Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your firm’s website rank for its main keywords on search engines. A staggering 90% of pages get zero traffic. If you’re not actively optimizing your site and content, you’re missing out on a chance to grow your firm. You have assets that have the potential to make you money, but they need a little extra help.

In today’s blog, we’ll talk about how you can use SEO to grow your accounting firm.

7 Tips to Attract New Accounting Firm Clients With SEO

1.  Start With Keyword Research

Creating content assets, whether it’s for your website or videos, doesn’t mean that people will actually see them. Why? We’ll for starters, people may not even be looking for the “thing” you’re talking about. 

You can increase your chances of success and reduce the risk of creating assets that don’t generate organic traffic by doing one simple thing: keyword research.

Through keyword research, you can discover:

• Topics people are searching for
• Answers you can provide to people’s questions
• Hidden opportunities for your services

It would be nice to rank for “accountant,” but you’ll find that there are also a lot of people searching for “accountant for law firms” and other keywords that are easier to rank for and just end up being more profitable.

You can get started with keyword research by using a few tools:

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Google Keyword Planner (free)
• Google Trends (free)

Ideally, you’ll find low-competition keywords that get good traffic and try optimizing for them.

We’ve written on guide on keyword research that we encourage you to read if you’re having difficulty finding keywords for your firm.

2. Niche Down Your SEO Efforts

It’s important to understand that targeting any keyword isn’t ideal. For example, if “accountant” is highly competitive and a lot of money is being funneled into this keyword by some of the largest accounting firms in the world, you may want to niche down your efforts.

It’s much easier to rank for:

• Accountant in Reno, Nevada
• Accountant for lawyers

If you can niche down your keywords to target your ideal client, you’re likely to rank faster and attract the clients you want to land.

Landing new accounting firm clients with SEO is possible when you niche down your keyword research to focus on highly converting keywords. 

3. Start Optimizing Your Website

You’ve done a lot of keyword research up to this point, and now it’s time to optimize your site using this information. A few of the key things you want to do are add keywords to:

• Topical blog posts
• Respective pages
• Meta titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headers 
• Image alt tags

It’s essential to use the keywords naturally in your content and in the placements listed above. We want to mention that your keywords should be on topical pages. For example, you wouldn’t want to optimize a page on kites for your accounting keywords because it simply doesn’t make sense.

Google is very good at understanding page context and may even penalize you for “keyword stuffing” if you try placing these keywords on pages where they don’t make sense

When adding it to the body of your text, you can add a keyword a handful of times. 

Even a one-spot increase in the search results will increase your chances of clicks by 2.8%, but the increase is higher when moving from position 3 to 2 or 2 to 1.

SEO takes time. Your optimization efforts won’t materialize immediately, but it’s worth it in the end. In fact, you can should read our article Why SEO Can’t Go Faster to understand the process better.

4. Create a Content Plan and Begin Publishing

The keyword research you’ve done should shed some light on content gaps on your site that you can improve. For example, you may find gaps in your content for:

• Local keywords
• Questions clients have
• Etc.

You can create content around the keywords related to these gaps. For example, you may create content for:

• Accounting Basics for Lawyers
• How Accountants Can Save Law Firms Money
• Etc.

When you create content, think about the reader. A law firm that wants to hire a tax accountant will likely be interested in: how you can save them money on taxes. If you create content that answers their questions, you can rank for related keywords and will attract leads in the process.

5. Start Promoting the Content You Make

You’re almost there. You’ve created content, but now it’s time to promote it so that others see it. Over time, SEO will drive organic traffic to these pieces, but you should use this in-between time to share this content:

1. On social media
2. Via newsletters
3. With clients directly

You can also send direct traffic to these pages with pay-per-click ads, but it’s not 100% necessary to do this.

6. Build Links to Your Pages

Building links is one of the sticking points we see for many accounting firms because it takes a lot of time and resources to build links properly. You never want to build spammy links or choose an SEO team based solely on the lowest price possible.

Instead, it’s better to find unique ways to build inks, such as:

• Chamber of Commerce pages from your city
• Clients that you work with
• Authoritative websites
• Guest posting

Links are a vote for your website and one that will help you rank above the competition in the long-term.

7. Review Your Technical SEO

Technical SEO is something that many people overlook, but it’s also crucial for your site. A lot goes into this form of SEO, such as:

• Site speed. Check your site speed (here) and make as many recommended changes as possible to boost your site’s speed. Google and other search engines focus heavily on speed, and your users will also appreciate a faster site.
• Navigation. How easy is it to navigate to pages on your site? User experience is a very important part of the SEO puzzle and deserves some added focus.
• Indexing. Go through your Google Search Console and review your site’s indexed pages. If you have any pages that aren’t being indexed, go through them to find out why. The pages may be old and need a refresh, or they may now be irrelevant to the services you offer.
• Duplicate content. Remove any duplicate content on your site that may be causing ranking issues.

Since technical SEO is vast, you may want to follow a complete guide like this one or hire someone with experience in this area.

Wrapping Up

Landing new accounting firm clients is possible, but it takes time, money, and the right approach. You can use the tips above to create a solid foundation for your firm to begin attracting organic search traffic. 

Over time and with consistency, you’ll find that your SEO efforts are paying off.

However, SEO is a time-consuming process that many firm owners can’t juggle along with the rest of their regular workload.

Are you tired of navigating the complex SEO landscape and would rather hire someone with first-hand experience ranking accountant websites?

Click here to schedule a call with me to discuss how we can grow your firm with SEO.