SEO For Accountants: 7 Best Practices To Generate More Clients

Being one of the most competitive fields in the world, it’s high time that your accounting website needs to outrank the competition and get that #1 spot in the SERPs.

But with rising competition and every accounting firm rushing to get the same clients, how can you make your accounting website stand out? 

With clients not going past the top 3-5 search results, how can you rank your website higher to get more clients?

The answer to all these questions is SEO (search engine optimization). With the correct strategy for SEO for accountants, your accounting firm can reach higher rankings to drive more potential traffic and leads that can further turn into conversions and revenues.

This blog will tell you everything about accounting SEO and how your firm can earn more potential traffic. 

So keep reading further…

What Is SEO For Accountants?

Let’s assume that you have well-renowned knowledge about SEO, but if you are new, then SEO is the practice of improving your website’s ranking when the audience searches for some services or products, whichever are related to your niche.

For example, if a person inserts a keyword in the Google search bar to find “accounting firms near me,” what are the chances that your website would appear in the top results? 

Let me practically do it and tell you… 

It flashes around 4,020,000 results! Now, can you tell me, out of this number, what would be your accounting website position? Tough know? It may also happen that your website could be found on the 2,300th spot, or maybe the 2,30,000th spot. 

But if you want to see your accounting website rank in the first position, or even position zero, on Google, then SEO for accountants is all you need!

So, overall, SEO is done to enhance your firm’s visibility in the SERPs, drive more people to your website, and increase the chances of conversions that turn into clients and generate revenues.

With this, let me tell all the accountants why you need to do SEO for accounting firms.

Why Do Accounting Firms Need SEO?

The reasons are obvious: if you want higher rankings, more clients, and higher ROIs, search engine optimization is the only practice you should pursue.

And to make sure that you reach potential clients before your competitors do, here are some of the best SEO accounting practices you may look for and implement in your SEO strategy.

7 Best Accounting SEO Practices To Generate More Clients

Run An SEO Audit Of Your Accounting Firm

You must be thinking, “Why am I asking you to audit your website instead of stating the ways to enhance the website’s visibility?”

That’s because most business starts rolling down the steps without even analyzing where they stand currently. 

How can you even think of getting your accounting and SEO firm where you want it to be before looking at its current performance?

Therefore, I recommend a site audit as a crucial factor to measure your current efforts. 

Some of the aspects are;

• Your website’s SEO performance which includes your current rankings, the number of clicks your website gets, how much traffic is coming to your website, etc.

• Measure and compare your website’s performance to that of your competitors which include the local competitors.

• The technical issues that are been faced

• And much more aspects

To measure your website’s current performance, you can use several site audit tools. Google Page Speed Insights is one of the most popular and free tools. 

The features it offers are:

• Conduct an in-depth analysis of the website’s performance in terms of speed.
• Crawls the website and provides an issue report based on a number of factors.
• Reveals how well a website performs across different devices such as mobile and desktop.

Pick The Best SEO Keywords For Accountants

The first and most crucial step in accounting SEO is finding the right keywords for your website.

As you may be aware, Google ranks websites in search engine results pages using a highly complex algorithm. 

As a result, you must ensure that you are using the appropriate keywords for your accounting firm that people may be searching for in order to find you or render your accounting services.

For this, you can quickly list out a few services that you may offer to your clients. but remember to stay relevant to the industry. 

Let’s say that your firm specializes in the management of taxes, bookkeeping services, etc., so you can list out the services you offer, like accounting services, tax preparation services, business advisory services, etc.

But here you must ask, I am having a small accounting firm and therefore I can have just a few basic keywords to rank for such as “accounting services” or “accounting firm”

See, targeting short keywords can make you rank higher, but the chances are very low. Why? because these search queries are very competitive and targeted by higher brands, plus these queries also do not clarify the intent.

Therefore, you can list out a few location-specific keywords like accounting firms in NYC, accountant near me, tax accountant near me, etc.

Such keywords can also be defined as “long-tailed keywords,” and rankings for these search queries are much easier as compared to short ones as they are more specific and have a certain intent. 

To analyze these keywords, you can take the help of some keyword research tools; there are a number of tools available on the internet, like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, etc.

You just have to insert a few listed terms into these tools, and bamm! You will get more keyword ideas along with several metrics to help you understand the competitiveness of the keywords.

Look at the image below,

I got nearly 1260 more keyword ideas! It’s not like you have to use all these keywords. NO! Instead, go for a few relevant terms that match the intent. 

Infusing keywords unnecessarily may lead to keyword stuffing and can result in penalties. 

After you have a handful of keywords in your bag, now is the time to create content that is relevant and informative to your clients. So let’s move on to the content part.

Create Content Around The Keywords Listed

To start with content, you first have to analyze what others are writing and how they are serving their clients in terms of information.

See, writing content is not as simple as it was earlier, especially after the current Google update about SEO content, which states that now, Google will not rank any website with low quality or unoriginal content whose primary focus is to rank higher.

So, it is undoubtedly important to offer a piece of content that is user-oriented and provides your audience with the required information.

Read More: 8 Valuable Tips To Create SEO Content Strategy

So, you can create separate pages for each keyword. For example, if there’s a keyword “personal tax accountant in California,” you can create a page around this keyword telling about your experience in that particular service, how you are better than others, the period of time that you have been providing this service, past client records, and other professional knowledge.

Doing this would build a positive impression for your accounting firm among the readers as well as the search engines.

For readers: they would get to know that you have expert knowledge about this service, which may develop a connection and trust for you. This can lead to conversions, as they might look to contact you or visit your firm.

In contrast, providing correct and relevant information to users will help you rank higher in the SERPs. 

In addition, you can also insert CTA buttons like “Contact Us” or “Fill This Form” on your pages to enhance the chances of visitors converting into paying clients. Just like how I did! Look below,

If any visitor landing on my website wants to audit their website, then I have provided a site audit form for them to do so.

Moreover, you can also write blog posts or articles in order to provide information through your content around the other keywords that you’ve listed. Writing SEO-friendly blogs is one of the finest ways to connect with your audience by providing more knowledge that they might need.

Plus, Google ranks a website higher when it finds that the website is consistent in providing information to its clients. 

People nowadays are more concerned with gathering the necessary information before taking any further action…

Suppose a person wants to get some information, like “Is it worth hiring an accountant for tax preparations?” For this, you have to create optimized content that includes the keyword to tell Google that you have an exceptional knowledge about it and would satisfy the client’s needs.

This would prove to Google that your website is trustworthy and authoritative. And ultimately, it would rank you higher in the search results. Like this…

Here are a few tips to help you optimize your content for accountant websites:

1. To make your accounting firm’s website appear well in the SERPs and to the readers, you have to enhance the on-page SEO of your website. A few elements to focus on are…

• Meta Tags – Optimizing meta tags such as meta titles and meta descriptions is the key to attracting more visitors to click on the website link and explore your website. You have to create unique titles and descriptions for each page including the target keyword.

• URLs- Make each URL SEO friendly. Therefore, you have to keep it unique for each page, the URLs should be short descriptive, and easy to understand. Plus, always include the target keyword in the URLs.

• Headings- For both users and search engine crawlers, a web page’s heading tags describe the content’s organizational structure. To enhance the quality of the headings of your accounting websites, you must add the target keyword in the H1 tag, and other relevant keywords in the H2–H6 tags.

Increase Your Visibility With Local SEO

Your main goal should be to drive local customers to your doorstep. Local SEO improves your website’s visibility in search engine results for local searches for any accountant SEO website.

To make it simple, going for local SEO for your website would help you rank higher for “near me” searches and drive new clients that are searching for specific services in multiple locations.

For example, if a person searches for “accountants near me,” your accounting firm immediately shows up right at the top!

For this, you have to start thinking like a customer who needs services. So, what would you do if you wanted to hire an accountant? 

You simply go on Google and type in “Accountants near me.” As a result, what does Google show? 

You’ll get to see a map of that area and, right at the top, a list of the top 3 businesses known as the “local 3 pack.” So what does this mean? It means those top three businesses are the ones that get the highest amount of search traffic. 

So what does this mean? The top three businesses are highly relevant to the keyword entered in the search bar.

Moreover, when potential clients are looking for services in a specific location, for that they use keywords such as “best accountant near Idaho” or “Tax Accountant Near Idaho.” 

For these businesses that rank at the top, the chances are high that the clients could straightaway make a call to them or hire their services. 

So, if you want your website to appear right on top of the search results, you must adhere to local SEO. To enhance your accounting website’s local SEO, here’s a video describing a few tips. So have a look.

After watching this video, you must now be aware of all the local SEO tips that would help you enhance your accounting firm’s visibility on search engines to drive more local clients.

With this, let us move on to some other practices for accountant SEO.

Home Page Recommendation & Implementation

The homepage could be called the face of the website. As a result, you must act immediately to ensure that your website’s homepage delivers the right thing at the right time.

See, it is obvious that when a person visits your website, the first thing that appears right in front of their eyes is the homepage.

So, you have to ensure that your accounting website’s homepage is well-designed and that every element is appearing correctly.

For example, if audience members visit your website looking for services, what would make them take action? 

It refers to how well your website’s homepage is designed and how easily visitors can find the information they require.

Look at this image of an SEO accounting firm given below. 

1. Every component is very clear. First, the logo of the firm is clearly presented at the top. There’s a clickable link to various individual pages such as “Home,” “Contact Us,” “Services,” “Events,” and “Blog.”

2. When discussing services, each one is mentioned separately and includes a brief description of the service as well as the firm’s experience in providing it.

3. The contact information shows the name, phone number, and firm’s address. Plus, there’s another CTA button, “Request An Appointment,” to book an appointment and discuss what all services to require.  

4. Plus, telling about future events that you would be conducting can really enhance your homepage SEO for accounting firms. Doing this can make your clients feel connected and excited about your services. See the images below.

See! The images tell how this accounting SEO firm did it to make their website’s homepage more engaging and action-oriented. The heading “Upcoming Event” catches users’ attention and draws them in further to learn about tax-saving services and their benefits. 

5. Moreover, the website also provided testimonials of their clients, which included their reviews and ratings for the accounting firm and what their experience was after taking their services. Like this.

And this is how you can optimize your homepage and implement the above-listed points to make your website more effective to generate more clients for your accounting firm.

With this, now let’s move further…

Get Your Accountant SEO Firm Listed In High-Quality Directories

You may wonder why there is a need to get cited in various directories when I am optimizing my website to be found in the search results.

Wait, look at this fact-it is found that 81% of people tend to find a business through local directories. 

With this, it might be clear why there is a need for your accounting SEO firm to list high-quality directories.
With the rise in competition, having great content is not everything that drives more customers…

With the trend going upward and people being more advanced with technology such as mobile devices and voice searches, you must ensure that your accounting website is optimized for these.

With people wanting quick solutions to their search queries, there is an immense need for you to make your accounting website optimized so that it is found by users as quickly as possible.

And here are a few benefits of getting listed in high-quality directories.

1. There would be an increase in your accounting firm’s search engine ranks as well as build more credibility as it would tell search engines that your website is trustworthy and genuine.

2. With increased SERP rankings, you will be able to attract more clients as well as traffic.

Some of the most famous and high-quality directories are:

• Yellowpages
• Google My Business
• Thumbtack
• Yelp
• Better Business Bureau (BBB)

Here’s an example of how these directories rank your website when people search for accounting services.

When I searched for “best tax accountant near Los Angeles,” the first result I got was Yelp.com. It gives me the top 10 ranking accounting websites. Look below.

But why these websites only? This is because these websites are optimized and provide users with every detail in the directories so that if customers need any accounting services, they can find them there.

And here are a few steps to optimize your accounting website and rank in local directories.

1. Accurate NAP Information

The first thing that you should focus on to optimize your accounting website is to add the correct NAP information. NAP means the name, address, and phone number of your accounting service. 

This is what people usually look for when they search for any business online. Therefore, it is very important to keep your NAP information accurate.

2. Tell About Your Business With A Short Description

Describing your business and the services you provide is the best way to build trust with your visitors. Therefore, you must add a brief description of your accounting firm to these directories.

3. Business Hours & Map Location

Adding your working hours and map location could be of great help, as it will let people know when you are available for business and where your firm is situated. 

The question here is: Do you want your clients to leave your website and move on to your competitors? 

Of course not! So it is important to make it clear to your visitors when you are available and when you are not with the accurate location of your accounting firm.

Plus, it also matters how you treat visitors coming to your website. Responding to them is the best way to get them to stay on your site and increase the chances of them contacting you. See the image below.

You must answer your consumers’ inquiries quickly if you want to boost the odds that customers will use your services. This would increase the odds that clients may contact you.

4. Add Photos To Your Advantages

Including photos and videos of your staff and offices is a great way to show your clients that you are a real company with real people. This might encourage people to click on your website and do business with you.

5. Collect Reviews Of Clients

The reviews left by your customers on your website are crucial in determining how well you met their needs with your services.

You should show your customers that you value their feedback by asking for a review. This would let your accounting firm gain more value.

For example, if someone takes your accounting services and appreciates your efforts to satisfy their requirements, what you can do is, you can ask them to give feedback on your website.

It makes no difference whether a review is positive or negative…

Clients who have given you positive feedback will undoubtedly recommend your services to others. And with negative reviews, you would get to know what improvements you need to make to retain your clients and offer them better services.

Therefore, it must be clear how reviews play a vital role in accounting SEO. It is how you prioritize your clients and provide them with the best services they require that can lead to more leads (through word of mouth and online reviews).

Read More: How To Boost Local Business With Google Reviews

Fix The Issues Faced By Your Website

By issues I didn’t mean only the technical part, your accounting website may face several issues that you can’t just think…

You simply need to fix any technical or other issues to improve the performance of your website.

Here are some of the factors that you may neglect while developing your accounting website that might become an obstacle to your path toward reaching the top position in the SERPs.

1. Page Speed of Your Website

The fact I saw is that 44% of accounting firms are victims of slow page speed. To counter this issue, you first have to measure your website’s performance.

There are several tools available to measure your website’s speed performance, but the one I prefer is Google Page Speed Insights, which is a free tool provided by Google only.

Don’t you think that your visitors would immediately leave your website if it was slow and less responsive? 

Nevertheless, you must ensure that your website loads quickly and is responsive enough to make users take some action. For this, you should fix the issues detected by the tool.

Some common issues that slow down the page speed are:

• Heavy HTML code, CSS files, and Javascript 
• Too big images without proper format
• Excessive plugins used in the website, etc.

And here are some ways to tackle these issues.

• Reduce the amount of Javascript and CSS used to solve these issues. You can simply merge JavaScript and all CSS files into a single file. As a result, fewer HTTP requests will be generated altogether.

• Optimize images and choose the right image format throughout your website.

• Plugins are helpful because they give the CMS new functionalities. But sometimes, plugins slow down a website. So it is better to reduce the number of plugins by analyzing which one is really needed.

The speed of your website is all that matters in determining whether users will stay or bounce. 

Talking about page speed and bounce rate, here’s an exciting infographic that would show the impact of your website’s page speed with respect to bounce rate.

Moreover, it also depends on the page speed to determine how it enhances the overall user experience for your accounting website, which further reduces bounce rates. And this is what I will tell you next.

2. User Experience

Allowing your visitors to locate the information they need is all that enhances the user experience. Your users may not consider staying on your website when they are not able to find what they need.

Suppose a user visits your website to hire tax accounting services, wants to explore a bit, finds relevant content, and now makes up his mind to hire your services.

But unfortunately, he is unable to find any form or button, such as one to book an appointment or fill out a form, to take any further action.

And ultimately, he would leave your website, resulting in a bad user experience and affecting the overall SEO.

Therefore, it must be ensured that whenever a visitor comes to your website, they are able to find the required information to take any action.

3. Establish an E.A.T Algorithm

With E.A.T. (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) you have to provide the correct details of your business on every platform. This factor is what most businesses lack.

You have to ensure that every piece of information you provide on your accounting website is based on expert knowledge so that it can build authority and trust among people and search engines alike.

To learn more, head to What Is Google E.A.T SEO and How To Perform It?

4. Fix internal linking

Internal linking is the process of adding links within your website to drive users to other pages of your website, such as blogs, social media pages, contact us pages, etc. It is done to show the relationship between the web pages and how they are interrelated.

For example, if a user wants to go from the homepage to the contact us page, you can put a link to the same page so that when he or she clicks on the text, they are directed to the contact us page.

Moving on, sometimes it happens that users want to explore more about the website and how well you are active on social media platforms. But often they couldn’t do so…

Therefore, to eliminate such issues, you can simply add links to your social media pages and other web pages of your website to make users skim without any difficulties. Like this.

5. Resolve 404 errors

Have you somehow come across something like this?

This is known as a 404 error and occurs when the page or the source is not found by the search engine crawlers. This may be due to dead or broken links on your accounting website.

Also, this issue can cause a negative experience for the users and can affect your website’s rankings.

With this, let us directly come to how to fix such errors…

1. The best way to fix 404 errors is by guiding the users to another pertinent page. Just be sure to send them somewhere relevant and not just back to your site.

2. If your website has any broken links, you may easily modify the link to redirect to the right URL.

3. Making a customized 404 error page will ensure that no client faces such issues and leaves your website.

So this is how you can fix 404 errors and lead to a better customer experience on your website.

And these were some of the factors, or issues, that you needed to fix to make your website more accessible and easy to use for both users and crawlers. Fixing these issues would really boost your website’s overall performance and have a positive effect on the users.

Conclusion

By now, you must have a clear view of how search engine optimization would help your accounting website grow and maximize its search engine visibility to generate more clients.

The above-listed practices must be considered if you want your website to rank higher and reach more potential clients.

So why to wait if you’ve got the best practices for accounting SEO? Go implement them and skyrocket your SEO strategy.

And if you get stuck at any point or need any assistance, all you need to do is book a free 30-minute strategy session with my team.

Our highly qualified SEO specialists will undoubtedly assist you in the best way possible.

FAQs

1. What are the KPIs that an accountant must measure?

The top priority for an accounting firm is to measure how many conversions took place after you implemented SEO for accountants. Next, a few metrics to be tracked are:

Ranking keywords: measuring and analyzing which keywords are ranking higher on the SERPs, as well as what changes have occurred in the rankings.

Incoming Traffic: Determine whether traffic to your website is increasing or decreasing. What changes have occurred in organic traffic over the past few weeks or months?

Number of phone calls or forms submitted: measuring how many leads have been generated through phone calls or forms submitted.

2. What type of content should an SEO accounting website have?

It can be identified by finding out if the keywords that you have listed are in the trend or not. Simply enter your keyword into Google and see if it can be used to create useful content for readers. Including question based keywords can do wonders.

You can create content that answers several question based queries asked by the users and satisfies their needs. Google, above everything, ranks the website that provides the content, which is user-oriented and not for the purpose of rankings.

3. What are the most searched keywords to have on your accounting website?

Here’s the list of the best and the most relevant keywords for accounting websites

Question based keywords

1. What does an accountant do

2. How to become an accountant

3. how much does an accountant cost

4. what does a forensic accountant do

5. how much does a tax accountant cost

Main Keywords

1. Tax accountant near me

2. Certified public accountant

3. Quickbook accountant

4. Tax accountant

5. Business accountant near me

6. Cpa accountant near me

7. Cpa tax accountant