Accounting firms are one of the most in-demand businesses today, which is not all that surprising, considering how accountants are one of the major players in any business. But where there’s high demand, there’s also a high level of competition. So how do you stay on top of the game today?
The answer is to increase your visibility.
You’ve worked hard in starting your accounting operations, so the last thing you want is for your services to go unnoticed because you haven’t optimized your online presence. Online presence is the result of all your activities online, which have been established by your interactions with your audience through social media, your website, forums, and any pages that appear on search engines. Optimize and utilize this well and you can sustainably gain and retain leads.
Here are five effective ways you can increase your online visibility in order to grow your accounting practice:
1.Google My Business
If you want your business to be found in local searches then this is a must-have tool for you. GMB allows you to find out what types of searches your potential clients use. There’s the direct search where the customer specifically searched for your business name or your address, then there’s the discovery search where the user searched for a particular service, product or category that made your business listing appear.
2. Boost social media activity
Social media has grown to greater proportions since the early 2000s. With an estimate of 3.2 biIlion active users daily, it’s grown from being just a social platform used to connect with family and friends, to a source of information and a platform for eCommerce as well. Its growth is due to its unique interactive feature. It allows users to share, comment and communicates.
This will help your accounting practice if your potential clients are active social media users, which they most likely are. There are countless social platforms. The most popular ones being Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter. You have to keep in mind that its good practice to promote your business in the channel that your target audience mostly frequent, since each platform has a unique audience.
3. Build a mobile-friendly website
If you want to attract online traffic to your accounting business, you need more than just a beautiful website. What’s more important than a well-designed and easy-to-navigate website? Yup, you got that right — a mobile-friendly website.
By 2020, it’s projected that smartphone users can reach up to 2.87 billion. Add that to the 2019 data which states that about 80% of users used a mobile device to search the internet. You can use this to your advantage by developing your website so that it would be more mobile-friendly making it easier for users to navigate.
4.Tap Search Engine Optimization
Your gorgeous and expensive accounting website will be all for nothing if your clients or potential clients can’t find it once they go online. With Google being the biggest search engine in the world with 81.5% market share, it’s important to know how to rank on it. Ranking means having your accounting website appear on the first page of Google whenever a potential client keys in a search query about anything related to your accounting services.
Google’s search algorithm aims to give users the best possible result, so not only do they constantly update their algorithms to weed out any discrepancies, they develop a guiding system or the Google search quality guidelines to help webmasters and web owners know how Google judges the search results,
Here are ways you can boost traffic and website conversion rate through SEO:
- Grow Organic Traffic – Organic traffic is when users find your website without paying for ads. These are visits to your website from search engines or another website. This is the opposite of paid traffic. Your accounting site will benefit from organic traffic the most, and you can optimize this by producing quality content, promoting your website on social media or through press releases.
- Keyword Research – This is crucial when doing SEO. Keyword research is the process of analyzing the words or actual terms that your potential customers use when they enter their queries into search engines. Learning what your potential clients are looking for can help you strategize what content to produce, or how to strategically optimize your on-page content. There are hundreds of tools you can use in order to find good quality keywords. The ones you should try are Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner.
- Improve your Call-to-action – Compelling calls to action are the cues that will guide the users down the road to signing with your business. These aren’t just buttons, but the final push that tells you they are interested. Use visual and active phrases like ‘Learn More’, ‘Get Invited’ and ‘Free Download Now’. Make it positive and make it so that the user can feel like they will get something if they click on your CTA. Your CTAs should be well-designed, professional and consistent. Put them on each page and make sure that they are visible.
There are more ways you can utilize SEO and improve your website’s conversion rate. If you’re new to the strategy or simply don’t have time to use this method, but don’t want to miss the opportunity, there are dedicated companies specializing in SEO for accountants that can help you elevate your SEO strategy, and make your website more effective.