Nowadays it’s terribly tough to market CPA websites websites. The field gets increasingly competitive by the month, and this makes distinguishing your practice harder. Some accountants have seen some substantial success by exploiting a technique called article distribution. Unfortunately, loads of these practices are using it incorrectly and this is giving the approach a bad rap.
I’m confident you’ve heard of “keywords” before. In short, keywords are the words and phrases that we make use of on pages to alert the search engines what the subject of our article is. Keywords can be, and often are, relentlessly abused by article writers. You’ve seen these articles, and they may well have put you off article marketing altogether. They are so badly written it looks like the author barely speaks English. This is actually a useful strategy, but you’ll get much better long term results if you respect some simple rules of “keyword etiquette”.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to write an article for on line distribution. Spamming the search engines is a waste of time as any benefit will be very short lived. Let’s compare these techniques side by side…
We’ll offer two short samples side by side. One will be spam, the other will be a real article meant to offer value to publishing websites. We’ll use the “keyphrase” (a keyword using two or more individual keywords is properly called a “keyphrase”) “Philadelphia CPA” in this example.
Keyword Stuffing
A typical keyword stuffed article might look something like this…
“If you are looking for a Philadelphia CPA, look no further than the premier Philadelphia CPA website, PhillyAccounts.com. Your Philadelphia CPA problems are easy for our high quality Philadelphia CPA experts. We have many Philadelphia CPA locations in Philadelphia to meet your Philadelphia CPA needs. You don’t need to go any farther than PhillyAccounting.com to satisfy your Philadelphia CPA needs.
No website with a human moderator will EVER publish this article. It’s spam, pure and simple. Back in the days of yore, like a couple years ago, this type of schwag actually worked. Not any more. Search engines can identify this kind of spam and ignores it.
Search engines can read for context now. They don’t understand meaning the way we do, but they can identify the components of a sentence and this paragraph would fire all kinds of warnings…
“This article is obviously full of keywords and trying to attract our attention, so we’ll mark it down for that. The article also does not seem to be written for a reader, so that’s another few points lost.”
What potential clients think:
“This article doesn’t make any sense and it hasn’t given me any good information. I’m outta here. This practice has no respect for me and is making my search for quality content harder. I don’t consider this company professional and I am likely to use a different business for my accounting needs.”
Doing the Job Right
“If you are a company looking for a Philadelphia CPA, it’s best to be discerning and look around for the firm that’ll be most likely to fit your business needs. Finding a good firm does not have to be a chore if you keep these three simple tips in mind:
* A good CPA won’t be afraid to provide real evidence of their skills, such as testimonials, figures and other useful information.
* An experienced CPA will generally attempt to make a good estimate of the price of a tax project up front.
* Putting off your CPA can be an expensive mistake so find someone you like. Trust your instincts. If you feel like an accountant is hiding something move on even if you don’t know exactly why.”
The search engines see this as a real article…
“This article is clearly written for a real person to read and includes bullet points and proper information about a real topic. We believe this article is relevant to the keywords incorporated and will rate it more highly in our search results.”
What potential clients think:
“This company obviously cares enough about their customers that they’re willing to provide me with decent information and a good read. That’s awesome. I will read this article and click on the links to this CPA website because I feel I can respect their business.”
It’s important when article marketing to write quality content that adds actual value to the publishers’ websites. The basic rule is simple. When you compose a post always write it on the premise that real human beings will uncover it. It will bring in interest from the traffic that reads it, delight your publishers and keep them wanting more, and improve your search engine presense.