SEO for Accountants: Best Practices

Accounting is important for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It helps managers keep track of business income and expenses. Because accounting tasks are time-consuming and tedious in nature, many businesses outsource their accounting to accounting firms. 

Many potential clients will check your business's online presence when deciding whether to outsource their accounting to your firm. A strong online presence inspires confidence, builds trust and credibility and improves your business's online visibility so your target audience can find you online. 

Every business that wants to build a strong online presence needs an effective SEO strategy. Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing a webpage or website to make it discoverable. When done correctly, there are several benefits of SEO. It boosts your credibility, can help you reach more people and is cost-effective. 

Here are some tips to improve your SEO so your target audience can find your website easily. 

Rethink Your Website Design 

No matter how visually appealing your website is, if visitors have to work hard to find the information they’re looking for, they may get frustrated and defect to the competition. To prevent this from happening, keep your website design as simple as possible. 

A well-designed website is easy to navigate both for humans as well as search engines. 

Get rid of unnecessary design elements that can distract your visitors. Remove annoying and frustrating pop-ups. Keep your homepage minimalist and free from clutter. 

Speed up Your Website 

We live in an instant world where people want instant everything. The modern consumer is restless. They hate waiting for a website to load. A study found that around 53 percent of visitors to a website abandon it if it takes more than three seconds to load. 

A mere one second delay in page load time can mean a seven percent reduction in conversions. A slow website leads to a high bounce rate, which can hurt your rankings. 

Here are some surefire ways to speed up your website 

➢ Compress and optimize images and other large files on your website 

➢ Reduce redirects

➢ Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript 

➢ Enable browser caching 

➢ Use asynchronous and defer loading for your JavaScript and CSS files 

➢ Get rid of unnecessary plugins 

➢ Use a content delivery network 

Perform Keyword Research 

The right keywords help you target the right audience and can improve the chances of your content rank better. Here are some keyword research tips to take your SEO to the next level 

➢ Leverage negative keywords to reach clients who are a good fit for your business

➢ If you are a local business, build a list of local keywords and leverage it to effectively target local clients 

➢ Consider the keywords your competitor’s target 

➢ To get keyword ideas, look through the ‘People Also Ask’ section on Google 

Build Links to Your site 

Link building is the process of obtaining links from other websites to your own website. There are several benefits of link building. Links help build credibility, establish authority, boost traffic and improve search rankings. 

Create impactful content that encourages trustworthy sites to link to you. Reach out to businesses in your niche and introduce them to your content. 

Guest blogging is a tried and trusted link building tactic. How does it work? You write a post/an article for a website and insert a link in the about the author section that directs readers to your site. 

If you find broken links on websites, reach out to webmasters, requesting them to replace broken links with new resources that you have created. Build new links by submitting content to video sharing sites and infographic directories. 

Before submitting your content to an infographic directory make sure it is in an appropriate format. Do not have infographics? Instead of creating new infographics, turn your long-form existing content into infographics. 

Write Impactful Content 

Content is and will always be king. It is undeniably the backbone of SEO. Effective content helps you connect with your readers on an emotional level and score brownie points with Google. Create engaging content that answers your target audience’s questions or solves their pain points. 

Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique. Do not stuff your pages with keywords. Instead, try to incorporate them into your content as naturally as possible. Write head turning headlines and use a hook to grab attention. 

Maintain a consistent brand voice throughout your content. Publish compelling content regularly. After writing content, proofread it for grammatical and spelling mistakes that can make you look unprofessional. Avoid plagiarism as it can damage brand reputation.

 Creating impactful content is a time-consuming process. If creating and optimizing content feels like an uphill struggle, outsource content creation to an Atlanta SEO company with an in-house content team. 

Aim for the Featured Snippets in SERPs 

Google and other search engines use featured snippets to display answers to questions on search engine result pages or SERPs, so users do not have to visit other sites to get answers to their queries.

When you earn a featured snippet, you rank for position zero, which is the best ranking spot possible without paid advertising. Featured snippets are more engaging than typical search results. They take up a lot of space and can help grab users' attention. 

To get featured snippets, create content that answers questio006E your target audience may have. Use long-tail keywords that can be posed as questions. 

Use images that support your content. For example, if you own a restaurant and want to earn a featured snippet for a question about the best pasta recipe, provide an image of the recipe card or at the least, an image of pasta. Arrange your content in lists and tables. 

WSI Biggs Digital is an established local SEO company. We help businesses build online authority. To talk to one of our digital marketing experts, call (404) 682-2991.