6 Pillars of SEO For Accountants 2024
As an accountant in the 21st century, your website plays a crucial role in your business. While you can build a top of the range site that makes it really easy for potential clients to understand what you do and get in touch, unless your website is being found on Google, it’s likely that your business isn’t reaching its full potential. SEO will ensure your business is found by those looking for your services, enabling your accounting firm to grow.
Local SEO
In the UK alone 20,000 users search for the term ‘accountant’ on Google each and every month. While many accountants will work with clients all across the UK and beyond, working on local SEO could greatly boost your business and ensure you’re not missing out on working with clients who specifically want to hire a local accountant.
Further search data shows that each month there are 3,500 searches for ‘accountant near me’ and 1K – 10K searches for ‘accountant London’. This just goes to show that people do take location into consideration when looking for an accountant.
| Keyword | Monthly Volume |
| accountant birmingham | 1K – 10K |
| accountant leeds | 1K – 10K |
| accountant liverpool | 1K – 10K |
| accountant london | 1K – 10K |
| accountant manchester | 1K – 10K |
| accountant newcastle | 1K – 10K |
| accountant nottingham | 1K – 10K |
| accountant sheffield | 1K – 10K |
With every search that takes place, Google takes location into account. This is for both location specific and non specific searches. When location plays a part in a search, Google will use the location to prioritise the results. As an accountant, optimising your website for local SEO can be a great way to tap into local business and increase traffic to your site. To do this, you need to make it clear to Google where you are based by optimising your site for local keywords.
Something else to be aware of is the ‘map pack’. This refers to three listings that show up at the top of the search results and shows basic business information such as your location, contact details and a link to your website. As a business that could benefit from local search, showing up in the map pack will drive more clicks through to your website.
To optimise your website for local SEO you need to create content that focuses on your location. For example, a landing page titled ‘Accountant London’ would be a no-brainer if you are based in London. If you are a large firm with multiple locations, create a landing page to cover each of these. Ensure the content is properly optimised with keywords, and include your address, phone number and business name too. In addition, ensure you have a listing with Google my Business, to show up in the map results and also on the map pack.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is usually the first step that is taken when it comes to creating any SEO strategy. Keyword research will provide data on search terms, including search traffic as well as competition and will help shape your keyword strategy.
When carrying out keyword research for SEO for accountants, it’s important to look at both your short term and long term goals. In the short term, you might target lower competition keywords, such as location focused search terms, as these are typically easier to rank for and will begin to drive traffic quickly. For the long term, broader search terms can be targeted, such as ‘accountant’, as these high competition keywords will take longer to rank for, but will drive more traffic.
On-Page SEO
Your on-page SEO is the first place to start when it comes to optimising your site and is typically the easiest way to make changes to improve your rankings. This includes…
Keyword Optimisation
It’s important to populate your website with your targeted keywords as this essentially tells Google what your website is about. Your home page should include broader and more general keywords, while your landing pages or location pages should should focus more on your specific search terms, such as location focused keywords.
Internal Linking
Add internal links within the content on your website, linking from other pages to more important pages. This gives the more important page that you are focusing on ranking page authority and helps communicate to Google which pages on your site to focus on.
Meta Titles & Meta Descriptions
Meta titles appear both on the tab for your website when you hover over it and on the Google search results. You should include your keywords in your meta titles. A meta description is the copy that appears under the meta title on search results. This is a good opportunity to provide a summary of the content to the user, to encourage them to click through, but it should also include keywords too.
Header Tags
Include your keywords in your header tags too. Header tags are used within the main content on your website, and are used to break up content into more manageable chunks as well as for keyword optimisation.
URL Structure
Don’t overlook updating your website URLs on each page (apart from your home page) to include your keywords.
Image Optimisation
Another great way to include more keywords across your website is by using meta tags, and tagging images with your targeted search terms.
Content Creation
Once your website is set up and populated with great, keyword rich content, it’s time to consider your content strategy moving forward. Unfortunately Google doesn’t favour websites that are static. Instead it will prioritise sites that are regularly being updated with high quality content.
Google loves great content being published on your site, but this is also an opportunity to add more keywords. As well as provide more content to potential clients, answering questions and giving them access to all of the information they need surrounding accountancy. Not only will this encourage more clicks through to your site, but it will also help you achieve ‘topical authority’.
Topical authority means that Google sees your site as a leader in your industry, and this will boost your rankings. You can achieve this by covering topics within your industry in depth, publishing lots of helpful content that people actually stay on your website for and read and share.
As an example, the query ‘sole trader vs limited company’ is searched 3,700 times a month in the UK, and you could cover this query by publishing a blog post on your site. ‘Dividend allowance 2023/24’ is searched 2,000 times a month, ‘tax free threshold’ 1,100 times, ‘vat return deadline’ 1,100 times, ‘how to do VAT return’ 300 times and ‘how to file accounts with companies house’ 200 times per month. Focus on your target market of those that are self employed or business owners, covering topics such as VAT, tax returns and anything else that your potential client might be looking for.
| Keyword | Monthly Volume |
| capital gains tax uk | 14000 |
| sole trader vs limited company | 5300 |
| vat threshold 2023 | 5100 |
| tax on second job | 2400 |
| when is corporation tax due | 1500 |
| tax self assessment deadline | 1400 |
| advantages of a sole trader | 1000 |
| self employed accounting software | 900 |
| when do you have to register for vat | 400 |
| file corporation tax return | 300 |
Link Building
You can also increase your off-site efforts to boost your SEO, by link building to your website. Links can be added to content that directs back to your site, and link building is most commonly done through blog posts. If you create valuable content like the topics above, the chances are other sites will link to your content as a reference. When it comes to gaining links, focus on quality over quantity. One link from an authoritative website is far more valuable than 10 from low value sites. Links are effectively a positive endorsement from one site to another, and if Google sees high quality sites that are relevant to your industry linking to your website, they will assume that your site must be important and worth ranking high up.
User Experience
How the user navigates your site plays a part in how well it ranks too. When someone lands on your site and stays there a long time, looking around at several pages, and maybe ending on your contact page and filling in your form, Google sees that as a positive experience. The search result that they provided for the search term that was entered was good, as the user didn’t click straight back off the site or jump from page to page quickly before exiting.
The design and structure of your site is important here. If when first landing on your page it doesn’t immediately meet expectations, it’s likely this user will leave. Other elements such as the page load speed, whether the site is mobile friendly and the accessibility all play a role. If your site is slow, or it’s not optimised for mobile, it can cause someone to give up on your website quickly.
All of this creates a high bounce rate, meaning someone clicks back off your site quickly after landing. A high bounce rate tells Google that your site is low quality and not worth ranking highly. User behaviour is a key indicator in SEO for accountants, so it’s well worth creating a user-friendly site with no dead ends. Consider an audit of your site and look at how the experience can be improved to boost SEO. Remember that more people use smartphones to browse online today than desktop, so your site must be mobile friendly and fully responsive.
While SEO can sound complicated, it’s essential if you want to grow your accountancy business. If you’d like help with your SEO strategy or you need someone to do the monthly legwork for you, get in touch…