If you’ve got a website hosted by CPA Site Solutions then you can get a premium listing on the Accountant Finder Website.  It’s a great – and easy – way to get started promoting your site through directories.

Accountant Finder  advertises on Google, AOL, Ask Jeeves,  and other search engines , so it reaches over 80% of US Internet users.  This strong internet presence means that your listing on Accountant Finder can be easily reached by millions of users on a site entirely designed to help people find accountants like you.

Standard listings, including business names, address and phone numbers are free, and any accountant can submit their information. The premium listing included with your CPA Site Solutions website however, includes a link back to your site to help bring those potential clients to your site.

With a link to your site included on your Accountant Finder listing you can dramatically increase the traffic to your site. This one link goes a long way to increase the incoming visitors to your site and can help increase your ranking in Google’s search results.

Once you’re listed on Accountant Finder, you’re already well on your way to promoting your site through directories. If you haven’t already, claim your listing in Google’s local search, and add yourself to  Yahoo Local, or  Yellow Book.  We’ll get into some tips on choosing directories and adding your listing in a future post. For now, check out Accountant Finder and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Use your creative energy wisely.  By using Google Analytics to examine how your visitors are navigating your site and where they’re spending their time, you can quickly determine which pages are already working for you, and which ones need a little extra attention. Expand the content that draws new visitors to the site in the first place, and adjust your other content  content to funnel your visitors into becoming new clients.

Google Adwords. If you’re taking advantage of Google’s Adwords then there’s no better way to review the effectiveness and adjust your ads then through Google Analytics.  Find out exactly which ads are bringing in the users and adjust your content or ads accordingly to maximize your results. By logging into your AdWords account you can link your Adwords to Analytics under the Reporting section.

See What Works. Google Analytic’s Top Content report displays exactly which pages are being used most by your visitors. Make your site easier to navigate by adding links to your most commonly used pages to a prominent location.  If clients are spending a lot of time on your Calculator’s page, move that page to the top level of your naviagation to make it easier to find, or use it to funnel users to your contact or appointment setting page.

Alternatively, as you make edits to pages that get fewer visits, pay attention to the Top Content report. Over time you can view how well those edits are working by watching how much more – or less – traffic that page receives.

Month to Month Comparisons. As your business shifts over the year and over time, your users activity changes too.  With Google Analytics you can view reports from month to month and get an idea of the potential changes.  By watching the trends of your usage reports over time, you can be prepared to make changes and updates that reflect those trends.

More Customizable Reports. You have more than 80 customizable reports at your fingertips.  It’s simply to drag and drop to change the data and display whatever information you need.

It’s free. Signing up for Google Analytics is easy and costs nothing. It includes all of Google’s excellent  documentation and help.  CHeck back here for more posts and tips as we dig deeper into the possibilities and features of Google Applications

By marketing your CPA or Accounting business through your website and search engines you can reach a lot of potential new clients, but it’s much more efficient to simply retain your existing clients than it is to fight for new ones. What’s more,with just a little work, those current clients can be leveraged to bring in even more business.

Incoming and Outgoing Links: Search engines view relationships in terms of links.  The more incoming links your site has, the better your ranking and rating in Google and other search engines.  Incoming lings carry a lot more weight for you, but your outgoing links- the links you direct to other sites, also help your ranking. Consider adding a links page to your site pointing to your client’s pages. Ask for a link back, but remember that the outgoing link is useful too, so there’s no need to worry about reciprocation.

Publicize Your Clients:  While editing your website and working to promote your business online, include some information about your existing clients. Highlight a particular client, promote their services and provide links to their website. By promoting your client in this way, you’re not only helping your clients -and making yourself an invaluable resource  – you’re also promoting yourself.

Review Your Clients: Your clients that have their own website or social networking promotion can benefit from your reviews. Take some time to look up your clients online and leave a comment or review. Not only will this help your client, but by signing your name and leaving a link back to your site, it’s an easy way to help generate some incomng links back to your site.

Give Gifts: Find a way to offer a little something extra to your clients. Develop a product with your name or logo to give out to clients, offer a drawing for a free hour of service,  even offering coffee or snacks for your clients as they come in the door can help.  Give them something to remember and they’ll remember to mention you elsewhere.

Offering a little extra service or promotion for your clients can go a long way. You’ll keep your clients happy and your relationship with your clients strong.

There are many CPA firms that wonder about what to use as a domain name for their CPA website. The default is to use their firm or last name. While that certainly gives you a unique domain name, it isn’t strong when it comes to search engines.

Even Larger Corporations Need a Good Domain Name

What It Really Means. The article basically points out how creditcards.com gets a better search result than any major credit card company. This is for the search term “credit cards” and yet the credit card companies have much better page rank. Not only that they have a huge number of incoming links, are talked about in the news all of the time, etc.

What It Means to You. Your domain can be much stronger if it includes some of the words that people are using to search. How strong? As the previous paragraph points out, in some cases strong enough to do better than some major established domains. Think of keywords that people might use to find you…

Your Location. One obvious keyword is your location. When an online search is made, more people want to find someone they can trust locally. So if you live in Winooski, Vermont then Winooski may be a good keyword to have in your domain.

What You Do. The next obvious one to use is what you do. If you are a CPA then you want to use this as a keyword as well. So, taking the example above, consider using winooskicpa.com.

This gives you a leg up when you are starting your CPA website. Want more proof? Norm has a blog that talks about this same domain issue with a Lemus and Company in Florida with cpadoral.com as a domain.

Have your own thoughts on domain names? How have you found your own domain useful with marketing your CPA firm? Fill out the comments below and share with other readers.

COSTING MORE  DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN IT ‘S BETTER!

Expensive ad campaigns don’t necessarily translate to increased sales. You need to be able to evaluate what the ROI is going to be on your campaigns to judge whether the money you are spending is going to accomplish your goals by connecting with your target market.

The chances of your marketing campaign succeding, greatly improve when you can get into more channnels. Potential customers will likely become buyers if they: see your add in the newspaper, see you at a conference or local business expo, pick up a brochures, post your business cards on local bulletin boards and visit your CPA website. The more you can strech you marketing budget to reach your target clients, the better chances of you connecting with potential clients.

DEFINE YOUR TARGET MARKET BEFORE YOU BEGIN THE CAMPAIGN

A critical part of your marketing plan is targeting the right customer. Once you have determined who is you target audience what form of media is going to give you the best chance of reaching that audience. If you are trying to target a younger market then internet advertising is most likely one of the more likely choices. If you are targeting retirees then maybe focusing on local papers would be a better use of you marketing dollars.

Don’t try to market to the whole country unless you have defined that as you target market, go for small niche markets. Focus on the immediate area where you are doing business. With your CPA website make sure that you keywords contain your address at least city and state. When a potential client is looking for a tax planner they are going to look close to home. If you are targeting TV ads then focus on the local channels and not Cspan or CNN because you like them.

BECOME PART OF THE COMMUNITY

Become part of the community get out and support local sporting events and fundraisers. All of these will get your name on flyers, t-shirts and banners. Be cautious not to select events that are controversial with in the community as this can generate a negative . I know that people say there is no such thing as bad publicity but, there is if you are losing business and you are in a small community.

CREATE AFFILIATES

Creating affiliates is a great way for small business to start building a local web of people that trust each other. Developing a relationship with your clients beyond the taxes. This creates a sense of belonging that will ultimately improve retention. Maybe you don’t have a plumber that is a client of yours but, you have a contractor that is a client. Ask that contractor who they would recommend?

The most cost-effective method of reaching new customers is by referrals from satisfied customers. A satisfied customer telling others about your small business is more effective than any fancy ad campaign. Spend time to get customer testimonials on your CPA websites.

You don’t need a large budget to achieve your goals,  you need to stay focused on the target market and give your budget it’s due attention. Be creative and ask other people for testimonials if they indicate that they are happy your service. Give them some of your business cards so that they can’t pass them out to their friends. Remember personal referrals are your best for of marketing.

Google Local ranks local businesses by gathering users’ feedback. As you see in the image above,  business listings on Google Maps have a ranking of 1-5 stars. If you perform a couple test searches you’ll see that most businesses are unranked.

Local search is driven by Google’s users. So the more reviews and feedback those users provide, the better chance you’ve got to be promoted in Google’s results. So the key to getting a higher local listing is to get people to leave feedback for your site and business on Google.

Getting Reviews

To leave feedback, users will need to be registered users- that is, they’ll have to have a free Gmail account. Then it’s just a matter of clicking on your search result and clicking the ‘write a review” link and leaving a star-ranking or writing a review.

Ask your customers to review you. Add a link on your site directly to the Google Local results, ask people to leave a review and good ranking. Just asking is good enough often, but a little something extra can be a great motivation. Offer a coupon, savings or other promotion to a good review.

There’s nothing wrong with writing the review and asking other users to copy and paste it into the form field. The easier you make it for your users, the more likely it is that they’ll be willing to help you out.

What stops your competition from leaving negative reviews?

Nothing at all.  That’s the downside of social marketing. Fortunately, negative feedback can help too. All feedback is beneficial to your position in the local results. While a negative review might scare some potential clients off,  but you’ll gain position in the search results.

Asking for, and encouraging reviews is about the easiest thing you can do to improve your local search results.  Search for your business now and see how you’re currently ranked. Try sending that link out to your satisfied clients and let us know in a comment here how it worked out.

As a CPA or Accountant you have different needs than  many other online businesses. Unlike Amazon or Ebay you’re looking for Web users located near you physically.  If you’re based in Seattle, Washington it doesn’t do you much good if Norm Miller of Winooski, Vermont likes your site and your services. He’s not going to make that cross-country  commute to your office.  Most people searching for a service provider like an accountant or tax preparer will search on their location, such as Seattle WA CPA.

Depending on the keyword in the local search, Google will display up to three kinds of search result: organic listings, local listings, and sponsored links. If Google has no sponsored links or local results for your search, it will only display organic listings. For example, at the time of this writing, if you search for the phrase Winooski biplane repair Google will return 6,380 organic listings, but not a single local business or sponsored link. Seattle WA CPA however, is different. It displays 3,320,000 organic results, and a full list of Sponsored Links and Local business results.

Organic listings

Most people, when referring to Search Engine Optimization, are referring to these free, organic results.  This is where competition is the most fierce. Everyone wants to be at the top of the list, or at the least on the first page.  To get in the running, Google has to be aware of your site. Once you’ve been found, then you can start adjusting your site to optimize for these results.  To check if Google has indext your site yet, you can search Google.com for  site:www.yourdomain.com.  The results will show exactly which pages on your site Google has indexed. For example, when searching for  site:www.cpasitesolutions.com, Google displayes results 1-10 of 522 pages. That means Google has indexed 522 pages of the site www.cpasitesolutions.com. CPASiteSolutions.com is a big site.

Try it for yoru domain.  Any results? If not, the next step is to submit your site to Google.  There are services and automated programs to submit your site for you, but for the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing, it’s best to handle those yourself.

To submit to Google:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

To Submit to Yahoo:
https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch
&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
Yahoo requires a Yahoo account and password to submit.

To submit to Bing:
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx?FORM=WSUT

Now sit back and relax. You may be in for a wait.  It can take up to a few months before your pages start to appear in search results after submission. Google indexes your site just a few pages at a time. They’ll index a few in one visit, then come back later for a few more and so on until Google has covered your entire site. It may be a year before every page on your site appears in Google’s search results.  To check, just search site:www.yourdomain.com again.  The results will show you exactly the pages that Google has indexed  so far.

Don’t rush to resubmit your site if it’s taking time. The search engines will find you eventually. If you’re getting no results after a couple months, go ahead and resubmit, but once indexing has started, don’t submit again unless you’ve dramatically changed your site’s content.  Needless resubmissions can look a lot like spam, which puts you in danger of being penalized. Once search engines find your site, they’ll revisit you occasionally.  If your content is static, you may be reindexed less often. Resubmitting after a major change can help- but be careful not to look like a spammer.

Local Listings

Above the organic listings are the local listings. Local listings display only specific businesses in the area being searched that provide searvices being searched on. For your business, these listings may be even more important and helpful than the organic results below.

Requesting a local listing often gets a better response from Google than requesting organic indexing. Once you appear in the local listings, you will automatically appear in the organic results.

Like the organic results, you can check to see if you’re already in the local listings by searching http://maps.google.com/ for your office address. Go a little broader if you don’t appear, just to double check. Try searching for your street and town or business type and town instead of your exact address.If you see your business listed, you are in the local business results. If you appear, it’s time to claim your listing.

To claim and edit your business listing you must be logged in as a Gmail user. Look for the “sign in” link on the upper right of every Google page. You’ll need a Gmail address too. To get one, visit gmail.google.com and sign up for a free account.  That address will become your user name and password to log in to Google Local. Once you’re logged in simply click on your business name in the listing to open up the detail balloon for your business. You should see something like this;

Click the “Edit” link in the detail balloon and from there you will find a link to claim your listing.

If you are not already in the local listings, it’s easy to request a listing. Just visit http://www.google.com/local/add and you can add a new listing to the local directory.

Sponsored Listings

Sponsored listings are, by and large, paid ads for your site. Meaning the companies and businesses that advertise in this section of the results create their ads and bid to achieve their position on the list.   There is no charge for the ad until someone clicks on the ad and visits your site.  This way, if you’re paying for your ad, you can be sure someone is visiting your site.

Sponsored Listings and Pay Per Click is worth an entire post- or an entire book- of it’s own, so we’ll touch on that more in the future. For now, look around for your site in the organic and local search results and start submitting and claiming your local listing.

PPC Advertising. Some have relied upon a Pay-Per-Click Campaign with great results. A PPC campaign still remains the fastest and easiest way to get in front of potential clients. The one problem that remains is how to measure the ROI.

On a CPA website there is no shirt to buy or widget to purchase. In short, there is nothing to place into a basket for checkout. If there were then you could view when a person clicked through from your PPC ad and made a purchase.

Responding to PPC. Once people see your ad online, 46% pick up the phone, 37% visit, and 11% end with online contact. That contact could be made immediately. On the other hand it could be made much later. You ask a recent client how they found you and they may be unable to remember. In other words it is hard to connect your online ad to the person coming in the door.

Local Search. Local search grew 46% from last year versus 31% for general search results. People are looking for local companies more and more often. In fact, 80% of customers look for results 15 miles from their location. It also helps that Google has a click-to-call option for mobile devices.

That is why local search can be so important. Yes people are online but they still like to use local businesses, especially when it comes to CPAs and other tax professionals.

Social Platforms. Potential clients also might find you via Facebook, Twitter, or any other social platform. These are becoming a way to communicate and your CPA firm misses out when not using these resources.

People to People. There is still the people to people connection. The old fashioned word of mouth is still worth more than any advertisement. Your CPA website can still help you market in this fashion thereby leveraging technology for old school results.

There are many ways to bring potential clients to your CPA website and in the door of your firm. It is important to remember to touch on each of these to ensure the health of your CPA firm and stay ahead of the competition.

It’s possible, in fact, to rank number one in search results for your chosen keywords just through incoming links. That’s not to say you should neglect your site’s content when optimizing your CPA website for search engines – it’s just an illustration of the power of incoming links.

There’s quite a few ways to bring in links to your CPA website, but today we’re looking at just one of them. We’ll cover the others in a future post.

The most direct way to generate links to your CPA website is to create them yourself. It takes some time and some research, but it’s otherwise very straightforward.
Quite simply, get published on blogs or other sites and include a link back to your site.

First, you’ll need to build a list of sites, blogs, message boards and forums that accept comments or – better yet – contributions in the form of articles, columns or guest blog posts. Sites relevant to your own are best. If the site’s subject and keywords match your own, the links from that site to yours will carry more weight.

It’s easier said than done, but once you’ve got a list of sites and blogs to contribute to, it’s time to write some content. Often, you can do this work yourself without devoting an overwhelming amount of time. For example, if you contribute to a discussion on an appropriate web forum, simply include a link to your site in your signature or account’s profile. If you comment on a blog post and you have the option, include a link back to your site.

Not only to blog comments and forum posts take up little time, they’re doubly valuable because you’re interacting with a community. You can build your own reputation and value to the community while you’re generating incoming links. If you bring value to the blog or forum with your posts, more people are going to click your links and they’ll be more likely to give you their business once they arrive at your site.

Longer content – more than just comments and contributing to discussions – articles, guest blog posts and other submissions to sites are very useful as well, but require a bit more work to generate the content. It’s worth the time (or the money spent hiring or finding a writer) because every published article or post can be grown into an ongoing relationship with a publisher where you can continuously generate links into your site.

When writing your content and preparing your comments and posts, be sure to make your links relevant to your text and subject. If you’re talking about tax strategies for small businesses, link to the page on your site that deals with tax strategies for small business owners. Include your keywords in the link text whenever it makes sense, but a mix of link text and link targets is better than the same link and link text over and over again.

Every incoming link can help, but when you’re generating the links yourself, you can ensure that you get the most out of every one. It may take some work, it may be hard work, but the result can be worth the effort.

In a future post, we’ll touch on more ways to generate some incoming links. In the meantime, you can get started generating links to your site right here. Leave a comment and a link back to your site below.

You’ve got just seconds – at best – to grab the attention of a new visitor to your site and convince her to read all your carefully optimized and edited content. Just one or two interesting pictures is enough to connect with a casual visitor long enough for her to turn her eye toward your text.

Appealing to the people that visit your site is easy: clear, high quality images of yourself, your office, your local area or anything else unique and relevant to the content on your page will do. Appealing to Google with those images is a little trickier. Google, after all, can’t see your your images.

To ensure that those images are optimized for search engines just as much as the rest of your content, you’ve got to help Google figure out what your images show.

• File Names. Take a look at your image file names. If you pulled the image directly off your camera, it probably has some generic file name like the time and date the photo was taken. Give it a good descriptive file name. If possible, include one of your keywords.
• Alt Tags. When adding the image to the page, use the Alt and Title tags. The alt tag text will display whenever the image cannot be loaded. The title text will display when your mouse hovers over the image. Like your file name, use a keyword here if it makes sense.
• Keywords. Google considers the context of the image, so be sure that your keywords are represented in the text surrounding the image. A page full of images may be fine for your human readers, but it doesn’t help Google much. Give Google something to read.
• Updated Your Pictures. Update your images occasionally. Google loves fresh content and images are no exception. When you update your content, bring in some new images too.
• Relevance Is Key. Relate your images to your text and your text to your keywords. Provide what people want to see, and Google will find it.

In short, think about your images the same way you think about optimizing your text for search engines. Make your content relevant, helpful, and attractive to your readers, and you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your search results from Google.