Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial aspect of marketing for accountants. SEO helps increase your online visibility and attracts more potential clients. This article sets out some SEO tips for accountants.
Use relevant keywords
People use keywords to search for information on search engines like Google and Bing. Keywords can be specific words or short phrases. Using relevant keywords throughout your website’s content will clarify what it is about and help direct people to the applicable content they have searched for. For example, if you are an accountant specialising in probate, you could use keywords like “probate accountant”, “probate and estate administration services”, or “probate services in (insert your town)”. As a result, this will help to improve your website rankings across different search engines.
If you target people or businesses in your local area, try incorporating your location into your keywords. Likewise, if you want to target people from further afield, use geographical terms such as your county, ‘countrywide’, ‘national’, or ‘UK’.
Create high quality content
Good quality website content is vital when trying to improve your SEO. Your content should be informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. It should also be optimised with relevant keywords and phrases. For example, you could create a blog post about the latest tax regulations and use keywords like “tax laws” or “tax code” throughout the article.
Optimise page titles and descriptions
The title and description of each page on your website should be optimised with relevant keywords and provide a summary of what the page is about. Page titles and descriptions not only help search engines understand the content of your website but also help potential clients understand what they can expect to find on each page. So if you For example, if you have a page about your tax planning services, your page title could be “Tax Planning in (insert your town)” and your description could be “Expert tax planning services to help you reduce your tax bills”.
Use header tags
Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) help organise your website’s content and make it easier for people to read and search engines to find your website. Use header tags to break up large blocks of text and highlight important sections of your content. For example, you could use an H1 tag for your page title, H2 tags for your subheadings, and H3 tags for your bullet points or lists
Make your website mobile-friendly
These days, most people will use their mobiles or tablets to search for and view information online. As a consequence, search engines prioritise mobile-friendly websites in their search results. Your accountancy website must be optimised for mobile devices to make it easy to navigate on a small screen (your website designer or company should be able to do this for). This includes using responsive design, which automatically adjusts the layout of your website to fit the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on.
Use internal linking
Internal linking is where you link different pages on your website. For example, you could include links to your probate or tax planning services pages from your homepage, blog posts, and other relevant pages. This helps users navigate your website and allows search engines to understand your website’s content to direct people to the appropriate page or pages.
Use external links
Likewise, adding links to your article, which takes readers to third-party websites, can also positively affect your search rankings. These external links should be to a credible website source to add credibility to your blog and enable the reader to find out more about the topic.
Optimise images and videos
Images and videos are essential for creating engaging content on your website, but they can also slow down your website’s loading speed if not optimised. Compress your images and videos to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality. Also, use descriptive file names and alt tags so that the different search engines know what the videos are images are about.
Additional points to consider for blog writing
If you want to write regular blogs for your website, getting the SEO aspects right is only part of the process. Our separate blog, ‘Blog writing tips for accountants’, offers some great ideas on how to make your blogs more engaging.
Additional tips for SEO, but with a technical spin, can be found on the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s website here.
In conclusion, the above SEO tips for accountants can positively affect a firm’s ranking in search engines. By using relevant keywords, creating high-quality content, optimising page titles and descriptions, using header tags, making your website mobile-friendly, using internal and external linking, and optimising images and videos, your website is more likely to be ranked on the main search engines and therefore easier for people to find.
