London Accountancy Firms Face These SEO Issues the Most

Looking at the first 3 pages of the search engine results page (SERP) it was clear to see that many accountancy businesses needed to work on building their backlink profile, as 73% had low-quality websites, or in some cases no websites, linking to them. Many relied on links from directories – a very early SEO tactic that Google has become privy to.

Also, surprisingly, many companies (70%) featured duplicate content on their website – having copied legal definitions of words like “VAT” and “Payroll” from other websites. In some cases, blog posts contained chunks of copied content.

The third most common SEO issue found was a lack of internal linking, with 67% of the sites analysed forgoing internal links. This is important for SEO as it helps Google understand the structure of your site and relationships between your content.

A further 60% did not optimise their pages fully for focus keywords, or at times any keywords at all, and 44% exhibited a below average page speed.

Main Improvements to be Made for Page 3+ Ranking Companies

• User Experience – only 30% of page 3 had ‘good‘ user experience, compared to 62% of page 1.
• Meta Tags – 30% of page 3 results had ‘poor‘ meta tags, as opposed to only 12% on page 1.
• Keyword Optimisation – 80% hadn’t done this to max effect on page 3, opposed to 30% on page 1.
• Internal Linking – 90% of page 3 results had no internal linking, compared to 66% of results on page 1.

Methodology

1. Reboot SEO Agency sought to discover the most common SEO issues faced by accountancy firms in London.
2. Utilising SEMrush, the key phrase accountants in London was chosen on the grounds of average search volumes, as a phrase that most businesses within the industry would like to rank for.
3. Following, a technical SEO audit of the companies ranking on the first 3 pages of Google‘s search results was conducted, in order to determine the most common SEO issues experienced by London accountancy firms.