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Accountancy Websites: Digital Marketing and SEO for Accountants

Unless you’re leveraging SEO as a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy, you’re losing numerous high-quality leads and leaving some significant amounts of money on the table.

In this brief guide, you’ll learn about the essential areas of search engine optimization that you should include in your accountancy firm’s digital marketing.

Why Search Engine Optimization?

Building your accountancy website is just a first step towards strengthening your online presence. You may already have a professionally designed website that runs perfectly, offering your potential and current clients all the information they need.

However, if your accountancy website doesn’t pop up in front of your target audience when they search for something like “accountant near me” or “VAT between UK and Ireland,” this alone is not enough.

SEO for accountants

To serve its real purpose – acquiring new clients and keeping the existing ones, your website needs to rank high on Google, so that it is placed in front of your target audience when they conduct relevant queries.

Stats show that on the first page of Google search results alone, the first five organic results account for 67,60% of all the traffic, so make it your goal to reach one of those positions.

SEO is a process that makes it possible for your website to achieve such ratings, resulting in both the improved quantity and the quality of your website traffic, helping your accounting business grow through free, organic traffic.

SEO for accountants is split into two areas, onsite and offsite, both of them working together to get you higher rankings in search results. Here is what you should pay special attention to.

Keyword Research

To optimize your website for search engines, one of the first steps you need to take is to determine the keywords you want to rank for, and then check out their search volume and competition to discover which ones give you the best chances to succeed.

When thinking about keywords, you should think about your ideal clients, what terms they would use when searching for the services you offer, or information within your field of expertise.

3 pillars of seo success

Building a comprehensive buyer persona will help you identify your potential clients’ profile, needs, interests, and pain points, making it easier for you to put together the initial keyword list.

Tools such as KW Finder, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, or SEM Rush will help you find relevant accountancy keywords and pick those with optimal keyword difficulty and a decent search volume.

Remember to monitor your keywords every month and review your keyword list every three months.

On-Site SEO

You will use the selected keywords to optimize your posts or webpages and rank well in searches.

There are several areas of your webpage that should include these keywords if you want to get the most out of the on-site SEO:

  • H1 (header of your webpage)
  • URL address
  • Meta description – an element in the HTML code of your webpage displayed in the search results
  • ALT text – use keywords to describe the images on your website; that’s the only way search engines can understand them.

Besides being stellar and tailored to your ideal clients’ needs and interests, the content also needs to be spiced up with relevant keywords. Having a blog on your website, where you will consistently post about useful topics is perfect for SEO purposes.

However, make sure not to overstuff your pages with keywords, as you might be penalized by the search engines – keep them below 1-2% of the page.

On page SEO

Technical SEO

When indexing and ranking your accountancy website, Google Rank Brain uses specific metrics to determine whether your visitors enjoy your website and rank it accordingly.

By performing technical SEO, you can ensure that your website runs smoothly and provides your visitors with excellent user experience, as well as improve the metrics, such as bounce rate, dwell time, or pages per session.

To get closer to your goal, your website should meet certain requirements:

  • Loading speed. Your website visitors don’t want to wait longer than 3 seconds for the website to load, so make sure it loads faster
  • Mobile-friendliness. Half of the global internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so your website should function properly on different screen sizes
  • Avoid duplicate content on your website, as Google will penalize you for such a mistake
  • Secure your website with an SSL certificate
  • Sitemap. Provide an XML file to search engines and inform them about your website’s content and structure
  • Schema markup. Add this code to your website so that the search engines can understand its structure better

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO refers to having your website listed on other websites and mainly consists of link building. There are many ways you can achieve this goal, but it mostly comes down to publishing your posts on high-authority or niche websites, directories, sharing it on social media, etc.

Off page SEO

The math is simple – if other relevant websites are talking about your accountancy business, Google will reward you with better rankings. However, the practice can be difficult and time-consuming, and it’s often worth outsourcing.

By investing in SEO and following the strategies above, your website will have better rankings, bringing you higher traffic and more clients to your accountancy firm.

Authored by Michael Deane: Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.