Advertise Your Business with Local Search and an Accounting Website
Advertise Your Business with Local Search and an Accounting Website
You won't be able to subdue the search engines in a day. There are 3 types of search listings you'll need to make use of; organic, local, and paid; and ultimately you'll want to exploit them all. Each has advantages, and disadvantages, and none are actually "better" than the others. The simplest type of SEO, for a web neophyte to do himself to work on their "Local Search Engine Rankings". Start here. Most accounting practices have a strong focus on acquiring local clients, and local search is a terrific source of leads for them. Don't rely on it completely, however. In the long run you're going to want to take advantage of all three types of listing and get your accounting website listed in the organic listings as well as paid search programs like Adwords.
So, step by step, let's get your firm listed in local search. Step one is to make sure your business is listed as a business on "Google Places". This is the database that drives Google's local results. Registering your business is easy, but it's unlikely you'll need to bother. It's very likely that the search engines have already found your accounting website and indexed your business location by listing you at the address on your contact page. What you will need to do is modify your listing. Businesses indexed by the search engines tend have very little information on them. Go through the listings and make sure they are completely filled out. You are able to upload your logo, pictures, etc. and you can add a short description of your firm, your business hours... just about everything you might want a prospect to know.
Just being listed isn't good enough. To drive your listing to the top of the list the first thing you want to do is get people to review you. Google uses these reviews, combined with a number of other factors like the physical location of your business, to determine your ranking on the page when it returns results to a search for accounting firms in your area. Google is driven by a philosophy of "popularity equals relevance". If you have a lot of reviews your practice looks more important, and this earns you a better position in the search listings.
That's the easy part. Now it's time to roll up your sleeves a do a little real work. There may be a lot of obsolete information about you floating around on the net. This can confuse the search engines and hurt your rankings if you don't take the time to fix it. You'll do this in two stages.
Do a search of your company. Don't just search for your business name. Use old names, phone numbers, and addresses that you don't use any more. Try to find every reference you can. Make sure the information on these listings is correct. Now, when you find mistakes it won't always be possible to correct them, but do your best. In many cases you'll be able to correct bad info yourself, and if you can't there may be phone number, email, or address you can contact the site owner at. Search engines like it when they find a lot of consistent information on the web, especially when the information is coming from a diversity of sources. This lends credibility to your accounting website.
Once your existing web presence is as consistent and current as possible, you're going to want to take the next step and increase it. The more mentions the search engines find about your company scattered about the web, the more important you appear to them. The easy way to do this is to apply to every directory you can find, but directory listings don't have that much "authority" in the eyes of the search engines. Search engines will be much more impressed if they see your company listed with "trusted" sites, so businesses registered with sites like AICPA, BBB, local chambers of commerce, etc will get a lot more credit than ones that are just listed in a bunch of free online directories.
Now, you'll notice I haven't really mentioned Bing. Don't worry about it. If you take these steps and get listed in Google you'll get found by Bing, too.
Most accounting firms are small locally owned companies with a strong focus on finding local clients. Local search is defiantly the best place to start for firms like this.
Don't stop with this. There's plenty more to do. You'll want to investigate paid advertising and organic SEO (or "search engine optimization"), but if you take these steps to improve your ranking in the local search results you will have gotten your accounting website off to a fine beginning.
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