Search engines are one of the primary ways through which Internet users find and access websites. A recent comScore report suggests that 750 million people world-wide annually carry out a total of 61 billion searches on the world’s top search engines. This means that effective use of SEO will optimise your website and improve the number and quality of visitors reaching your website. The better your search engine ranking, the more likely prospects are to visit your firm website when trying to find accounting services in your area or specialisation. Ineffective use of SEO means that prospects don’t hear about your firm and are more likely to go with your competition.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and/or quality of traffic that reaches a website through different search engines. Typically, the aim is to have the website rank the earliest (or highest) in the search results list, in order to receive more visitors from that search engine. SEO targets image search, video search, local search or industry-specific vertical search engines.

Search engines actively search the web in order to return increasingly relevant results to users. However, they can only operate within particular limits – this is where SEO can help search engines better access, classify and index your website. Essentially, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for in order to optimise your website. This involves editing content, HTML and associated coding to increase relevance to specific keywords and remove any potential indexing barriers.

It is important to ensure that you are using suitable SEO strategies: inappropriate or ineffective use of SEO can see your website hiding far within the search results where visibility (and therefore traffic) is minimal.