SEO for Accounting Firms

Accountancy will always be a competitive industry when it comes to marketing. No matter where you are focusing your lead generation efforts, you will be met with strong competition. Our SEO for accounting firms turns your website into an asset which can generate organic leads for months or even years to come.

Leads are extremely valuable for any business, but especially for an accountants’ practice, where a new relationship with a good client can bring regular work over the years. Investing in a high-quality SEO campaign which ranks your site in top positions for relevant keywords can transform your website from a marketing tool into a valuable business asset. Such a campaign can also:

• Consistently generate targeted, relevant leads

• Generate a return-on-investment (ROI) that can be reinvested into targeting even more keywords and generating more new business

• Allow you to pursue more and broader opportunities that you could not justify pursuing with paid advertising

• Position your website as an industry leader which will earn you high quality, natural and powerful backlinks

Paid Advertising Vs Accountancy SEO

If you are considering paid advertising or already have a large budget allocated for this, you may wish to consider the other option, SEO. Whilst a pay per click (PPC) campaign can generate results immediately (and if you're interested in learning more on this, view our PPC statistics page), they are limited and dependant on how much you invest. The only way your results can grow is by investing more into each campaign. When considering the average cost per click (CPC) in the accounting industry, often there will not be a large enough return to test other areas and scale your paid campaigns. We have put together a pros and cons list of each medium below.

PPC

SEO



 

With the above in mind, it might be useful to look at some average CPCs of accounting keywords to gauge how much you might expect to spend with a lead generation PPC campaign.

The average conversion rate in the accountancy (financial) industry is approx. 5.10%. Using this figure, we can predict that just 5 clicks out of every 100 generated through Google search ads will turn into an enquiry.

The average PPC campaign will result in just 1 in every 20 clicks leading to a potential customer.

When we partner this conversion rate with the estimated CPC of some relevant accountancy firm keywords, we can work out the price you should expect to pay per enquiry (*note an enquiry is simply a user providing you with their contact details and asking for more information about your product or services, not necessarily them turning into a new customer).

 

With an estimated CPC of £10.80 and a 5.10% conversion rate, each enquiry generated through a campaign targeting this keyword would cost approx. £216.

 

Estimated CPC: £7.69. Conversion rate: 5.1%. Cost per enquiry: £153.80.

 

Estimated CPC: £6.19. Conversion rate: 5.10%. Cost per enquiry: £123.80.

 

When considering the average cost of generating an enquiry through each of the above keywords, it quickly becomes apparent that you would need a substantial budget to achieve any consistent results. By the time you had tested a range of keywords, ads and landing pages you would have spent a small fortune and have missed out on countless opportunities to target broader keywords.

Furthermore, if you were to pause the campaigns you would immediately lose all your traffic and your source of new enquiries.

By now you will probably either be shocked by how much you will have to pay to get a single call from AdWords or thinking “I am not targeting London, surely it will be cheaper” and whilst it might be marginally cheaper, running ads even in more local areas will still set you back. Below we will look at a few examples local to our office:

 

​​​​​​Estimated CPC: £4.40. Conversion rate: 5.10%. Cost per enquiry: £88.

 

Estimated CPC: £4.37. Conversion rate: 5.10%. Cost per enquiry: £87.40.

 

We can see that even a local PPC campaign will come at a high price every month without adding anything to the overall value of your business.

If you were to run a campaign targeting each of the keywords reviewed above to generate just 10 enquiries a month, you could expect to spend upwards of £1338 (worked out by taking the average of all the cost per enquiries and dividing by the number keywords).

Alternatively, with our SEO services starting at £500 a month you could start working to place your website at the top of the search results for these keywords and many more. Given the competitive nature of the keywords, it is likely you would have to invest in some high-quality link building also. Once first page positions have been secured, the budget can immediately be used to target even more keywords. It is easy to see why an SEO company can offer much greater potential for business growth.

Focusing your lead generation budget on an accountancy SEO campaign is your best option for long term business growth, results and success. Whilst competitors are left behind bidding on only a handful of keywords, your site can start dominating the SERPs across tens or even hundreds of relevant, targeted searches.

If you are serious about securing more marketing leads, growing your accountancy business and turning your website into a lead generation asset, we recommend you start with our SEO and Digital PR services. Alternatively, read our accountancy study where we found the top SEO issues affecting UK accounting businesses. Once you are ready to see the kind of results your business needs to not only grow but to thrive, please get in touch for more details and a free audit of your site!