Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the largest buzzwords right now in the realm of digital content marketing and SEO for accountants is no exception. It may be a complex topic, but its importance cannot be overstated.
SEO is all about improving your website for better search engine results so that your clients, both existing and prospective, can find your content more easily. SEO services consistently deliver high-quality results in that regard, making it an attractive marketing method.
Do you find yourself asking the following questions:
- Have we received enough visitors to our website this year?
- Why hasn’t Google generated more organic traffic to our website
In practice, many companies miss out on key SEO techniques that can potentially generate consistent traffic, inquiries, and customers over time.
SEO services are designed to increase client base and revenue. At Full Stadium Marketing, we use our knowledge of the accounting industry and SurferSEO, to create efficient and effective SEO strategies to help your business gain traction.
Our team specializes in content marketing for accountants, accounting firms, and businesses in the industry and is certified in SEO and SEO copywriting.
Surfer Certified
What is Surfer and what does it have to do with SEO for accountants?
Surfer is a content strategy creation tool aimed at improving your content optimization and SEO. The tool allows us to create data-driven, AI-assisted, SEO-ready content quickly and efficiently. Surfer allows us to optimize your material to rank well on search engine results pages, compare your website to your competitors, research keywords, generate topics for you, and even do basic content audits of particular pages on your site.
Our team has taken and passed the Official Surfer Skills Test, which is a comprehensive exam covering data-driven content strategy techniques and fundamental SEO knowledge. As Certified Surfer Experts, we are uniquely positioned to help you create great, SEO-friendly, content.
Keyword Strategy
Good SEO strategy starts with a strong keyword strategy. A good keyword strategy starts with knowing what keywords are relevant to your topic and to your firm.
With our knowledge of SEO and Surfer’s AI-powered platform, we can help you select the perfect set of keywords to help jumpstart your content creation and ideation.
Keyword Research & Clusters
Identifying keywords is more than just selecting random words that fit with the topic you’re writing about.
For example, say you’re writing a blog post about how great accounting can change the trajectory of your business. If you select “accounting” as one of your keywords, you aren’t likely to rank well on search engines, like Google. Why? The term “accounting” has a monthly search value (MSV) of 246,000.
Instead of using words that will place you low in rankings, our team makes use of Surfer’s content planner tool to help guide you toward topics your firm would have a good chance of ranking highly for on a Google search.
Part of our process is using AI-generated keyword clusters based on a general idea to help find more focused terms for your firm to use. Say our team helps you whittle down your topic to something a little more niche, like small business accounting. Our team would take a look at our clusters and recommend the best keywords for you to use based on the number of search queries and topic difficulty.
For example, if you select “small business accounting” as one of your keywords, we could recommend writing about a number of topics, like accounting software for small businesses (which has an MSV of 8,100) or tips for small accounting businesses (which has an MSV of 6,100). This narrows down your approach and puts you in a position to rank higher on search engines.
Topic Planning & Selection
When it comes to planning and selecting your topic, however, you need to carefully consider three questions:
- Is my topic relevant?
- Does it address the needs of my clients, potential clients, and other visitors to my website?
- Does the topic fit within my marketing strategy?
Firms and firm owners are often looking for niche-specific material, and you are the expert, which is why SEO for accountants is so important. When potential clients are looking for an answer to their problem, they aren’t likely to go far beyond the second or third pages of search results. In fact, most won’t even go beyond the first page. So, how do you get onto that coveted first page?
Find Opportunities
The key is to find opportunities to produce content covering topics your firm excels in. If your firm is a digital marketing champion, start a vlog that helps accountants and accounting firms develop digital marketing strategies.
Maybe you’re an accountant who understands tax service websites better than anyone else, start a blog that reviews the various tax services and update it throughout the year.
Or maybe you’re an advisor who is passionate about helping new business owners develop long-term plans and best practices for long-term success, start producing website content that gives new business owners startup tips while still driving traffic to your website.
Whatever your specialty may be, new clients are often looking for accountants and accounting firms that offer particular services. You simply need to determine your niche and then begin marketing to and producing high-quality content for that niche.
High Volume + Low Difficulty
The goal when producing content is to choose topics and keywords that have higher MSV with low difficulty. Obviously, this is a delicate balancing act.
Writing about accountancy would certainly net you a high MSV (307,000) but ranking on any of the search engines with such a broad topic would be nearly impossible.
This is why selecting a niche is so important. Recall my example from earlier of selecting “small business accounting” as one of your terms and then writing about topics like accounting software for small businesses (MSV: 8,100) or tips for small accounting businesses (MSV:6,100). It narrows in your content to reach the audience who will benefit from it the most.
SEO Optimized Briefs/Outlines
If you’ve selected your topic but simply don’t have time to write, our team can help! Most accounting firms don’t have the time to devote to outbound marketing, but that’s our specialty.
We help accounting firms grow by identifying your ideal client, crafting marketing messages for that ideal client, and finding targeted traffic for your message.
Our process begins by producing briefs/outlines which are optimized for SEO. These briefs include working titles, headings that are consistent with the keywords, and short samples of potential copy. This ensures we are touching on all of the major ideas and including the necessary keywords within the article.
Team Effort
We have a dedicated team of copywriters that can help produce the desired content for you, all while maintaining brand consistency and voice.
New clients are assigned to one of our marketing project managers who meet with the clients to determine the needs of their company, strategies for meeting those needs, and basic topic ideas. The project manager then relays the wants, needs, and desired topics of the company to the writers. The project manager and the designated writer then work together to produce a suitable outline for the topic based on research and search results.
These outlines help produce consistency as the topic moves from the project manager to the writers and editors. Once we have a working draft ready, we send it to you for feedback to help ensure we are maintaining consistency with your brand.
After you’ve reviewed the draft, the project manager then takes any feedback you’ve provided back to the writers and editors for final changes. But our team structure and effort aren’t the only tools we have for ensuring your content is as high-quality as possible.
Content Score + Optimization
We run all of our content through the Surfer to make sure it’s as SEO optimized as possible. We look for the best possible:
- Phrases
- Word choices
- Headings
- Subheadings.
However, it’s not just our material we run through Surfer, we can also run your material through it. The tool analyzes the material it is given and helps us identify good internal links for your page and add or remove key terms to help improve focus and clarity. Surfer gives each piece it has analyzed a content score—the higher the score, the more likely it is to be noticed by Google and other search engines.
Using Surfer to Optimize for SEO
When we think about SEO, we often focus on the copy, without giving much thought to what else is happening on the page, namely internal and external linking.
The most common type of link that we see on most websites is external links, which is a link from your site or page to another domain. These links are for you to connect what you’re saying about a particular topic with another company’s commentary on the same or a related issue.
You have to be careful with this because by linking your domain with another company’s, you’re essentially telling Google you approve of the company you’re linking to unless you provide a <nofollow> in your page’s code.
The other type of link is the internal link. This is for connecting what you’re saying on one page to something you have said on another. Perhaps you mention a complex issue an accounting firm needs guidance on in a particular blog post, but don’t delve into it in detail, however, you have covered it in a previous post, that’s the perfect spot for an internal link.
Linking isn’t the only thing that goes into content optimization; you also have to consider word choice, headings and subheadings, and what it is your competitors have written and are writing about now.
The Impact of Word Choice on SEO for Accountants
Everyone understands how important word choice is when working on SEO. This is even more important when it comes to SEO for accounting firms.
Choosing key terms to work off of can be tricky due to overlap with other industries. However, once you’ve identified your keywords, you can begin writing in earnest.
It’s important to include your keywords in your content, but avoid keyword stuffing, which involves the overly repetitive use of certain terms. Not only does keyword stuffing turn your target audience off, it actually backfires on your SEO efforts. Google now uses a natural language processing program called BERT that can detect, you guessed it, the natural use of language and can differentiate when people are just jamming in keywords.
That being said, you don’t have to use your keywords sparsely. In fact, you should ensure your keywords are embedded in your headings and subheadings in order to ensure they, too, are SEO optimized.
Competitor Comparison
One of the other services that we provide at Full Stadium involves competitor comparison—how well your content stacks up to theirs. This works especially well if you have a specific article you are trying to compete with. Whether it’s an article discussing your services, a web page describing your accounting firm, or a blog post covering best practices, we can compare your drafted article and their existing one.
Regardless of the type of business you are trying to compete with, Surfer analyzes the provided URLs, assigns it a content score, and tells us the URL’s:
- Rank on Google
- Domain authority
- Number of words used
- URL traffic per month
- Domain traffic per month
- And a litany of other things
We can analyze your competitors at the local level, too, provided they have a web page that shows up in a Google search.
Local SEO for accountants is just as important as, if not more important than, global SEO. Local SEO for accountants is vital because it’s your reputation within your given community. When you rank well in the search results when clients search for “accountants near me”, “accountant in my area,” or “local accounting firms,” your potential for picking up new business for your practice increases.
Content Audits to Improve SEO for Accountants
Another SEO service we provide is content auditing specifically designed to improve SEO for accountants. If you’re embarrassed that the content you put out in the past is still showing up in search results, we can help.
Surfer’s content audit tool shows us:
- Internal link suggestions
- Partial and exact terms
- Headings and subheadings
- Common words and phrases
- A list of questions that may be helpful for honing in the focus of the page.
It also tells us about site speed and the speed of specific pages.
Improving, Updating, and Optimizing for SEO
All too often, business owners are hesitant to either start producing content or start promoting their existing content due to the state of their websites. This doesn’t need to be the case. People are looking to hear about your expertise in a given subject, not if you have a degree in web design. The content audits we do can be for a blog or for your entire site. Either way, part of our SEO strategy involves helping you improve, update, and optimize your site for SEO.
What your website needs is relevant content that seeks to address the needs of your target audience. More often than not, your site already has this content, it’s just not optimized. Improving SEO with your existing content isn’t difficult. Once we’ve run an audit on your content, we can begin editing and optimizing it for appearances in the search engine.
Whether you’re a tax professional, general accountant, or business advisor for accountants, we can help you produce great content that ranks well on any search engine. Contact us today to learn more about how Full Stadium Marketing can help you grow your firm!
