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This article was first published in the March 2016 UK edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

Metatags, crawlers, bots and serps may sound like characters from the latest Star Wars film, but, like it or not, they are crucial to the success of your firm. 

These tools - and hundreds of others like them - are part of the dizzying world of search engine optimisation (SEO), a dark art that can be the difference between success and failure in the digital world we all live in today. It’s a world where Google holds many of the keys to sustained business growth. 

Where local advertising, word of mouth and personal referrals might once have been the route to new business for accountancy firms, today it’s increasingly about web presence. Back in 2013 a study published by Hinge Marketing, How Buyers Buy Accounting & Financial Services, revealed that online search had already become the second most popular route when selecting a provider of accounting and financial services. And while personal referrals were still the most popular approach – and still are by some margin – the trend is clear. 

Being visible

So what exactly is SEO? In simple terms, SEO is the process of making your web presence as visible as possible to potential clients. It’s the online equivalent of building an enticing window display and frontage to encourage people to pop in. Or to put it another way, it’s about making your firm as visible as possible to Google (and other search engines) so that your business figures prominently among the search results that Google presents to potential clients looking online for accountancy services (or indeed any product).

Developing a successful SEO strategy isn’t easy – it takes time and investment. But, says Karen Reyburn, managing director of The Profitable Firm, an online-marketing advisory firm focused purely on the accounting sector, the rewards can be significant. ‘When it comes to SEO, the rich get richer, and the poor get nothing at all,’ she says. 

But, before you run out and write a glut of cheques, it’s worth understanding SEO in more detail and how Google wants you to behave online. And Google is the search engine that really matters – data from Statista shows that Google took an 85.71% market share of total UK search traffic for the 12 months to January 2016.

Above all else, Google is interested in the quality of content that a website holds. Should Google give your firm’s website a ‘low-quality’ rating, it is effectively signing a death warrant for its online presence. 

The good news is that Google is more than happy to explain what low quality means and regularly updates its guidelines to this effect. Those guidelines are long and complex, but it’s worth noting some golden rules that your website must adhere to if it is to avoid that low-quality kiss of death.

Quality of content

Google’s philosophy is that the internet is a resource where information can be exchanged freely, and its search engine is a tool that can be used to find that content. As a result, your content should be relevant, of good quality, regularly updated and original. On top of this, the way it is presented and structured should be high quality, and it should also be authoritative and trustworthy. 

The thing to note here is that providing valuable information, for free, to the general population might not seem like the most obvious way to go about developing new business, but it is the criterion that Google uses when it decides how high your business will rank in its search results.

Relevance

However, there is no point in strewing your website’s pages with top-notch information unless it is directly relevant to your intended audience, and keywords should be used liberally throughout the content to maximise the chances of it being picked up by people searching in Google on those keywords. This is a crucial point, and the first step in any SEO initiative is to understand exactly what you want to be ranked highly for. 

‘Unless the root issues of client needs, the firm and the owner’s areas of expertise are dealt with properly, then no amount of SEO will solve the marketing issues,’ says Reyburn. ‘I’d argue that although SEO is important, it’s far more important to understand who you are as a firm, where your expertise lies and how you showcase that in a digital marketing arena.’

Credibility

One way to gain credibility is to produce quality content that is well written and has authority. But another, which is a key measure for Google – and so a key contributor to any successful SEO strategy – is the number of inbound links to your website. Google reckons that if third-party websites are pointing to your website, you must have something worth linking to. 

Quality of experience

Another important component of a successful SEO strategy is to ensure that the user experience is as seamless as possible. Broken links on webpages are a serious misdemeanour, and websites should be logical and straightforward for users to navigate, allowing Google’s ‘crawlers’ to index a site easily.

Quick wins

There are several things that corporates and practitioners can immediately do to improve their SEO (and so their ranking in Google searches). These include ensuring all images or other objects on a website are appropriately named and described (‘alt tags’), that metadata (data that describes other data) is in place and relevant for all pages, that your firm has a Google Plus and Google Local Business presence, and that content is well written, keyword-optimised and regularly updated. 

But remember: SEO is not a magic wand that just needs waving once. It demands commitment, investment and patience to reap rewards, something that Reyburn is keen to point out. ‘If you want to really see big wins with an SEO campaign, you need to spend big,’ she says. ‘This is not pleasant news for many accountants, but the more we study SEO and see who is succeeding with it, the clearer it becomes that it’s a case of you spend more, you get more.’

David Rae, journalist