Bill Gates famously said 'Content is king' more than 20 years ago, referring to the massive potential the internet had for sharing everything from news and pictures to video.
But if you want your website to appear at the top of an online search, it's not just content that you need. It's quality content.
About SEO
Getting your website noticed is the purpose behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). A decade or so ago, SEO was easy – you just needed to have swathes of text featuring the keywords and phrases that you thought people would search for.
These days it's a lot more sophisticated. Google's own guide to SEO says: “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any other factors. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.”
Useful content
So the secret to helping people find and interact with your website is to make sure you have relevant, interesting information on it.
It's the reason that so many sites have a 'news' or 'blogs' section. These not only give a company the opportunity to bring to life what they do by talking about new developments, new services or new trends; but they also encourage people to return to the site to see what's new.
Links and interaction
Google and the other search engines rank websites that frequently add new content to their site more highly than those that don't. In their view, an updated site is active and less likely to be out of date.
The other big advantage of posting new copy is that it gives you something to say on social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And that helps get your site noticed: if your content is good, people will comment on it and share it, making it more visible to their contacts – who might not have heard of you before.
What this means for accountants
So what is 'quality content' in the context of accountancy? The good news is, there's a lot of material you could share that will interest users. Tax rates, for example, are highly searched online – and you could also include the key tax deadlines. That also leads on to news or blog posts advising people of the next key dates and what they need to do. Some accountancies also have downloadable forms on their sites to help with HMRC requests or to file information with Companies House.
It's also worth producing regular news articles for your site – reacting to the latest government budget, perhaps, or explaining new guidelines or legislation.
Content = leads
Once you have a steady flow of new content happening on your site, you have more reason to reach out to your clients. A quarterly e-mail newsletter could work well as a low-cost way of reminding clients about the range of services you provide.
But no matter how valuable it can be, we're well aware that creating and sharing content takes time. That's why, as part of our AccWEBSITE offering, we create news items, factsheets, calculators, calendars and market reports on a regular basis for accountants.
Many accountants trust us to manage their website so that they get the best SEO performance without the worry.We'll do all the hard work for you, SEO is something we do as standard with all our websites. Find out more…