Improving the Online Presence of Your Tax Practice

When it comes to improving the online presence of your tax practice, it may often feel as if you need to hire an outside agency or a new internal hire to manage it. Whether your goal is to improve your online reputation or grow your practice, you can gain attention online without investing a ton of time, money or resources.

Follow these three simple-to-use tips and tricks, and you’ll likely see better results quickly.

1: Create Your Social Media Profiles

By registering for social media profiles, you will increase the digital footprint on the web for your name or brand, giving you multiple opportunities to surface the content you generate, as well as improve awareness of your website. Don’t forget to add your website in your profile registration and description so that users are able to navigate from your social profile to your site.

Some of my recommended sites to register for include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

2: Gain Local Visibility

You can market yourself locally on the internet. Google and other search engines often surface local businesses for users who type in queries with a local intent to the top of a results page. For example, if a prospect types “accountant” into Google, that user will receive results of accountants where the user is located. This works the same as if you were searching for pizza – it makes sense for Google to show pizza locations nearby.

One tool to stay ahead of the local marketing best practices is to register your business with Google My Business – for FREE. By ensuring your business name, address and phone number are correct, you improve the chances of your business being listed when a prospect or existing client looks for you on the web.

Tip: ensure you select “category” when registering your business, so that Google can correctly categorize your business.

3: Optimize Your Website

Staying ahead of search engine optimization (SEO) can often be daunting and difficult; hopefully, these two tips can make it a little bit easier:

• Tip 1: Register your website for Google Search Console (like My Business, it’s free). This tool gives you the diagnostics to work through on your site, in order to ensure that it’s found to the best of a search engine’s ability.

• Tip 2: Keep publishing content. Google and other search engines love to see fresh, relevant, unique content on websites. Generally, search engines favor websites that produce high-quality, engaging content for their users. And, even if you don’t have a website, you could quickly get started using one of the many free website/blogging platforms, such as WordPress.com.

Try some or all of these recommendations, and you’ll be well on your way to getting the most out of everything that search engines and the web has to offer. Don’t feel discouraged; like anything in your practice, you get out of it what you put in to it, so continue to read, learn and make the most out of your online reputation. There are also a ton of content marketing resources you can read for more information.

Editor’s Note: Creating a practical social media strategy is also important; check out Charles Costa’s article “5 Ways to Create a Social Media Strategy” on the ProConnect™ Tax Pro Center for helpful advice.