Local businesses, including accountants, need to have an online presence in today’s digital-first customer journey. That is defined as a location online where clients can find you, learn about your services, and request a consultation or appointment. Just having a website is not enough, though. You must also optimize it so that Google understands what your website is and what it has to offer and can direct prospective clients to you. Local SEO website strategies for accountants allow you to do this.
Small businesses like accountants should work to localize their online presence. That means focusing heavily on marketing to your most likely client: a person or company that lives near you and is looking for a local accountant to provide them with the services they need. This is not easy to do, though, since there is a lot of competition.
With an optimized website, people searching for your services can easily find your business online and connect with you. When your most likely customer is within your geographic area, you need to invest in local SEO website strategies for accountants.
Understanding Local SEO
What is Local SEO?
It is the use of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies with a local focus. The goal of SEO is to help the search engine recognize the value your website offers when someone searches for an accountant. Local SEO helps people within a specific geographic area find your site.
Various factors impact local search rankings – the search engine results page that shows up when someone searches for your service within a geographic area. Various factors impact this, including:
- The physical location of your business as noted within city search directories
- The terms you use on your website to describe the local area you serve
- Your Google Business Profile
- The address of the point of the Google search
- Check-ins at your location
- Reviews on Google for your local business
This is in addition to keyword usage, backlinks, and other standard SEO strategies. The impact of local SEO on attracting clients to your accounting firm cannot be understated. Utilizing local SEO will help to drive your most likely clients to your website.
Keyword Research
A core way to build your local SEO is through the use of well-defined, local SEO keywords. You will still use keywords that relate to the accounting services you offer (such as terms like “small business accountant” for example), but you will go one step further by offering a local element to this. For example, you may be focused on “small business accountant in New York City.”
Identifying local keywords is not just about utilizing a city name, though. You need to use one of the numerous keyword research tools to help you understand what people are actually typing into the search engines to find the services you offer. This will include:
- Local terms that relate to your area
- Neighborhoods
- Cities that you serve around the physical location of your firm
- Terms related to your geographic or metro area
- Names and other tidbits of information that help Google to see you are really a local business
Effective keyword research takes some time and skill to complete, but because this is one of the most valuable tools you have for building your business, it is critical that you do the work. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMRUSH can offer guidance and support in capturing these terms.
Once you have the terms, you need to place them on your website in a strategic manner. It’s not ideal to just throw city names throughout the content of your website. Your readers should still be your main propriety. That means quality content matters most here.
On-Page SEO Optimization
One of the local SEO website strategies for accountants is to incorporate on-page keywords or SEO strategies. There are various ways to do this, including the following:
- Optimize meta tags: Be sure your meta tags, including the title, description, and page headers, all incorporate local keywords)
- Naturally include them in your page: This includes using the metro and city tags and other local references in the content on your website (in a natural way, means where they don’t stand out to the reader)
- Mobile optimization: Many people looking for accountants online are using their phones. Your pages must be mobile-optimized with fast loading times to ensure that they can reach you and get the information they need.
Localized Content Creation
The content you create for your website should be location-specific. This means that it should relay to the reader what city you are in and what region you service. There are several ways to achieve this:
- Create dedicated location pages: Create website pages for each of the main cities you operate in or where your clients are located. One page that offers service-specific information for each of the main cities you provide service to can help improve local SEO rankings.
- Accessible contact information: Be sure your contact page includes not just how people can contact you but also a list of the cities you serve. Your page should make it clear what cities, counties, and metro areas you service.
- Google Map embedding: Work with your website development team to implement a Google Map on your website. This helps to create more of a local familiarity for readers.
Next, create content for your website that’s locally relevant. For example, if city, county, or state tax laws change, you can provide content on your blog to share that information with your readers. Blogs that do not have a local focus still incorporate information about the local city or community that helps people know you’re a local accountant.
Be sure you are putting customer testimonials to work for you, too. Ask your clients to leave a positive review for you on your Google Business Profile that outlines their location. Encourage clients to provide success stories about how you helped them transform their bookkeeping practices. This helps you build local credibility.
Finally, ensure your images are locally focused. Having photos of your accountants walking through a local park that’s easy to distinguish is a good starting point. You can incorporate video into your website, too.
Building Local Citations
Your website is solid at this point, but you cannot stop there. You need to develop local citations, which means ensuring that any related online directory or resource includes your local information.
This also means ensuring you have consistency in your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP). This should be exactly the same on all websites, blogs, social media sites, review sites, and online directories that list your accounting service.
Be sure to link your social media profiles to your websites, too. They should have an icon, at the very least, on your website. Link to your business listings online and review sites on your site as well.
Implement Structured Data Markup
Another component of this process is a bit more focused on technical SEO. Schema markup is a valuable SEO tool. For the local accountant, this means using tags to help mark up details like the company’s name, phone number, opening hours, and other data related to your practice. This helps search engines locate your site and create a stronger local focus for your accountant website.
Incorporating structured data into your website helps to enhance search result snippets, too. Snippets are often displayed on Google results pages in the form of questions. There are often three or more of these listed on a page when someone Googles a question. You want to be a recognized snippet.
Your structured data also should be very local and business-focused. You want to take full advantage of using words specific to your industry.
Monitor and Analyze Website Performance
Your next step is not to stop – keep going by monitoring and updating your local SEO strategies for accountants over time as you see changes occur. To do this, set up Google Analytics for website tracking. It will give you the information you need about how people are getting to your website, what they do when they reach it, and where they are coming from. This allows you to then target your marketing efforts based on performance.
Data-driven adjustments to your strategies will be more powerful and effective. You will need to work consistently to improve local SEO performance with ongoing monitoring.
Put Our Team to Work for You on Local SEO Strategies for Accountants
It is critical to localize your online presence as an accountant since most of your clients come directly from local areas. When you localize your SEO, you become more visible to those who are local to you and who need the services you offer. This creates numerous benefits:
- Better visibility in specific zip codes
- Better customer engagement in reaching out and connecting with your prospective clients
- Improved business growth with more leads
Surefire Local works closely with accountants and bookkeeping services to help them with local SEO strategies, including full website and SEO best practices for localized online marketing.
We’re all about helping small businesses like yours to establish their online presence by creating local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easier for new clients to find you.
Surefire Local offers an all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses like this with features such as:
- Website and local SEO optimization: Create geo-tagged content published to your site, blog, and social media
- Online review management: Send review requests to your clients, write responses to reviews, and analyze your brand sentiment over time
- Directories management: Claim, edit, and publish new contact, including photos and special offers to businesses across 80 online directory listing platforms
- Content marketing: Utilize our tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, social media, and business directories
- Social media management: Create posts, schedule them, track their performance, and respond to comments with ease.
- Local online advertising: This includes ads targeted directly at your local area businesses that need your accounting services
- Analytics and reporting: Consistent and transparent ongoing campaign performance and the revenue your marketing investment is generating, using AI-generated recommendations
We also provide educational resources, including blogs and webinars, to help accountants with their local SEO strategies and local online marketing.
Find out how we can help you today. Attend a Surefire Local demo now.