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What SEO agencies should offer London firms

04/01/202002/17/2020 by scmarketing

For many professional services firms in London, having a marketing strategy in place will be key to growth. But, what’s one of the core digital marketing tactics that’s vital to stand out in this crowded marketplace?

Three simple letters – SEO! That’s Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about implementing certain processes that make it better for a website to be found through search engines so that you rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

So, if you’re looking to grow your business then partnering with an SEO agency could be the answer. But what are some of the main points to consider when choosing your agency? Here’s some of key things that an SEO agency should be offering.

Optimise your content with keywords

Know who your website is targeted at: Before you start optimising, you need to understand your target audience. Your content should be tailored so that you are answering questions for that stereotypical client. The SEO agency should help you develop an online persona which incorporates goals and challenges of your target audience.

Create pillar pages: An important starting point for optimising your website is understanding what your pillar pages are. Know what your keywords are (usually phrases or longtail keywords, not just one word!), then ensure that you have relevant pages on your website. What we’ve found working with clients existing websites is that with small tweaks to the heading you already have the start of a pillar page. However, what’s key is that the URL is also the same as the heading so this may mean you have to change that which may lead to broken links. So, watch out for that.

Create a blog page: If you haven’t got a blog already then create one. Most people expect to see a blog on a website these days for interesting industry insight. For each blog post it is important to perform keyword research to ensure your accountant business is recognised in SEO. This is especially important for professional services such as an accounting firm as there’s always plenty of new updates to be shared with changes from HMRC for example. The reason it’s so good for optimisation is that by posting regularly each month you’re providing fresh content, which includes keywords, and this helps the search engine find you.

Don’t stuff it: But don’t cram your blog full of keywords. Search engines are very sophisticated and can decipher synonyms and longtail phrases. Ultimately the content needs to be quality, insightful and relevant to the reader.

Internal links: Adding relevant links within pages or blogs to other relevant pages on your website really helps navigation and engagement with visitors. Basically, you’re giving visitors tips on useful resources and similar topics.

Technical know how

A key part of optimising your accountant website is ensuring that you’ve completed as much as you can on the backend. This also has an impact on how search engines find you. Here’s some of our top pointers to implement that can really help kick start your technical SEO campaign:

Meta descriptions: This is the short paragraph that sits beneath the company name when you conduct a search online. By completing the meta description when you upload a post or page, you can create a short descriptive paragraph which includes keywords to help search engines and potential visitors. Meta descriptions are a website’s way of telling Google and other search engines exactly what each of your pages are about, what to display and how to display it in the results.

Alt tags: Complete the description of your image in the ‘Alt Tag’ box when you upload it to your website. You can be descriptive about what’s in the image but also relate back to a relevant keyword if you can.

Headings: Keywords should be incorporated into your pillar pages which talk about your services. But, can you add keywords to your blog title? If you can, then absolutely add keywords to your headings and subheadings. The h1 tag should contain information about the content of the page. Search engines check the keyword consistency between the header tag and the content on the rest of the page.

Is your website mobile friendly? Your website should already be built on CMS (Content Managed System), but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically mobile friendly. You may need to make some tweaks which an SEO agency should be able to action for you by installing plugins.

Site speed: This is another key area because people are likely to leave a website within 3-5 seconds if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Or, if the page doesn’t load fast enough. Again, an SEO agency can help you with this.

Link building

What you’re doing with your website design is building your domain authority by gaining trust and being a thought leader. As part of the ranking process, search engines consider the quality of links, awarding scores based on relevance. Less links will have an impact upon where you return in a search result for a given term.

Links can be from social media posts, or articles linking back to your website. Having information on a third-party directory with a link back to your website can also really boost your SEO campaign – think Yell, Bing, 192.com or Yelp.

But perhaps the finest example of a directory is Google My Business. So, if an agency has just created your website or you’re looking to improve your SEO on your current website, ask your SEO agency about creating this for you.

Populate Google My Business: This is a free tool to use and well worth the time and effort to complete. Google is one of the most popular search engines, so fill out as much about your company as you can. The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact number and email as well as a short paragraph about your company.

Google analytics: Setting up Google analytics will allow you to understand the demographics of visitors to your site and how long they stay. You can set this up yourself or work with an SEO digital marketing agency to help you.

Looking to grow your business?

Optimising your website will help create stand out and help you be found for your services. We are looking to improve SEO for accountants in London and provide SEO services for companies in Croydon. If you feel you need some support in getting your website Search Engine Optimised, then get in touch with us today and book a free consultation.

Digital marketing resources:

Why website optimisation is key to business growth

8 Tips to improve marketing for accountants in London

05/06/202101/19/2020 by scmarketing

As an accounting firm, it’s easy to rely on repeat and referral business. However, if you want to grow, you need to turn to marketing your firm.

Marketing for accountants requires a bit more expertise to break through the noise and get your business noticed. There are more than 76,000 accountants in the UK. You have to work hard to get your business noticed online.

Keep reading to learn the latest marketing tips for accountants that will help your business grow.

1. Get on Google My Business

How will you be found on search engines if you don’t tell search engines that your business exists? You have to fill out a listing on Google My Business to show search engines that you have a legitimate business. It will also help your firm be found when people are searching.

2. Get Your Marketing Messages Right

How well can you communicate what sets your accounting firm apart from all of the other accounting firms in London?

You need to be able to explain to someone the services you provide, to whom, and why they need to go to your firm. That needs to happen in about 5-7 seconds.

If you do that well, you’ll be able to weed out the people who aren’t a good fit for your business and pique the curiosity of your ideal client.

3. Optimise for SEO

Millions of people turn to search engines every single day to find products and services. That includes searching for tax information and finding accountants.

Search engine optimisation is a great way to get your accounting firm in front of potential clients when they’re trying to learn about taxes or trying to find an accountant in London.

4. Content Builds Trust

Let’s say that someone is trying to find tax information. They don’t want to hire an accountant yet, but they want information on what capital allowances are and what qualifies.

You can write a blog post that addresses that very question. The goal is to optimise that post to appear in related searches for capital allowances.

The person wanting to understand what they are comes across your post, they read it, and they become more interested in your services.

Your content has to go above and beyond adding value and help people solve a very specific problem.

Marketing your accounting practice needs to establish trust with your target audience. The way you do that is by providing value and repetition.

The more people see your company, the more they’ll remember it. You want to be seen as a tax resource in London, not just another accountant.

Don’t be afraid to give away information for free.

5. Capture Email Addresses

In the example above, your website did its job to get someone interested in your accounting firm. Now it’s time to convert that person to a lead.

The best way to do that is to have them sign up to your email list. That allows you the opportunity to remain in communication with them until they decide to unsubscribe.

In order to capture an email address, you want to offer something of value. People aren’t really going to give up their email address because you want them to sign up for your newsletter.

However, a guide that outlines 5 tax saving strategies for small business owners would be a great way to get people to sign up to your list.

Whatever you have as your trap, so to speak, it has to be relevant and useful to your target audience.

6. Follow up With Retargeting

Not everyone will want to sign up for your email after they visit your website. You don’t want to lose that lead for good, so you need to find a way to keep your brand in front of them once they leave your site.

A retargeting campaign can do just that. A retargeting campaign uses tracking cookies to present your display ads on websites and social media networks once someone leaves your site.

Retargeting does “impact consumer behaviour” and it can help you get more clients to your accounting firm.

7. Take Networking Online

How often do you spend time at networking meetings? They can be incredibly valuable and provide a great source of referrals. You can take the same approach to a networking meeting and apply it to social media. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are great places to connect with other professionals and individuals who could benefit from a good accountant. It’s another way to engage with potential customers and establish credibility and trust.

8. Measure Results and Adjust Your Campaign

Once you start a marketing campaign, you can’t let it run on autopilot. It needs attention and tweaking, which can be difficult when you’re trying to manage client work in the middle of tax season.

You need to measure the results of your campaign to see what tactics are working well and which ones aren’t. That will give you enough information to make an informed decision about your marketing.

For example, you look at your analytics and see what you’re getting traffic to your site, and they’re reading your content. However, they’re not converting to email leads or scheduling appointments.

It could be for a variety of reasons. The visitors may be early in the buying cycle and need more touches before

It could also be that your lead magnet isn’t compelling enough to drive signups. Good marketing takes patience and testing to get it to be perfect.

Marketing for Accountants

As an accounting firm, if you want to grow, you need to do more than rely on repeat and referral business. You need to learn the latest ways to improve marketing for accountants and apply them to your business.

There are plenty of ways to market your firm from content marketing to SEO. To be successful, you need to be consistent and be willing to measure and test your campaigns.

Do you need help with marketing your accounting firm? Contact us, digital marketing and SEO experts for accountants, today for a free consultation.

Laptop searching for inbound marketing agencies in London

Have you told search engines you exist?

10/12/202009/02/2019 by scmarketing

Grow your business with Google

To help your business grow, you need to tell people that you exist. These days your shop window is a virtual one – it’s your website. However, just like a bricks and mortar premises your website needs to be found, it’s just that these days that means via a search engine. Just as you would have a sign on your window advertising your products and services you need to let people know where you are.

One of the first things you need to do when you have created your website, or if you are embarking on a digital marketing campaign to grow your business, is to make sure you’ve told search engines that you exist. The most popular way to do this is initially is by populating Google My Business with your company details.

About Google
My Business

This is a free tool to use and well worth the
time and effort to complete. Google is one of the most popular search engines
after all, so you may as well let them know about you by filling out as much about
your company as you can.

The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact numbers and email addresses and a short paragraph about your company. But it is worth exploring what else you can complete as this will all help Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and your company being seen in search, further optimising your website.

For example, you can add ‘posts’ to your Google
My Business page. This allows you to add offers and event details with clear
call to action buttons. It’s worth noting here that you don’t need to create
fresh content for this you can just edit one of your blogs or offer from your
website and repurpose for Google My Business as part of your routine SEO work.

Images say a thousand words and you have the
ability to add imagery to your Google My Business page too.

A regular look at your ‘insights’ on this page will reveal the most popular search queries for your business by unique users. These insights can also assist you in keeping the keywords and phrases you use up to date.

Reviews

These business pages are also a great way for
you to ask customers to leave reviews. When people look for a product or
service they are comforted by reviews from people and this could be the
difference between whether someone clicks on your link or the person with a
populated Google My Business page.

Book a Practice Growth Session

Google My Business is just one of the tactics we recommend that our clients implement. If you would like to find out more, our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. As an inbound marketing agency in London, arming you with the fundamental details for you to be able to implement a campaign to help you grow is well within our abilities. You can book a session with us for £95.

Keep an eye on our blog for more tips on growing your business with a well targeted digital marketing campaign.