Six Basic Strategies- Search Engine Optimization and Websites for Accountants
When designing websites for accountants it's important to take time to "SEO", or Search Engine Optimize, them so your site will rank advantageously organically in search engines like Bing and Google. This isn't everything there is to know, just some basics that you can utilize fast and easy. Since it will attract the majority of your visits commence your SEO campaign on your home or welcome page.
Identify the Keywords You'll Optimize To
If you spread yourself too thin your SEO will fail so don't try to take over the world with one web page. Instead of trying to think of every keyword that could possibly describe your business just focus on a few that you think will get the best results. Most searches will include a location, so your town name and state should be on your list. Your next most important keyword will be related to your business profession so you'll want to choose some keywords like accounting, accountant, and CPA. Next, think about the products and services you offer; tax prep, audits, etc; and use those as keywords. The word "keyword" is in and of itself a bit of a misnomer. A keyword can consist of two or more words so you might want to think of them as "Keyphrases". I would recommend choosing two, maybe three of the following keywords:
- Accounting
- CPA
- Accountant
- Accountants
- Tax Preparation
- Business Planning
- Financial Planning
- Audits
Of course, you'll want to include your city and state. If you try to optimize your site to a competitive keyword like accounting without localizing it I can guarantee your website will disappear into a sea of other results. Also, always use the abbreviation for your state as a keyword. Most people searching by state use abbreviations rather than writing out the full state name. For example, a good selection of index page keywords might be:
- Tampa
- FL
- Florida
- Accounting
- CPA
- Accountant
- Business Planning
Write Original, Relevant Content
Using the keywords you've chosen write some original content for your home page that includes each of your keywords 4 - 5 times and is 400-600 words in length. Search engines and visitors alike prefer short, bite-sized paragraphs so avoid getting too verbose. A really good SEO strategy is to write a paragraph dedicated to the subject of each of your keywords. Search engines pay particular attention to the very beginning and very end of your article. This means keyword appearing in the first or last few sentences will score slightly better than the others.
Keywords and Headlines
Headlines don't just help catch and direct the readers eye to subjects that interest him, search engines love them too. Search engines consider anything they see in a paragraph "header" as more "relevant" to the page, so use your keywords in them wherever possible. Apply header tags to the headlines. If you have more than one H1 tag on your page the site will look spammy to the search engines and you'll lose the benefit. You'll find header settings in your websites page editor.
Title Tags
Use your keyword(s) in your page title and format it like this. Each page can have a unique title tag, but as usual your welcome page is the most important. Page titles can be long, but the search engines will ignore everything after the first seven or eight words. List your firm name last as this is not a competitive keyword. A good page title would be...
Syracuse, NY Accounting: New York Accountant & Tax Preparation- Hypothetical Business Services, LLC
Build Links to Internal Pages
It's important to show the search engines that you have other pages related to your keywords. The best way to do that is to add simple, keyword rich text links to relevant pages on your site. The keyword "tax preparation" should link to a full page that has content explaining your tax preparation service in detail.
Using Pictures
Have a nice photo of a popular landmark that is located near your business? Add it to your home page to help visually localize your website to your physical location, then add your location keywords to the image alt tags. "Alt" or "alternative text" are tags that can be added to images in order to explain the image contents to, among other things, search engine crawlers analyzing the page. While some older, obsolete editors don't support them, you can usually set an image's alt tag by examining the image properties in your website's page editor.
Search Engine Optimization is a ton of work and I'm certainly not suggesting that every small CPA firm in the country should run out and hire a full service SEO. What I'm suggesting is that there are some simple steps that you can take yourself at little or no cost that can really help websites for accountants rank better in the search engines. You just need to know a few basic tricks and how to implement them to your website. You might have noted that this post doesn't discuss "backlinking" strategy at all, and without doubt, these links are the key factor for getting good rankings. This isn't meant to be an extensive treatment of SEO, but a sharp primer on the easy stuff you can do to get the search engines to pay attention to your website.