Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Techniques
There are tons of techniques that can be used to improve your organic placement within the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Each of the major search engines use hundreds of criterion to determine whether you are listed on the first page of the results pages, or page 200. If you would like to improve the placement of your accounting firm website in the search engines, here are the most important considerations if you want to generate higher placement within the search engines.
- Well Constructed Content – A website that is written with a clear understanding of the business owners needs works wonders, just like a John Grisham or E.L. James novel. Lousy content puts the reader to sleep. Persuasive content helps search engines understand what your website is about and motivates prospects to call your accounting firm. Your content needs to be written for both search engines AND prospects.
- Incoming Website Links – Quality links from other accounting websites provides the validation that search engines demand. Volume of links and quality of the links matter. If you provide quality content, other relevant accounting websites will consider linking to your website. These links can come from Intuit’s directory of QuickBook Pro Advisors, Bookkeepinghelp.com, your local accounting association, and accounting firms around the country.
- Page Title Tags – The title tags for each page within your website helps search engines determine what each website page is about. They also help prospective visitors determine if your website is worth visiting. The keywords near the beginning are most important (e.g., Dallas Accounting Firm – Helping Small Businesses Lower Taxes!).
- Heading Tags – When your website is being developed, the flow from one page to another is like the flow within a house that you are considering purchasing. Lousy flows create problems. Heading tags (H1, H2, H3) help the search engines understand what the relative order of importance is on your website and the flow.
- Internal Linking – Within a website, there should be multiple ways for website visitors to get from the page they land on to the page they want to read. Often, this is accomplished with top navigation, left navigation and hyper links within the body copy. Making navigation easy is critical for users to find what they want quickly and it helps search engines index your content.
- Keyword Density – Ensuring that your website uses keywords which describe what you do on each page in conjunction with your local marketing area is critical. The keyword density should be approximately 5% to 10%.
- Domain Name – Inserting keywords into your domain name can help your organic search engine ranking (e.g, nyc-cpa.com, medical-cpafirm.com).
- Blog – A blog that is incorporated into your website can help boost your website placement. The articles should be developed around what prospects are searching online for (e.g., international tax cpa firm, accounting firm for dentists, NYC city taxes). It helps to insert your keywords into your titles and tags. Unique content with a strong voice will elevate your placement.
- Website Development Programs – The search engines hate certain programming languages just like you hate certain foods. To keep these issues down, avoid using Flash, overuse of Ajax, minimize the use of Java, and avoid frames. Also, avoid using template driven website development systems which enable you to develop a website in less than thirty minutes because search engines hate them. For example, these website systems use long URL’s and characters that search engines can not choke down (e.g., &, ?, etc.). Avoid website development programs that promise a website quickly as search engines prefer old fashioned HTML websites which take longer to develop.
- Authority of domain – Older, more established domains get higher placement. It’s like fine wine, age is perceived as being better than youth. A website domain address that is ten years older is better than one year. Recently, search engines have been incorporating social media signals into this to help them sift through who is important and who is irrelevant. A strong presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube gives search engines more confidence to elevate your position. The same goes for having your website listed online in places like Yelp, YellowPages.com, Superpages, Manta, Kudzu and many other online directories (free listings). Yes, it’s like high school popularity all over again. Older kids and more popular kids get more action.
And if you are too busy to worry about all of this search engine marketing stuff, contact Build Your Firm at 888-999-9800 x1 and we’ll do this for you.
Avoid Search Engine Optimization Firms That Do The Following
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of using the best possible website development practices to improve your organic placement in the search engines. There are proper techniques, which are referred to as white hat SEO, and improper techniques which are designed to trick the search engines, referred to as black hat SEO.
If you’d like to improve your placement in the search engines, here are some things worth considering:
- No one can guarantee a #1 ranking . Run away from any website development firm that promises or guarantees a top placement with Google, Bing and Yahoo. They are flat out lying to get your business. No website development or search engine optimization firm has a “special” relationship with Google, Bing or Yahoo. They are trying to sell you a bridge which they do not own. Run.
- Be wary of SEO firms that send you an email out of the blue. Everybody gets solicited by these fly by night firms that run a canned report about how terrible your website is from a search engine optimization perspective. These firms work about as well as companies that sell fat burning diet pills that remove fat while you sleep. Real SEO firms don’t market this way.
- Avoid SEO firms that advocate the following techniques:
- Develop one website and replicate it repeatedly on multiple domains
- Uses invisible text on a page
- Uses doorway pages (aka – cloaking) to trick the search engines
- Links your website to other websites that have nothing to do with the accounting industry using a technique called link farming.
For accountants, we recommend that you select one of the major accounting website development firms rather than some snake oil website development firm. Each year, CPA Practice Advisor reviews all of the established website developers that service the accounting industry. It is not worth your time and energy to associate your accounting practice with some unproven website developer that promises more than they can deliver. In my experience, there are only two accounting firm website developers that are effective at search engine optimization, Build Your Firm and one other provider who will go nameless. Most of the major accounting website developers either ignore this aspect because it takes too much effort or don’t understand it.
Also, you should ask your website development vendor to provide examples of their accounting firm clients that are well optimized within the search engines so you can visually see how easy it is to locate them in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Any decent SEO website developer should be able to show you 5-10 examples of how their clients are consistently towards the top of search engines in markets around the country. While it is fair for them to show you markets other than your own, they should be able to show a wide variety of markets and types of accounting practices which have been optimized.
Does Your Accounting Website Have The Right Personality?
Does your website create favorable impressions of your accounting firm when people find it on the internet? Does it distinguish your practice from the other boring accounting firms in town? Or does it suck like most accounting firm websites?
As it stands, accountants have a terrible stereotype in the marketplace. Given this, the need to be unique is higher than normal given the prevailing stereotype that accountants are boring.
What is Personality?
Personality is the characteristic that makes us unique and identifiable. Some of us are endearing, some are honorable, some are witty, and others are rough around the edges. Just as personality makes each of us unique, your web site should have a personality that sets you apart from other accounting firms in town.
Marketers use personality as a vehicle to understand branding. In focus groups, marketers will often ask people if this product was a car, what kind of car would it be? And based on those answers, you have a pretty good sense of how the general public was viewing your brand and your TV commercials.
To illustrate the importance of personality, let’s take politics since it’s on television constantly. Whether you like him or hate him, Barack Obama has created his own identity and demonstrated consistently that he is willing to show some personality as the Comedian-in-Chief. Examples include the recent Correspondents dinner with Jimmy Kimmel, trip to University of North Carolina with Jimmy Fallon, tonite show with Jay Leno, and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. And each year in March, Barack goes out on a limb and even picks teams for the NCAA basketball tournament on ESPN regardless of picking sides and offending hoop fans. Now contrast that to Mitt Romney and despite his good looks, stellar business credentials, and a solid job overseeing the Winter Olympics, he has fallen flat on personality.
Personality matters. Personality drives website traffic and encourages them to come back, even if you made a mistake. Yes, we all frequent businesses that are not perfect and occasionally make mistakes (like your favorite dining spot).
Does Your Web Site Look the SAME as Everyone Else?
Given the stereotype that our industry faces, do you really want to have a boring web site that looks just like every other accounting firm out there? And why does your web site show today’s weather forecast? Do you really think people are searching on accounting firm websites for today’s weather forecast? And why is the website loaded with stock photos of calculators and headshots of people that look nothing like the owner?
In our industry, there are a few website development vendors that have 3,000 – 5,000+ clients in the US. So in a large city like Los Angeles or Chicago, the largest website vendor probably has 300-500 accounting firms using very similar websites with the same stock photography, same weather tool and very little personalization. In fact, the page that is dedicated to meeting the firm owner is boiler plate copy that puts you to sleep like elevator music. Come on, show me your picture and why I should hire you rather than sticking your head in the sand and giving me lame computer generated text about your firm values and commitment to quality.
How to Create Personality in Your Website
Building a personality on the internet starts on the home page of your accounting web site. Your home page should have some photos of your local market, maybe your office building, and some prominent locations that locals know is home. The second logical place is on your About Us page, where there should be pictures and well written bio’s on the key members of the firm. Last, a blog is another venue to show your personality.
Show your colors online and paint a picture for your clients and prospects on why they should hire you.
BUILD YOUR FIRM PARTNERS WITH QUICKBOOKS HOSTING PROVIDER, NOVELASPECT
Build Your Firm, a full-service accounting marketing and website development firm for accounting firms, announced today the newly formed partnership with NovelASPect.com, an Intuit Authorized Commercial Host for QuickBooks . The partnership supports joint promotion of complimentary products and is designed to provide accounting firms with a seamless environment for operating QuickBooks in the cloud.
“Our partnership with NovelASPect.com is another step in the right direction and accelerates our commitment to align with leading companies that help accountants operate more profitably by becoming more efficient,” stated Allan Ratafia, President of Build Your Firm, Inc. “With our accounting website development services, this partnership helps our accounting firm clients more efficiently serve the needs of small business owners, and operate remotely with fewer issues. The accounting firm website that Build Your Firm provides to accounting firms, in conjunction with the Citrix QuickBooks Hosting that NovelASPect provides will enable accounting firms to operate QuickBooks with fewer issues.
Both Build Your Firm and NovelASPect.com share the same core goals for the partnership, including:
- Make it far easier for accounting firms to work efficiently with small business owners using QuickBooks, operate in Mac and Windows environments, and work remotely with fewer issues.
- Enable accounting firms to operate more securely.
- Develop a co-marketing service which enables accounting firms to operate more efficiently.
- Both Build Your Firm and NovelASPect.com were founded by a practicing CPA.
As part of the partnership, Build Your Firm and NovelASPect.com will both contribute resources in order to get the price lower than the current marketplace for Citrix QuickBooks Hosting services. These prices are only available if you are a website customer of Build Your Firm.
Allan’s accounting practice, Ratafia & Co., CPAs, PC, uses NovelASPect’s QuickBooks Hosted Solution, which specifically supports and creates efficiencies for Allan’s style practice, and is in line with the methodology Build Your Firm advocates to its’ clients. According to Allan, “NovelASPect.com made the installation so easy for our office that we had it up in running after a couple of hours. It’s great that this works for both Mac and Windows clients using QuickBooks. And we experience fewer connectivity issues using Novel’s Citrix servers, rather than terminal servers which most host providers use.”
Build Your Firm’s partnership with NovelASPect.com officially launched on April 18, 2012.
New Season for Accountants!!
Time to turn the page and start a new season.
If you are an accountant, join our LinkedIn Discussion group called “Modern Marketing Methods for Accountants.” It’s free at http://linkd.in/vl80s1. Over 1,100 accountants are sharing their key insights from last season. Share with other accountants what worked and what did not.
We have many new initiatives for 2012. Hear about these new initiatives first at our LI Discussion group.
Does the Location of My Accounting Practice Matter?
Absolutely!
If you want to develop a high quality clientele gradually over time, the location of your office matters. Ideally, you will want an office location that is near businesses that you’ll ideally want to attract into your practice. In other words, if you locate your practice in the inner city like East LA, you will attract businesses and individuals in that immediate area. If you locate your office in a suburban location, make certain the location has a population large enough to support your growth goals and demographically, it matches your ideal client.
While your accounting practice does NOT need a retail location with walk-in traffic, the physical location does matter in today’s digital world. In other words, when someone is searching for a CPA or accounting firm near their business location, you will want your accounting firm to be located nearby because most business owners “feel” that they need an accountant nearby in the event of an emergency. Perception matters.
By this, I mean that you can be located on a second floor or third floor of an office building to avoid paying retail office space pricing but the physical location should be near the businesses that are in your target audience. Also, the location should be near the center of the city. If you want to be towards the top of the list on Google/Bing/Yahoo when someone is doing a search, you need to be physically near the location the searcher requests. With geographic targeting capabilities improving all the time, it is becoming far more challenging to dupe the search engines if your actual location is not in the city being requested. In other words, you can’t claim to be located near Times Square in New York City when you are actually located in Staten Island or New Jersey. Yes, I understand it is relatively close in miles (from your perspective) but the prospect wants a firm near Times Square, not someone in Yonkers. The days of saying you are located downtown when in fact you are 8-15 miles outside the city are over. And if you are successful duping the search engine, the prospect will eventually find out and dump you before you get to establish yourself as the trusted advisor.
With the explosion of smart phones and tablets, increased sophistication of search engines, combined with prospects becoming more adept at searching, the location of your accounting practice is become more and more important.
Location matters now more than it has in the past.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic a web site or web page receives from search engines organically (e.g., no pay per click, without using paid advertising) so that your website generates leads, and ultimately, new business for your accounting practice.
While search engine optimization sounds simple and easy to do, it takes considerable planning, knowledge, work and takes time to deliver results. As more and more businesses employ search engine optimization into their internet marketing strategy, the more competitive it becomes. And as the use of the internet has grown, the forms of optimization has expanded beyond search engines to include video optimization in YouTube, mobile optimization for smart phones, and local search optimization for Google Places/Yahoo Local/Bing Business Portal.
Search engine optimization is mostly technical in nature, combining source code programming with business marketing, web site architecture, visual presentation, persuasion copy writing, and some other disciplines woven into one to attract more prospects and visitors. Because of the labor intensive work involved, virtually all web site developers do not factor search engine optimization into the construction of your website because it’s hard for the client to visibly see and would drive up the cost to develop the website. The rules are constantly changing and the number of venues are increasing (websites, mobile websites, videos, local search, etc.), which adds to the complexity.
Search engines have become a huge business and are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more extensively and deliver better results to users. However, there are limits to the how the web site is constructed, which programming languages they work with, and whether the search engine will index the web site. Whereas the right changes can deliver thousands of new visitors to your web site, the wrong moves can hide or bury your web site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. That’s why your goal should be to have a “search engine friendly” website that makes it easy for the major search engines to index your website.
When done properly, search engine optimization is amazing. However, it takes significant work to do properly and takes several months to start producing results. Get started now!!
Is Your Accounting Practice Easy to Locate???
When a small business owner goes online to locate accounting firm, is your accounting practice easy to locate? Are you listing consistently in the online yellow pages?
Below is a free online tool to see your score. This is a quick way to see if your accounting practice is lost in space or well represented. Yes, they will give you a score of where you stand and what you need to do to improve.
Yes, this is not immediate. Please save your usernames and passwords.
Make a concerted effort to provide photos, logos (CPA, QB Pro Advisor, BBB, etc.), hours of operation, social media addresses, and text which explains your firm in plain-English. This stuff supports your website and generates more phone calls.
This is important!!
Google Places Optimization – Generate More Leads for Your Accounting Practice
Could your accounting practice use more customers? If so, think Google Places.
Google reports that 97% of consumers today search for local businesses online, so having a virtual presence in our digital age is essential. Google Places brings potential customers and local businesses together first online, then in the real world. It’s a savvy way for accounting and CPA firms to be found in today’s competitive marketplace.
Make It Easy to Get Found
Did I mention that Google Places is free? If reducing marketing expenses isn’t enough to pique your interest in the online platform, consider this: a page on Google Places (your Place Page) provides consumers who are new to your area with an easy way to get to know you, read reviews of your services and take action.
Sure, you have a website that works hard to give your accounting practice visibility, but if you want to make sure your accounting firm appears in Google search results, Google Places makes good sense. It’s a more direct way to advertise your practice than putting your dollars in newspaper ads, yellow pages or other local efforts.
What’s more, iPhone and Android users can find your business listing immediately while on-the-go. They don’t need to be in front of a computer to do a search or visit your accounting firm website.
Learn From Your Relationships
As part of your free Google Places listing, you can add content and visuals to your Place Page, highlight special offers or services, and use the platform’s reporting tools to gain valuable insight about potential and existing customers.
For example, the Google Places dashboard is especially useful for understanding how customers find your practice. Review how many people are seeing your Place Page at any given time, find out how they have come to your page and see where they have come from. The dashboard makes it easy to see how many times your listing appears as a result of a Google or a Google Maps search, and what keywords people are searching to get to you.
It’s also useful for tracking effectiveness. Check the dashboard’s top search query results to see how many people found your listing when looking for an accounting firm. Google Places makes it much easier to measure online advertising effectiveness and determine how new business inquiries correlate to Web traffic than, say, a Yellow Pages ad — and, it’s a whole lot cheaper. With Google Places, you can make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google and interact with your customers.
Put Your Best Foot Forward
If you can find 15 minutes to spare in your day, you can gain visibility on Google Places. To get the most out of your listing, follow these guidelines to get started.
- Represent your accounting practice exactly as it appears in the offline world. The business name field is just for that: providing the name of your practice. This is not the place to include your marketing tagline, phone number or website URL — unless they are truly part of your business name. You will allow for better searches if you stick to a concise name rather than trying to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords.
- Use a precise, accurate address to describe your practice’s physical location. One out of five searches on Google are related to location, so every Google Places business listing must have a mailing address. If you office out of your home, you can specify a “service area” during the sign-up process and choose to hide your physical address. If you specialize in multiple services, it’s best to create a single listing that highlights all of the specialties rather than creating multiple listings.
- Provide a phone number that connects to your individual practice location as directly as possible, and provide one website that best represents your practice location. This should be pretty straightforward (in any line of business).
- Be specific, but brief, in categorizing your practice. Say what your business is (Certified Public Accountant, Accountant, Enrolled Agent) instead of what you offer (tax accounting). This information can be added in your description.
- Complete the registration fully. Provide Google Places with all relevant information like hours of operation, photos, and appropriate logos. As part of their algorithm, they measure the percent of completeness so lightly completed Google Places pages are seldom visible.
- You must validate. Your Google Places account must be validated just like a newly issued credit card. No validation, no exposure.
This is extremely important for lead generation. Yes, it will take a little extra elbow grease and results are not immediate. For example, correcting your address in Google Places can take weeks.
Your website developer is not responsible to registering your business online and creating usernames and passwords. Just suck it up and do it.
If you want more detail, below are links to articles that go into more depth. All three articles are excellent.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/11/5-ways-local-search/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/13292/5-Steps-to-Google-Places-Optimization-Zen.aspx
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-your-google-places-page
Is Your Accounting Firm Website Faceless and Impersonal??
Is your website faceless and impersonal? Does it lack personality?
While I admit that many accounting firm websites are improving, most are still very cold and fail to create the right first impression. In some cases, they suck. Sorry but true.
Making a strong first impression is a part of building your accounting firm into a brand. Whether a person first learns about your firm from your website, LinkedIn page, Facebook Fan page, or from a client of yours, the first impression goes a long ways towards defining their perception of your firm, and you.
Let’s focus on your accounting firm website. The process is similar for most electronic mediums. Here are several factors that create an impression when someone is considering working with your accounting firm.
1. Photography – It’s amazing how much impact a high-quality photo or graphic can have on a website design. The right photo can immediately create interest in your firm services. Take the time to paint the proper picture for your prospect when they arrive at your doorstep. Here are examples of how photography can create an image.
www.ljtcpa.com www.fontanaconsulting.com www.medical-cpafirm.com
2. Logo/Branding – A well crafted logo can make it easier for people to remember your firm or create a favorable image of your firm. While a logo is not always necessary, it can pull together the message you want to create.
www.cpabellingham.com www.theilenassociates.com
3. Website Colors – The color of your website should coordinate with the photography and logo for your firm and create the right mood.
www.medical-cpa.com www.csaccounting.com
4. Website layout design – One of the most important design elements is the layout choice. Whatever layout you use should draw the reader to those items that are most important. While most template based accounting websites use a standard and rigid design, you’ll want to make sure your website design adds to the effectiveness of your message.
5. Advertising – Accepting advertising onto a professional service firm website is an easy way to create a bad first impression. Don’t do it.
6. Your Reputation and Qualifications – Many accounting firms have a lame page dedicated to the owners of the firm. Often, the copy on the page is boiler plate generic text provided by the accounting website provider and there are no pictures of the owner and worker bees. If you are working with a Fortune 500 company, we understand that it’s a faceless corporation but a local accounting firm should be warm and inviting.
www.kregel-cpa.com/about.htm www.cpa-charlotte.com
7. Quality of Content – The content on each page about your accounting firm services should be well organized and persuasive so the prospect can decide whether your accounting firm can address their issues and concerns.
8. Associations – Visitors to your website are looking for assurance that you can handle their needs competently. Many associations have logos and these logos should be strategically placed onto the corresponding pages. In other words, a CPA logo should probably be placed into the website header so it is on each page but logos like QuickBooks Pro Advisor should be on the page discussing QuickBooks accounting services. Other logos and acronyms to consider are NACVA, CVA, CFE, PFS, MTAX, EA, JD, MBA and Certified Tax Coach.
www.healthcare-cpa.com www.baltimoreqb.com
9. Video – Another technique to draw website visitors into your firm is the use of video. Some website visitors like video and others avoid it. A general rule is that you should make video optional and never ever play it automatically.
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