Your Accounting Website- Promote Your Business with Google Local

There are different kinds of search engine listings; organic, local, and paid; and in the end you'll want to exploit them all. Each has advantages, and disadvantages, and none are actually "better" than the others. The easiest type of SEO, for a web newcomer to do himself to work on their "Local Search Engine Listings". Lets get you started there. Most accounting practices have a clear-cut focus on acquiring local cunstomers, and local search is a wonderful 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.

Now, the first step in optimizing your website for local search is making sure you're listed in "Google Places". Google places drives the local search 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. Make sure your listing is thorough. 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. These reviews are one of the most important metrics used by Google to determine your ranking when it returns results for your area. The more reviews you have, the more important you look.

That's the easy part. Now it's time to roll up your sleeves a do a little real work. You need to make sure you have a solid, consistent online presence. 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. If you find obsolete or incorrect information do your level best to correct it. 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 this is done it's time to increase the the number of sources that the search engines can draw from. The more mentions the search engines find about your company scattered about the web, the more important you appear to them. There are some easy referrals out there. There are a lot of online directories that may not have a lot of "authority" in the eyes of the search engines, but will be happy to list your firm. 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.

I know what you're thinking. What about 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 at this. There's a great deal more to do. You're going to want to consider paid listings and organic search engine optimization, but if you take these steps to improve your position in the local search results you will have gotten your accounting website off to a great beginning.

Kenny Marshall is a marketing consultant and former Officer of CPA Site Solutions, one of the nation's leading edge website businesses oriented solely to accounting website design.