Accounting is a very competitive industry, and there are thousands of accounting firms providing accounting services and competing for the same clients to get them signing up for your services. To stand out from the competition, you need to have your website optimize to appear on top of the search engine result page for the keywords you are targeting, as the sites appearing on the first page of the search engine result gets the most traffic, which eventually leads to generating potential customers. As 75% of users never visit the second page of the search engine result page and according to study number one result got 28.5% of CTR. So as an accounting firm, you need to optimize your website to have a chance to get into the competition.
When starting SEO for your accounting firm, you first need to analyze your locality, what area you will be targeting, who will be your target audience in that area, and what type of clients you will be serving, like small businesses and startups, self-employed, freelancers. Analyze your target location and audience, and then select your targeted keywords for that. When you have done your research on your audience and location, you need to analyze the website appearing on top of search results for the keywords you are targeting, explore those top website, their keyword placement, content, what value they are providing to the user who lands on the target page, why that particular page is ranking on that keyword.
For SEO, you need to keep in your mind, and there are different types of SEO you need to perform for your accounting firm. Below we will discuss a few of the aspects of SEO that are very important for your website.
On-Page SEO
This is the first step from where you start SEO for your website; as the name suggests, this type of SEO is directly related to your website pages. In on-page SEO, you need to take care of all the on-page factors to optimize your site for the keywords you target to appear on top of the search result page. Following are the essential points you need to keep in mind while performing your site on-page SEO.
- SEO Title: Your webpage title must have the keyword that you need to optimize for.
- Meta Description: It is the summary/description of your web page that summarizes the purpose of your web page content.
- Content: Google focuses more on content and only rank pages that fulfill user search intent. Your webpage must discuss the keyword you are targeting to rank and must be relevant and describe your firm’s purpose. You must keep your website updating by publishing quality and fresh content in the form of blogs, articles, videos, case studies, and others, as Google likes new content.
- Internal linking: Internal Linking is about linking your website pages with each other so that your website pages are connected, which helps in ranking as a higher-ranking page linked with low ranking or new page. It helps promote that page.
- Headings: Use proper heading titles like H1, H2, H3 with H1 as the top heading and others with subsequent H2 and H3 headings, giving proper structure to your site, and encourage the search engine to understand your content and provide value to it on the search engine.
- Keyword density: You must use your keyword wisely in your content and don’t over-optimize your target keyword in your content. This is called keyword density; the ideal keyword density is once in 150 words content. Your keyword must appear on the first opening paragraph of the content to help google that the content is relevant to the target keyword.
- Image optimization: You must optimize your images with alt attributes, which means alternative text, which helps Google to understand what the image about in case the images fail to load.
- Slug: Keep your webpage slug short, and it must have the target keyword in it.
These are some of the major on-page SEO factors you need to keep in mind when performing SEO for your accounting firm website. There is another major SEO factor called Local SEO, in which you have to optimize your local business listing on google my business. Your accounting firm must be present on google maps, and it has the correct name, phone, address mentioned on the listing. You can further optimize your google my business listing by adding accounting services you are offering, online appointments, images, updates, etc., which help boost your local search results.
In this article, we tried to help you understand the need and importance of SEO for accountants and accounting firms to appear on the first page of search results and have the chance of signing up a potential client from there. I hope. You enjoy my article.
