7 Steps to Excellent SEO for Accounting Firms

7 Steps to Excellent SEO for Accounting Firms

Let’s talk about SEO for accounting firms and how to drive more organic traffic to your website through search engine optimization.

In this article, I'm going to show you 7 specific things you can do to make sure you've laid a good foundation so you can show up in search engines.

If you need a website for your CPA or accounting firm, you gotta check out what we do here at Feedbackwrench, but I also want to just help you in the hopes you decide to want to build your firm's website and advertising with us.

These are seven things you can do to help your accounting business rank higher in both local search engine rankings and the more broad search engine result pages.

We will cover some of the following SEO for accountant topics:

• How to rank on Google for a CPA firm
• How to get organic traffic to your accounting firm website
• How CPA firms can outrank their competitors on google search & Bing search
• How to improve your google maps and Google My Business rankings
• How to attract business clients specifically with search engines

1 - Website done right

SEO starts with building a website that’s technically sound, has an excellent user interface and actually satisfies peoples queries and searches. If your website is littered with technical problems, and the content is thin and not that helpful, it's going to struggle to rank in Google or Bing.

You need a good website that shows your'e a high quality company or publisher, otherwise Google with clump it together with all the half published spam or forgotten websites strewn across the web.

We need to show we're a trustworthy website, so here are some basics to consider.

Technical website best practices:

1. Use google page speed checker and work to make every page load incredibly fast.
2. Have meta titles and meta descriptions that clearly and succinctly communicate to users.
3. Have a good structure and organization to your website
4. Create various navigation paths to pages so your main pages are never more than one click away.
5. Add schema markup whenever possible.
6. Title your website and pages clearly.
7. Work on excellent messaging, value propositions and design so that people take a step with you.
8. Create content that engages & provide various next steps to keep people engaged and reading your website.

Google rewards excellent solutions to queries, and you can’t keep good content down.

If your website has content that draws in users and really engages with people and keeps them reading, your website and other pages will start to rank in Google eventually.

Part of why Google is so good, is that it’s excellent at finding great solutions to queries on its own.

For the most part, if you focus on creating lots of fantastic content, Google will eventually reward you with organic traffic.

So a good website with good content is going to show up in search eventually.

2 - Setup all the profiles & listings

The next thing that will help a lot with your search engine optimization on your accounting website, is building what’s called citations.

We want to show you’re a legit and prominent business, and part of that is to open up all the relevant profiles available and point them all back to your website, while simultaneously publishing precisely titled profiles.

Basically, we are trying to stand out a bit on the web, and build up profiles and other pages to show you are a business.

There used to be lots of SEO gimmicks around citations, but now I recommend just opening up the basic core profiles.

As we build out these profiles across the internet, we need to send consistent messages so we stand out.

Build out the following profiles, but make sure you have consistency in your name, your contact information, services and descriptions.

We want you to stand out in unison across the net.

When someone does a branded search for your name, we want it to stand out.

Your company title, phone number, email, address and description should be consistent across the various citation profiles you open.

What are the best citations for an accounting firm or bookkeeping business?

• Google my Business
• Bing Places
• Apple Maps
• Yelp
• Quickbooks pro advisor profile
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Manta
• YouTube
• Chamber of Commerce
• Associations & industry listing websites.

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You want to open all of these profiles, fill them out completely, and ensure that you point them back to your website.

Not only should they be pointing to your website, but you want to make sure that you put them in the footer of your website as well, so you send a signal to search engines that this is profile also you.

Place outbound links to all of your major profiles in the footer of your website and then also add in local schema markup, including each of the profiles in that markup so that Google and other search tools will really associate them with your profile.

The best way to test if you’re doing a good job of this is to perform a branded search and find out how many profiles you have taking up space in the result pages.

When you search your business name, all these profiles should show up in the result pages.

A branded search is when you search your own business name.

Your citations help establish your prominence across the web, which is one way Google measures your worthiness.

3 - Open & develop your Google My Business & Bing places

Google My Business and Bing places are going to become your two most important local SEO tools and will drive a massive amount of business your way over time.

Your goal is to set up, and then develop your Google My Business profile into the most dominant profile in the 20 to 30 mile region around your address.

How do you develop and improve your Google My Business for local SEO?

• Fill it out completely & accurately.
• Get more reviews than anyone else.
• Post lots of photos all the time.
• Make posts on the system.
• Build backlinks to your website and Google My Business profile.

Improve your websites overall SEO

The two most important things is to get the most reviews compared to your competitors, and then build up your overall SEO signals for your website and brand.

Why is this so important?

Accounting, tax, bookkeeping and advisory services all have local search features on the results pages, which means that you will be able to show up to local searches, specifically within a 20 to 30 mile radius around your core business location.

Some of the best customers for accountants are those that value location businesses.

Showing up in the local business and google maps features can really help your business grow.

What are some of the most important accountant keywords you can rank for in the Google local maps?

• Business accountant near me
• Bookkeeping services
• Bookkeepers near me
• Business taxes near me
• Tax professionals near me
• Tax accountant near me
• CPA firm near me
• CPA firm
• Accounting companies near me
• Payroll companies
• Bookkeeping companies

This is just meant to get your mind going, the list of accountant keywords for SEO are vast. For help or to learn more about the SEO services Feedbackwrench provides, check out our site here.

4 - Service pages Done Right

There are many keywords your accounting firm will want to rank for, and one of the most important ways to rank for those keywords is to create a thorough and robust services page and system.

Every service your firm provides should have its own page, with tons of content about the service including:

• FAQ's
• Main topics
• Core questions
• Explanations and teaching to make it clear
• Lots of real and helpful content
• Images and illustrations
• Meta titles and meta descriptions that are clear

Those pages will send the signals to google that you perform those services.

It's really hard to make one web page rank for many unique services.

Your services pages will help your Google my Business profile show up in much braoder searches than just the core commercial keywords you use on your home page.

Bookkeeping, payroll, taxes, business taxes, audits, CFO services and the various types of accounting all get advantages when you have a services page system behind the scenes on your website.

SEO optimized navigation

Another important thing is to make sure that you have navigation throughout the entire website, in the main menu, footer, side bars and even throughout every page, pointing to these core service pages.

You want these core service pages to never be more than one click away from any other piece of content on your website.

Internal linking for SEO

When you write additional blog posts or content anywhere, you should also work to hyperlink to your core pages within the actual paragraphs.

This is called internal linking, and when it’s done inside of content that is viewed as authoritative, and it’s done within the paragraph incorrectly, you will see users will end up checking out those pages and Google notes it as it crawls that content.

You want internal linking to your core content everywhere on your website.

5 - Search consoles & sitemaps hooked up

Both Google and Bing have a place where you will actually hook up your website to their system so that it will get crawled consistently and you can notify Google of new pages, contents and information.

The system to hook your website up to Google is called the Search Console.

The first thing you should do is open up a google and then Bing search console or webmaster account and create a property and submit your sitemap.

Search console will also show you what’s happening on your website as it pertains to search, and you will be empowered to understand what’s all happening between your website and Google.

6 - Content & questions

You want your website to rank for core commercial keywords. You also want individual pages to rank for important keywords.

The absolute most important thing to do for SEO as an accounting firm is to create content that answers questions and teaches information.

If you do not create blogs and pages that answer questions, you will never rank for search queries.

You should invest into blogging and content creation because it will be the core thing that transforms you into a dominant ranking force in your accounting, CPA, tax and bookkeeping industry.

Your content should be helpful, engaging, and actually help people so that they choose to consume the content you create. The ultimate test for whether or not your content is any good is the reading of how users are responding to it. You should be paying attention to your average time on page within your analytics system, and checking out whether or not people are reading your contents so that you know if you are engaging with readers.

Create lots of good content and ensure that you cover your subject matter thoroughly.

7 - Backlinks

The last and most important step to accounting firm SEO and helping your CPA firm or bookkeeping business ranking google, is building up your credibility across the web with backlinks.

A back link is when another website hyperlinks to yours as a source or citation for their readers.

Every back link from another website to yours is essentially a vote of confidence and shows how prominent your website and information really is. How do you build up lots of good backlinks? The best way is to create excellent content that can actually serve as a source for other people writing.

People doing research will find your content and then link to it.

Types of content that attract backlinks:

• Research & data
• Steps and how to articles
• Teaching and explaining
• Original graphs & infographics

Besides creating this content, you can also build relationships with, and even collaborate with other websites in order to build up backlinks. It’s important to know that you want backlinks from authoritative websites, not spam websites. Do not pay money to have people back link to your website, and certainly do not try to trick the system by doing silly schemes.

Create excellent content, collaborate with others, and even write on other peoples websites and you will find that you will attract great backlinks and eventually rank.

If you wanted to, you can invest into backlinks outreach and even find other websites that want excellent content and try to write on their behalf, but that often consumes a great deal of resources and people get really tired of the barrage of spam outreach they receive so they might not respond well to your invitation to backlinking.

Outreach to other publications, businesses and even your friends that own businesses is really a good idea over the long-haul, but the core is to simply publish your own content that can be used while other people create their content and look for authoritative sources.

If you work on these seven things, your business will rank higher on the Google MyBusiness local result page, and all of the pages within your website will have a better opportunity to rank for a whole host of search queries.