INTHEBLACK July/August 2023 - Magazine - Page 50
P O D C AS T
INTHEBLACK PODCAST
The INTHEBLACK podcast is a must-listen for business leaders and accounting
professionals. It covers a broad range of topics to help develop the latest
multidisciplinary skills, take the next career step and improve business outcomes.
Here are the highlights from a recent episode.
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HOW TO GET FOUND ON GOOGLE
Search engine optimisation (SEO) expert Darren Shaw explains how accounting
firms can harness the power of SEO to attract new customers. Listen to the
episode for many simple and practical tips.
WHY SEO MATTERS
“Most accounting firms out there are going
to have a website where people can go
and learn about them, but if you Google
‘Melbourne accountants’ does your website
come up? That’s why you would implement
SEO tactics – to try and improve that.
“Ideally, you’d be ranking number
one – that’s the goal. It’s hugely
important because people get fatigued.
They will not go to page three or
page four to find an accountant.
“Basically, if you’re not right at the top
there, you will not get the traffic, you
will not get the click-throughs and being
at the top of those results is what will
potentially transform your business.”
TRADITIONAL SEO
“Traditional SEO is really focusing
only on your website. It’s about the
relevancy of your content – what does
your website say about you? Are you
optimised in the correct places? For
example, having ‘Sydney accountants’
in your title tag is very important if you
want to rank for Sydney accountants.
“It’s also about authority. You might
have a relevant page, but there’s 500
other relevant pages. How does Google
decide which ones should be at the top?”
IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL SEARCH
“Search is changing because of AI – we
see search changing from a list of results
to one answer. If you asked Google a
standard question before it would say,
‘Here’s a bunch of websites that are
kind of answering that question’.
50 INTHEBLACK July/August 2023
“As we shift to a model like ChatGPT
where you can actually just get the
answer, you don’t really have to go
digging through the search results.
“Local SEO is interesting in that it is
more protected from that. It should grow
to a much larger discipline than SEO
itself because, one, there are millions
more businesses that are interested
in ranking on Google. Two, because
you can’t get one answer when you’re
searching for a local business.
“You need to see multiple answers and
you need to be able to look through the
results. I actually think local SEO is set
to explode over the coming years.”
RAISING YOUR PROFILE
“The businesses that take the time to
manage and optimise their Google Business
Profile are the ones that really stand out,
especially compared to the competition.
“Accounting is a little bit wide open right
now. Accounting is one of the industries that
has been a little slow to adopt local search.
“If you take the time to do this and
optimise your profile, and you do continue
to manage it to make it stand out, you
really are going to stand out from the
competition.”
LISTEN
to the full
podcast episode
DARREN SHAW,
WHITESPARK
