The Ultimate Guide to SEO Management for Professional Services firms

By Nagamani On Apr 29, 2022

Introduction

Professional services firms provide specialist knowledge and services to clients. Industries like architecture, interior design, accountancy, etc., can be counted as professional services firms. Given the nature of their offerings, the requirements for their SEO Management are also different, to say the least. Not to forget that Google, Google Images and YouTube own most of the market share in search (62.6%, 22.6%, and 4.3% respectively, according to Jumpshot data)

For one, the content needs to be highly specialized, and keywords narrowed down, guest posts, and blog content highly relevant and well-researched, among others, to truly benefit from such a large market share by improving visibility in online searches. It thus works best to hire an SEO expert if you run one such firm, so that SEO for specialized requirements can be sorted out well.

Let’s look at some of the major ways you can leverage the services of SEO experts for optimizing your websites for SEO, if you are a professional services firm.

4 Distinct Steps to Manage SEO for a Professional Services Firm

Professional services firms require a different kind of approach towards managing their SEO – whether it be the creation of guest posts, content on their own blogs or approaching the right platforms for the association to create backlinks. According to Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, Andrey Lipattsev, the top three factors that impact search results rankings on Google are links, content and RankBrain. You want your website to be optimized to be optimum for these three parameters for better rankings – a good SEO professional can help you with that.

Given that the basics are out of the way and already accounted for, like what SEO is, how it works, and whether your website is structured right for the indexers and crawlers, here are the next steps to take to optimize SEO for professional services firms.

Defining the Identity of Your Firm for the Right Keywords

Branding and clarity are the things that drive a business when it comes to professional services. It is highly likely that your firm is already known in your locality, so leveraging that for the benefit of your local SEO strategy could help you get more traffic to your website. According to Google, 60% of the users utilize local information served to them in ads.

Another aspect of firm identity is the brand itself. Allowing your prospects to search for you using your own brand name, or that of a recognized professional employed with you, lets you cash in on that traffic. For example, “Acme Architecture in XYZ City” or, “John Doe Acme Architecture” helps you leverage keywords unique to you – and get you leads that are already hot.

Getting the Right Content

According to a study conducted by Moz, it was found that high quality content (long-form) is likely to receive higher shares and links. This is extremely good for a professional services firm looking to boost its visibility and gain more clients.

Not to mention the complexity of blogs that increase the more niche-specific your services get; the best bet then is to hire professional SEO service provider to source content that isn’t just high quality, but also authentic and optimized for the right keywords that have been selected for your firm. There is only one thumb rule here: best quality content will always rise up in rankings – so try not to compromise here.

Retaining Your Visitors

Visitors are likely to convert into customers. According to this Harvard study, your firm stands to spend as much as 25 times more in acquiring new customers than it would to retain the loyal ones. It is, thus, important to design your website in a way that keeps your visitors engaged.

There are a few key ways a professional SEO firm can help you with that:

By designing a website that is responsive and can adapt to any device it is accessed on
By keeping the website elements fluid and intuitive, crafting a smooth user journey
Structuring the website right to make it search-engine friendly
Presenting the right information to the visitors – optimizing the website according to user intent

If you think your own in-house professionals can’t handle all these factors, it is time to hire a professional SEO company.

Tracking the Metrics

Search engine results and algorithms are always changing, always evolving. Your website may rank higher today than it would tomorrow – it may rise to the top for two hours and then lose the spot. In order to maintain your SERP position, thus, it is important to always measure certain performance parameters that, when optimized, could help you stay at or near your targeted spot on the search engine results.

Such tools are mostly available online, and they are free to use. For example, Google Analytics helps you track your new and unique users, session durations, bounce rate and more to see how customers use your website. Keywords analytics tells you everything about how your keywords are performing.

The bottom line is, tracking metrics will help you invest more in strategies that are fetching better results, and reallocate resources from the ones that aren’t.

Conclusion

SEO firms provide their services to many kinds of businesses, and they know the tricks of the trade of each one where SEO is concerned. Professional services firms are a niche business, and their SEO requirements differ drastically from other businesses – the SEO, thus, is done a little differently. Using these four steps as a guide will help you sort most things out.