Google is king when it comes to anything related to the internet. It has been this way for a long time and there isn’t any sign of change on the horizon.

Its market share of all online searches is close to 90 percent, with more than 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every single day.

Your CPA marketing strategy needs to be heavily focused on Google — from pay-per-click ads to being found in the local organic search results. There is endless opportunity for business growth when you fully understand how to master all that Google has to offer your CPA advertising effort.

Many small business owners are aware of CPA PPC and CPA SEO, but Google has additional marketing tools that also provide growth opportunity yet are often ignored. Google is more than just a CPA advertising platform and search engine.

Understanding what marketing tools are available and how they can be utilized will play a major role in your CPA firm’s growth. Everyone knows that Google is a search engine and that website visibility in its results can help drive leads — but the other available tools can contribute to the improvement of your CPA marketing effort as well.

We are going to outline five Google marketing tools that need to be part of your CPA advertising campaign. While there are dozens of tools available, these are the most commonly used and the ones we highly suggest you focus on.

1. Google My Business (Google Maps)

Before you can even think about CPA SEO, you need to make sure you have a completed Google My Business profile, optimized to its fullest in order to help your firm move towards the top of the Google Maps results.

This business profile is the most important component when it comes to local organic search engine marketing. The information contained within your Google My Business profile and listing is what the search engine pulls from when its algorithm determines what keywords and search phrases trigger your business to be displayed and in what position it’s shown on the map.

This is also where your business reviews will be displayed and submitted. While some customers will take the liberty to leave you a review on their own, the majority of them will need you to request they do it, and you will point them to your GMB profile — it’s a must-do component of CPA advertising.

Having a complete profile with accurate contact and location details, along with a very detailed description with information pertaining to your location and services offered is key, along with constantly collecting new five-star reviews.

2. Google Ads (CPA PPC)

Google Ads is the fastest way to get traffic to your website that you can then convert in leads and eventually accounting clients. You are paying for each visitor, but there isn’t the waiting period that exists with search engine optimization.

It can take months to experience a significant spike in traffic through SEO, but with PPC, you can drive traffic as soon as you launch a campaign. There are three popular formats that your CPA firm can use, each with a different purpose.

Local Service Ads

Local service ads are pay-per-click bidding, but you aren’t driving the clicks to your website. If someone engages with you ad, they are given two options: submit a lead form or call your business.

This creates the highest quality lead your company could possible generate — a prospect that wants to speak to your business right away. You monitor your leads from an app, which allows you to instantly reply to their submission request or be instantly connected to them on the phone.

Either way, while you are paying for each “click,” you are receiving warm leads that have a high probability of converting into CPA and accounting clients. Local Service Ads also extend a perk they call Google Guaranteed, which provides purchase protection to the user, covering the full value of the service.

Google Video Ads

Video content is very popular and it’s a great way to re-market to people that have previously engaged with your PPC ads and visited your website but have not converted into a lead yet. A creative video designed to pull prospects back in with an irresistible offer is something we encourage all of our clients to explore.

When someone is looking for an accountant, whether for personal or business needs, they are typically going to look at and evaluate several options. If you rely solely on first-visit conversions you will miss out on a lot of local business. It often takes several interactions with your business before a potential customer is ready to convert.

This is why an online marketing campaign needs to include several different components, from CPA PPC ads to video ads and content marketing — multiple “touches” are often required before the conversion occurs.

YouTube is the second largest search engine and when you also consider that video content is highly engaging, you understand why Google Video Ads need to be part of your accounting firm marketing strategy.

GDN (Google Display Network)

Just like video ads are great for re-marketing, the Google Display Network allows you to re-market to your previous visitors across millions of websites and blogs. You can create highly targeted offers according to what pages on your website the person has previously visited, which greatly improves the likelihood of them clicking-through (and then converting).

Display ads on the GDN operate on a bidding system, similar to traditional Google Ads, but you are able to select from CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions). You will want to test both, and determine what strategy allows you to generate the highest quality lead at the lowest acquisition cost.

3. Google Analytics

Successful CPA marketing requires constant analyzation and optimization. You cannot expect to launch a campaign — organic or paid — and expect it to perform at its highest level immediately.

You have to monitor and analyze traffic sources, click-through rates, lead conversion rates and acquisition costs. You also have to reverse engineer the source and flow of your paying customers and identify where they are not coming from.

When you have this information you can then make adjustments to your CPA advertising efforts that result in more leads at a lower cost-per-lead.

Google Analytics is robust software that tells you everything about your website visitors — from where they come from and where they are located to what kind of device they are using and what pages they clicked-through prior to converting into a lead (or leaving your website).

It’s easy to install, free to use and something we highly suggest you become familiar with, even if you have us handle all of your online marketing and advertising. Understanding how to read and comprehend your Google Analytics data plays a key role in understanding how your business is growing and succeeding online.

4. Google PageSpeed Insights

This is a free web-based tool that analyzes your website content and provides suggestions to make the specific page load faster. Every URL you analyze is provided with a score for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website.

There are two reasons why you need to pay attention to these scores:

• A fast-loading website provides your visitors with a pleasant user experience. If a website is slow and pages take forever to load they are going to leave and find another option. We live in a “now” generation — consumers demand instant gratification.
• Google’s algorithm is designed to deliver search results that satisfy their users. Do you think they are going to rank a website that loads slowly and provides a poor user experience? Of course not.

This isn’t a third-party analysis of your website speed — it’s coming directly from Google. The suggestions they provide are designed to help, and ultimately improving this will contribute to better organic visibility for your CPA firm’s website.

5. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool available to website owners, allowing you to see how many of your webpages are indexed in its search results and monitor the health of your website. The information available within Google Search Console can be used to optimize the visibility of your website. The three major uses are:

Monitor Performance

There are two types of performance issues you will want to monitor here. First, you will want to make sure there are no 404 errors. If one of your URLs becomes broken it will show up here and you will want to correct or redirect that particular URL. A website with perfect health is going to receive more organic exposure than one with several technical errors.

If there are any mobile issues detected you will be notified of them here as well. Things like small text or pages and forms that are too hard to navigate and complete on smaller screens will be listed here if issues are detected. You will want to address any issues right away, as Google puts a lot of weight on the mobile-friendliness of a website.

Measure Search Traffic

You can quickly see how much traffic each page of your website received, along with how many impressions each page received in the organic search results. If you are seeing pages with high impressions but low click-through rates you know that you might need to optimize your page titles and descriptions to pull more traffic.

Often times the slightest changes can have the biggest impact on your accounting firm SEO, so always monitor this data and look for opportunities for improvement.

Identify New CPA SEO Opportunities

Google Search Console also gives you the opportunity to identify new keywords and search terms to target in your CPA SEO campaign. You can access a list of all search queries that caused your website to show up in the search results.

This can often uncover new terms and phrases to optimize for. Knowing what your potential clients are searching for and what pages those terms are triggering gives you a major head start when it comes to ranking those pages higher in the results.

With a little on-page optimization and link building, you can propel those pages higher, and capture more organic traffic on Google. When you do this consistently you can experience massive traffic growth.

Final Thoughts

Google provides your CPA firm with unlimited marketing and advertising opportunities, but it can be overwhelming to monitor, manage and optimize various campaigns and plans while attending to the day-to-day operation of your business.

If you would like to learn how we can handle your online marketing, allowing you to focus your time and energy on your business, then contact us now for a consultation. We would be more than happy to explain and outline how we can leverage our expertise to help you grow your accounting business.

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