If you want more traffic coming to your accountant website, then you need your content to reflect what your target market are searching for. Your overall web design, articles, blogs and landing pages should all mirror the reality found in your market.
Some accountants get concerned that this means they will need to design separate web pages for every search term that their target market use. Fortunately, Google has advanced significantly to ensure you do not need to do this. It is now possible to rank one landing page, or web page, for multiple keywords.
Grouping Keywords in Accountant Web Design
It makes much more sense to design a small set of web pages, each of which target 10 or more keywords, rather than designing dozens of web pages which individually only target one or two keywords.
Most accountants (and many accountant marketing agencies) ignore this reality or are simply ignorant of it. As a result, many hours and considerable expense is needlessly expended. At AccountantLift, we want to give our clients a high-quality accountant web design, without creating more work than is necessary. In this short guide, we are going to show you some examples of how we cluster keywords into effective groups, allowing accountants to get more search engine exposure:
Step 1: Collecting Keywords
Of course, before you start grouping keywords together for your accountant website, you need to actually gather your overall list. We use a number of data sets to collect this for our clients, which will greatly inform the structure for their new website design project.
Here are some different sources you might want to consider gathering your keywords from:
- Third party tools (e.g. Ahrefs, Agency Analytics, Google AdWords Keyword Planner)
- Mind-mapping your own keyword ideas
- Using Google Search’s own keyword suggestions, when you enter phrases into the search bar
- Competitor research (i.e. other accountant web designs)
- Search query data from your Google Ads / Analytics account
Step 2: Analysing the Terms
Suppose using the above data sources, you collect well over a hundred possible keywords that your accountant web design could use. It’s now time to engage in some “term analysis”.
What this means is that you look at your list of target keywords, and identify the most commonly-occurring words. For example, here are three keywords which might be on an accountant’s list:
- cpa tax accountant near me
- cpa tax advice
- local cpa
If you look at this list, you’ll notice that “cpa” occurs in all three search queries. Perhaps this word is simply occurring in these three keywords, or perhaps it appears throughout your entire keyword list. To find out, we recommend using a free word frequency counter.
Feel free to remove propositions like “a”, “the”, “to” and “for” when you do your counting up (they’re not really important when it comes to keyword research). You will need to be careful, however, to not just look at individual words when making your list. After all, “certified public accountant” comprises three words which are part of a set phrase.
To list your phrases, use a phrase frequency counter. If you see phrases like “certified public accountant” appearing multiple times, then you know that will be an important one for your web design to target.
Step 3: Find Your “Gem” Terms
Some keywords on your list will be more important than other ones. In particular, those with higher traffic volume potential, greater relevance, lower search engine competition, and more immediate / urgent user purchase intent are likely to be top of your list.
It can be useful to list your keywords in order of priority, according to criteria such as the above. This will help you focus your efforts when you start designing your web pages and landing pages, as well as help you identify and remove any “negative” keywords which you do not need.
Be mindful that various words on your list are likely to come from the same “root”. For instance, “accounting specialist” and “accountant specialist” should be considered as part of the same cluster when you start actually grouping your keywords together.
Step 4: Grouping the Keywords
You now how the building blocks you need to start grouping your keywords, so you can begin targeting them with your web pages. To go this effectively, you are going to need a good sense of intuition about which terms fit well together, a solid understanding of your target market, and good judgement.
In general, it’s a good idea to start with the keywords on your list which are more niche – as they are less likely to overlap with other topics. For instance, when we created our list of keywords for our own AccountantLift website, some keywords were quite broad and overlapped with lots of other topics, such as “accountant marketing“. We therefore decided to start with more narrowly-focused keywords when mapping out how our landing page structure would look, such as “ppc for accountants”.
When you eventually arrive at your larger, more broad keyword groups, it might suddenly make sense to divide these into smaller groups. Do not just do that for the sake of it, however!
Now What?
With your list of keywords now successfully clustered together into groups, you can now begin the fun work of mapping out the page structure for your accountant web design project.
It might be, for instance, that one group of keywords could be used to build a specific services page which is part of the “spine” of your website navigation. Another, smaller list with lower traffic volume might be more suited to a landing page, which you could create later as part of an ongoing digital marketing campaign. Other keyword groups with lower user intent (e.g. people who are looking for information about a topic pertaining to your service) might sit better on a blog, or set of blogs within an overall blog category.
