SEO for accountants in 2021
(7 ways to maximize your client base)

What makes a good accountant? Well, Different things. A keen eye for details, high time management skills, exceptional customer handling skills, and great with numbers are not forgotten.
But what makes a successful one?
Let’s see,
A successful accountant knows the significance of the market. Understanding digital marketing will help you reach out to numerous targeted audiences creating better customer engagement while being cost-effective than the traditional one. With digital marketing, you can campaign for your business without leaving your home office and going out of your budget. There are different kinds of strategies and methods to grow your business digitally, like social media marketing, email marketing, SEO.
This article will discuss SEO.

What is SEO for accountants?

Let’s define SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a series of processes in optimizing a website for search engines like “Google” to boost the quality and quantity of web traffic to a site by generating unpaid (organic) search engine results. When your business is getting searched by a user on the internet, SEO helps your website be present on the first search result page and get chosen by a user. SEO will help you rank number one on a search result page so you can get the highest traffic to your web. Depending on the services your firm provides, your SEO could be more local or international-focused.
seo for accountants
“Mapping out your marketing plan is a great way to visualize your goal.”
As we’ll see in a minute, there are several ways you can win clients over your competitors.

1) Provide valuable content.

Your site should have relevant information and a well-curated topic for your targeted audience. When you give an audience what they want or need, they have no option but to make your site their first choice.
seo content for accountants
Want to learn more about keywords? Keep reading.
After a user searches up a query and different results come up, the user would see a list on a page with titles and descriptions. This title determines if a user wants to click and view it furthermore. So it is significant to make your title as catchy, informative, and relevant as possible. Don’t forget including keywords in your headings and make them specific and descriptive. By making your web content better than the ones around, you will gain higher web visitors. Then the Google algorithm picks up on this, recognizes and labels your web valuable, and ranks it higher on the first search result page (SERP).

2) Make your site appealing

When you compose your site with different pictures, photos, videos, graphics, it makes reading more comfortable, entertaining, and manageable. Just like content, your attention to design and aesthetics also must be at work. As an accountant who is detail-oriented and organized, this is where your skill comes in handy.
A well-constructed page should be easy to navigate; it shouldn’t be confusing to a user who never visited your web page before. Don’t make it too wordy; use hyperlinks, backlinks from a trusted web source, and overall a seamless finish design.
What’s a backlink? Coming up later on
If you want to experiment with different web designs, don’t make it complicated for a new user that came looking for your website’s Info. Users don’t want to keep figuring out how your webpage works. If it’s something different from the normal ones they see out there on the internet, They will think it’s a waste of time, and they will leave the page to move on to the manageable one. This will decrease your web visibility.

3) Targeted Keywords

Keywords are particular phrases a searcher uses to find information on search engines like Google. When you type in specific keywords, you get different results on the result page. According to Google, those results listed are the best value that matches the users’ keyword, so they are ranked highly. The keyword does not determine how well your website performs, but it sure plays a vital role in benefiting your website along the process.

Choosing the right keyword

Content could be a written article, blog, video, audio. It is a process of transcribing or recording ideas and pieces of information on your web page in a practical matter for the targeted audience.
When you are researching keywords, it’s good to start from what the majority audience wants to see out there and look for patterns in phrases on how they describe that specific query.
Well, depending on the type of accounting firm you have, the search for keywords could get even more specific and targeted.
Let’s see the familiar four types of accounting firms as an example,

Full-service accounting firms

As you would know, these types of accounting firms are Huge! They provide every kind of accounting service out there. Due to their broad client base, if these firms want to target a customer base, they have a lot of freedom. Since These types of firms provide extensive services, they can use any keywords like “payroll managing, Tax planning, business consultants, auditing, financial reports…”.

Only tax firms

These types of firms are experts in taxes. They are the most common type of firms. Besides providing tax returns, preparing financial statements, and creating budget plans, tax accountants also have to deal with customers every day. This will allow them to know their clients’ needs and wants. As a tax accountant, you can optimize that to your advantage. It could be from your work experience or survey data you collected. You will know the client’s wants and needs following patterns and utilizing it to your advantage in picking the right keywords for your firm.

Bookkeeping firms

If you are a small business owner, you are most likely a bookkeeping firm client to keep you with your financial transactions or do the bookkeeping yourself. If you have a bookkeeping firm, you can optimize your keywords just like the other firms relevant to your specific services you are providing. You can categorize your target audience as small business owners near your local area.

Auditing firms

As you know, these businesses perform audits for multiple clients like organizations, companies, private individual clients, and even governments. Your firm won’t have to ever run out of clients, but to expand or reach out to your client base, you will need to know how to use SEO keywords properly. For your audit firm, you can optimize your keywords for your specific local target groups looking for your particular service as “ audit firms in Toronto (or near me).”
Numerous tools can help you pick keywords like Google console, google analytic, Keyword explorer, and even the google search bar that would suggest phrases people have been looking in. These tools will help you find the right keywords relevant to your business and even more help you keep track of your web performances.
seo audit for accountants
After you finish finding the right keywords, you can integrate them into your web page to a better user experience and high ranking. It’s significant to Localise your keyword targeting, like adding your locations because you will often compete with your nearby accountants, and people wouldn’t travel hours far just to get their taxes done.
Some of the places you could use keywords are;
  • In a heading 
  • Subheadings
  • URLs
  • Main body content 
  • META tags 

Now let’s see META tags in detail,

4) META Tags

Meta tags are another factor for your website performance. They are descriptive sentences found on the search results page, along with your web title. The tags explain what your web page is about before clicking to see the full content. They are composed of one or more sentences that are only found on the source code but not on your actual web page content. It saves your readers time by giving them a window to the content. Since Meta tags are only visible to the search engine, they can help you in the higher ranking of your page if you know how to use them properly.
“Meta tags are usually coded at the top of the algorithms. Meta tags are available in HTML.”
seo meta tags for accountants
“The arrow shows where Meta-tags are found on a search result page.”

How to use Meta tags appropriately.

When writing your Meta tags, make sure to add your keywords in the descriptions. When a user searches the search engine with keywords, it will match your Meta tags and make your ranking higher.
  • When writing your meta tags, don’t exceed the words to 200.  Google search snippets are up to 230 characters. We recommend you to not go over 200 characters. If not  Google will cut off your Meta description before you get to address the full  information. But Make your Meta tags long enough to be descriptive and give valuable information and short enough to deliver an idea.
  • Research which Meta tags are still relevant for your accounting business during 2021 or your present time.
  • Your title tags, just like your Meta tags, are part of your HTML coding that describes your web title. Like Meta tags, these also appear on the page source code(HTML code). But unlike Meta tags, these could appear on the actual web page, but  these titles could get cut off if they are too long as well as Google displays title tags only of 60 characters. So try to keep your title characters less than 60. In addition to that, your title tag should also contain keywords you picked for SEO.

5) SEO account manager

seo account manager for accountants
If you are a business owner buried with tons of work due and don’t have time to do an SEO by yourself, there is always a way to achieve your goal. Without stealing time from your precious work hour, you can always consider hiring an SEO manager as a way to grow your business. An SEO manager will help you a great deal by doing all the work there is to optimize your web visibility desirably to bring high traffic to your website. An SEO manager is an alternative way to grow your business besides every other ways discussed above and even more. By hiring an expert, they will conduct research on the targeted audience, keywords, analyze and monitor your web performance. An SEO manager is also responsible for helping your business promote on different social media relevant to your accounting business. Like on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and linkedin.

6) Managing URLs

seo urls for accountants
Suppose you have looked something up on the internet before; you probably have noticed a URL on the top of your page that looks like http://SEOforaccountants.com.
A URL stands for Uniform source locator. It is composed of letters, symbols, and numbers. Just like your home address, a URL is used for locating a document source on the internet. A typical URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS.
Notice there is a colon and a double slash to separate the two parts of a URL. The “SEO for accountants” is called a domain name. This part shows the name of the source you are locating.
When creating and deciding your domain name, It should describe your business and contain the keyword you have selected. Do not forget to keep your URLs as short as possible as well. There are numerous tools to help you build your website. Some of these with free trials are WordPress, Wix, and Shopify.
Now, let’s discuss backlinks.

7) Aquire Backlinks

With the growth of e-businesses and most accounting work being digital, you could spend a sufficient amount of time on the internet daily. If you did, you most probably have come across links to a different page to give you a lot of descriptive information on the topic. These are called hyperlinks. A backlink is when your website has a link on another website. It is like a backdoor to your website. Let’s say when you are visiting Yahoo Finance to learn about the market price on bitcoin today. And later, when you scroll down the page, you see a phrase highlighted with blue, saying “how to earn cryptocurrency.” If you click that sentence, it will take you to a whole new article about earning a cryptocurrency. If you own this “how to earn cryptocurrency” page, that was a backlink to your page. A backlinking can also be called hyperlinks or inbound links. Among others, there are various effective mechanisms to getting backlinks for free like developing contacts with essential news outlets and blogs, making your content a news source itself, frequently updating your page to stay relevant, offering backlink to other websites so they can do the same for you, and there is always asking webpage owners if they would refer yours, boldly.
seo backlinks for accountants
“Those blue highlighted words could be an example of backlinks.”
When a major news outlet or a trusted website links your page on theirs, it is a brilliant marketing scheme to growing business fast. Because it shows, your page can be credible and has value since the recommendation comes from a page with high web traffic and user confidence.

Make a bank.

“Never lower your target, increase your actions” – Grant Cardone.
There are now various opportunities for your business that could benefit you. Yes, Learning SEO requires a considerable amount of your time, but all great works need a great deal of effort and commitment. Using SEO for your accounting business will most definitely help recognize and appreciate your company’s value while increasing your users’ experiences. SEO could create more opportunities than what you aimed for. I hope this article was able to deliver the tips you were looking to develop your business.
Ready to start your new project but have a few questions? We are here to discuss.