy-to-follow directions and help explain why SEO works so well for accountants. By the end, you should be able to get started with your SEO-friendly website.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the idea of using simple tactics that Google is known to reward.
SEO itself can get complicated, but you can achieve great results by just sticking to the basics. SEO for beginners is easy enough to do and doesn’t require any special equipment or knowledge besides what you’ll learn in this guide.
What does beginner SEO include?
Beginner SEO can be broken down into a few important parts. Do your best to include all the parts in your online content and you should start seeing better results.
Optimizing keywords
One of the biggest focuses in SEO for accountants is keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase that a potential client might use to find services like yours. By building your content around a keyword, Google will start to associate your page with the chosen keyword.
For example: If you target the phrase “CPA in Paterson, NJ” in an article, your article might start popping up when people Google that phrase.
Picking the right keywords and keyphrases is one way to jump up the ranks at Google and start showing up in more results. Importantly, you’ll show up in the right results. As people are looking for a CPA, your CPA SEO will start working.
Using the right URL
Even your web page’s URL matters when it comes to SEO for accountants. An SEO-friendly webpage will use a URL that closely mirrors what’s described on the page. A good tip is to use the title of your article as your web page’s URL.
Optimizing meta descriptions
A meta description will give a summary of the article. It shows up on Google under your web page’s link. It acts as a blurb to introduce the topic to the viewer. If they’re interested, they’ll click the link and get directed to your site.
Try to put a key phrase in your meta description to help your Google ranking even more.
Using alt tags
An alt tag is the text associated with an image you have on your site. A search engine can’t look at an image and know what it is — it relies on the alt tag.
If you use keywords in your alt tag, this is yet another way to help your Google ranking. In this case, your images will appear towards the top of the list.
Linking internally
Internal links are a big deal for beginners in SEO. If you put together a CPA blog post, you should add hyperlinks to other pages on your site.
Accountants will typically link to their Contact Us, Services, or About Us pages. It improves the views across the board and helps your site as a whole.
Using SEO-friendly headings
Be mindful of the headings that you use. For reference, a heading is the big, bold text that introduces the topic you’re about to talk about.
Using short, easily-scannable headings helps the viewer find the right area they want to read. Using keywords in your headings will help your page show up sooner on Google’s results.
How does SEO work for accountants?
SEO for accountants is a straightforward process. You’re helping your site show up on Google, so you want your online content to use SEO tactics. This means that your social media accounts, website, and listing should all use SEO best practices — as detailed above.
Why should you be concerned about SEO as an accountant?
Some people think that SEO can be overlooked. Focusing on your accountant business is a logical thing to do, but you should carve out some time for SEO. This is because SEO will help your business perform much better online.
Using beginner-level SEO techniques can:
- Establish a strong online presence
- Generate more leads and new clients
- Help more customers find you
- Increases visibility in search engines
How does SEO fit into an accounting marketing plan?
SEO all happens online. Any part of your accounting marketing plan that’s web-based can benefit from SEO. This includes your Google Ads, social media, blog, website, listings, and reviews.
It doesn’t necessarily replace anything in your marketing plan — it works in tandem to hopefully improve your results.
How can you implement SEO into an accounting website?
Rolling out SEO is pretty easy, even for a beginner. Your accounting website design can incorporate SEO in several different places.
If you have access to the design of your site, you can start making these changes immediately. For your existing pages, start by sprinkling in keywords and optimizing the headers. Adjust the URLs you use and make sure all of your pictures have alt images.
If you don’t have a blog already, now’s a good time to start it.
How can accounting blogs and content marketing benefit from financial services SEO?
A blog is one of the best places for your SEO techniques to start working. You can build specialized blog posts around a single keyword that you’re targeting.
In this guide of accounting blog topics, the big takeaway is that blogging is best when it’s done consistently. You should also focus on making easy-to-read content that’s enjoyable to read.
Since you’re an expert in accounting, try to put together content that uses industry knowledge. If you share interesting ideas, the typical viewer has a reason to keep scrolling through your blog.
In SEO for tax preparers, it might help to publish much more content around tax season.
How can you do keyword research?
How does keyword research work? It’s simpler than you might think. Keyword research typically revolves around a few techniques.
Brainstorming
Start by brainstorming a list of words that someone might Google. Again, these phrases should emulate something that would lead them to your page.
For example, “dog walker near me” probably has nothing to do with your accounting firm. SEO for accounting firms should revolve around the services you provide.
Checking Google for related terms
Type a phrase into Google and see how many results you get. From there, scroll down a little until you see a section that suggests similar results. This is another list of potential keywords you can target.
Using Google’s autocomplete feature
When you start typing in Google, it might start suggesting searches for you. These searches were generated based on high-volume searches that started with similar words that you’re typing.
You can target these auto-completed phrases since you already know they have decent search volume.
What are the next steps involving SEO for accountants?
At this point, you might feel empowered and inspired to start your SEO campaign. As you just learned, SEO for accountants isn’t as hard as some people think. We just reviewed the basics, showed you why it works so well, and explained how you can get started today.
The next step is to build an SEO-friendly site. You can use a professional website builder tool with built-in SEO to get started. You can also audit your current website with an SEO tool from Constant Contact.
