The main objective in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn’t about planting heaps of keywords into your website so clients can find you, it’s about making your website easy for the search engines to read, understand and then index correctly. This means using keywords, meta tags, robot tags and titles together in such a way that your accounting firm website can then be served up to the most relevant users based on their search terms.
So before you start adding heaps of accounting keywords generically throughout your website, you’ll need to have a strategy. Find the niche of who are you trying to reach and what service are they going to want, and get as specific as possible. You might be tempted to add keywords such as Bookkeeping, Accounts, Taxes, Audit, but if you try searching for any of these terms – even if you add a location – you’ll find yourself being overwhelmed with results.
Once you have taken the time to research and narrow down your search terms, you’ll need to place these in your website and/or landing page in such a way where they read well. Many search engines will penalise you for such things as using unrelated words, using the same word too many times, or even just listing keywords out of context.
Behind the visible text of your accounting firm website are the meta tags that only the search engine can read. Getting these set correctly, and incorporating your carefully selected search terms, is equally important as getting the text right on your page.
Let’s start with the Canonical tag. If you have similar information on several different pages, or even if you have a desktop and mobile version of your website, Google sees this as duplication, so it will choose one page as the original or real version, and crawl the other pages less often. By adding a canonical tag, YOU are specifying which page is the original.
While we’re on the subject of the search engine indexing your website, there are pages you don’t need listed in the search engine, such as the thank you page after an enquiry or pages that update so often you don’t want them cached. This is where the Robot meta tag comes in handy, allowing you to specify instructions such as noindex or noarchive.
When your website appears in the search results, this is your opportunity for the final sales pitch to make you stand out above all the other results on the page. Simply having a listing with your accounting firm name and location isn’t going to make you stand out. By adding a custom title tag and meta description to each web page, and incorporating your carefully researched search terms, you can craft the perfect message to encourage your new client to click through to your website.
SEO for accountants is not an easy task to manage. It is a competitive space and you should work with a team that has experience navigating through this complex landscape. Get in touch today to discuss how we can help your website ranking better.
But SEO can be a beast, and getting it right on your own can be very time-consuming. So let us tame it for you. Speak to one of our SEO specialists at 4DP to ask about the services we can provide you.