Four pillars of SEO Services

These are the key elements that good SEO services do to get your accounting or bookkeeping business to the top of the rankings.

Unraveling the mystery of SEO

SEO services can sound like a dark art. For most accountants or bookkeepers its just confusing. Frustratingly, the answers to most of your questions to SEO companies seem to come back as ‘It depends.’ But there is reason behind that response. There’s a lot that goes into good SEO services in order to effectively influence the ranking factors, deal with constant changes to the search engine algorithms and manage other SEO variables. The more you invest into SEO each month, the more results you’ll see.

Most CPAs want to capitalize on the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) but end up putting it on the back burner as it quickly becomes too overwhelming or confusing. That’s where professional SEO services can really help you. MITCO Digital has a strong track record of helping our accounting clients implement a solid SEO strategy, climb the search engine rankings, generate more website traffic and get more quality enquiries each month (that is the end goal after all).

Making use of a professional SEO service is a good idea in today’s online business context. Let’s take a look at the four pillars of SEO, in order to help you identify a good strategy and weed out the bad advice from SEO outsourcing companies.

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What are the 4 pillars of SEO?

The four pillars of SEO that we’re going to look at are:

Technical SEO: How easily search engines and users can move around and visualize your website
Content: All the text, videos and images on your website
On-site SEO: This refers to optimizing everything on your website
Off-site SEO: Building authority through optimizations outside of your website

Pillar 1: Technical SEO

We start with technical SEO. What use is there in paying for a website or writing blogs each week if the search engines can’t find you?

This is where the SEO service providers you deal with will talk about terms such as core web vitals, robots, XML sitemap and site structure. We can go deeper into each element with you if you wish – just shoot us an email. For now, let’s stick to the basics.

If you have a WordPress site (as most accountants do) then technical SEO is much less daunting and complicated than if you have a hard-coded site build by a developer.

These are the important elements that we will look out for under technical SEO services:

Can the search engines find you and run through (crawl) your site. Most accountants that we speak to have spent money on building a website but have never ‘told’ Google about it or checked that Google is aware of them. You can do this easily by using a free tool from Google called Google Search Console. Create an account today. If you need help with this, or help verifying the account, contact us.
Which pages do we want the search engines to index and which do you want them to ignore. Let’s be clear here, all your pages will be crawled. However, you can signal to search engines which pages you’d like them not to take into consideration.
Is your site user friendly on both desktop and mobile. Mobile readiness and usabilty is now a major factor for SEO performance and ranking.
Speed and loading times of all elements of your site.
Site hierarchy. This refers to how the pages on your site are structured and if the site is structured logically. Think of it like a pyramid with your key page (usually ‘Home’) at the pinnacle, supported by numerous other pages that logically fit under one another and connect (link) to each other.

This is what SEO services can do for accountants

The key number to look at here is the blue box – number of clicks from Google per month to an accounting client’s website. This accounting firm client of ours went from 43 organic visitors to over 1,400 (and currently over 2,000) per month, purely from good SEO services from our team of SEO experts.

This is a report from Google Search Console that you should be checking at least once a month. Impressions are the number of times a site shows up in the search results.

Check your own accounting website’s performance on GSC and then set a target for impressions and clicks. Once you hit that goal, move it up.

Pro Tip: If you’re getting loads of impressions but extremely low clicks (less than 1%), that means you’re showing up in search results but prospects aren’t choosing to click on your website link.

You can try improve this by tweaking your Meta Title and Meta Descriptions (the lines that show up in search results). Write something enticing, in line with the intent of the content, to get people to click.

Pillar 2: Content

There is a long standing saying in professional SEO services that content is king. A site without content would look pretty strange. Content not only refers to the written words on your site but also all images and videos. Search engines have become smarter in evaluating content and therefore there are a few variables to keep in mind here.

One of the largest would be quality and relevance. Search engines wouldn’t exist if they didn’t do their ‘jobs’ well. A search engine has to answer a question that the searcher has. They aim to do so by providing them with the best, most comprehensive and most relevant answer that matches their search intent.

This would be your biggest flag to look for within the strategy as a company outsourcing SEO services. Do they understand the role of content and how it fits into an SEO plan? Do they have a track record of producing original content that ranks well, generates traffic and leads for accountants?

Ask your professional SEO services provider about EAT. It stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. EAT is Google guideline which any SEO professional services should be adhering to. All content should comply with EAT by offering content that ticks all guideline boxes.

SEO services should start with thorough SEO research. This includes competitor research, keyword research and old school manual searches in the search engines themselves to see how they ‘auto-complete’ an enquiry and what sites are shown in the results. Tools are great, but nothing beats going to have a look at what the source (the search engines) are displaying.

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Pillar 3: On-site SEO

This is also referred to as On-page SEO. That probably explains the concept a bit better.

Professional SEO services should optimize your site using on-site best practices. SEO audits of your CPA website should be run on a regular basis to identify errors, where changes should be made, what is working well, what’s not working and what new items you could implement.

Key elements to get right in on-page SEO are:

Page Titles
URL slugs
Meta Titles
Meta Descriptions
H-tags (Headings)
Keyword Optimization
Image Alt texts
Internal Links
Structured data
Call to action

Each of these are in-depth SEO items that should be measured and optimized on an on-going basis. They’re also the SEO basics that any accounting or bookkeeping website must have in place if you want to rank well. Chat to us about our SEO packages if you need help with this.

Pillar 4: Off-site SEO

This is also known as off-page SEO. These are elements that are outside of your website but influence your ranking position in the search engines. You’re off to a great start if you’ve got the other pillars in place and are signaling to the search engines that you should be number 1, but what do others domains (websites) say about you?

This is popularly influenced by backlinks. These are links from other websites to your site. Your service offering and website content should be so amazing that others use it as a source of information, a reference.

Reviews and Google My Business are typical ways that SEO services optimize your off-site SEO. What people think matters and influences the decisions of prospects. Online reviews are like word of mouth marketing in the online word.

Social media presence is also important for your credibility. Search engines use third party presence as proof that you exist and that you are who you say you are. It is also a great way to get visibility, potential customers to your site and hopefully enquiring about your accounting or bookkeeping services.

Takeaways and next steps

Each of the above four pillars are important for a well-rounded SEO strategy. They all overlap and support one another. One broken part of the chain could make a large difference to your site and overall SEO performance. As you can see, there is a lot to do and a lot to keep on top of if you want to implement good SEO and see your website generate more leads for you!

Hopefully we’ve given you an idea of what each pillar means and what professional SEO services should be doing for you.

If you’re ready to discover how good SEO can bring large amounts of good traffic to your website each month and start generating you new clients, book a strategy call with us.

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