Improving your accountancy firm’s website ranking
It’s the million-dollar question: How can I improve my accountancy firm’s website ranking? Every business wants to ensure they’re ahead of the competition in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and that they’re picking up more traffic (and hopefully more leads) than their rivals. But it’s not a simple case of altering some code or adding some content. Improving your ranking requires effort and, unfortunately, time – that commodity we all lack.
The good news, however, is that there are some key actions you can take to get off to the right start. In this guide, we’ll talk you through how to assess the Core Web Vitals of your site, determine how to improve page speed, and track your performance over time.
What are Core Web Vitals?
First things first: let’s explain what we mean when we talk about Core Web Vitals.
Google has developed a set of three page speed metrics, which measure and rate different aspects of a user’s experience on your website. These are the Core Web Vitals. They include:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly does the main page content render?
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Is the page layout stable after rendering?
First Input Delay (FID): How quickly does the page react to user input?
To enjoy improved rankings in the SERPs, it’s important to improve your Core Web Vitals. So, how do you go about doing that?
- Assess your Core Web Vitals
Your Google Search Console provides comprehensive reporting on how well your website performs in search results. Using the tool, you can find out how your Core Web Vitals are performing. Simply select ‘Core Web Vitals’ in the left-hand menu and the display will show you how many of your URLs are ‘poor’, ‘good’, and ‘need improvement’. If you only have ‘good’ URLs, well done! You don’t have to do anything else.
If, however, some of your URLs are rated as ‘poor’ or ‘need improvement’, there’s work to be done. This work can then result in better rankings.
- Identify slow pages
Individual pages that are slow to load can pull down the metrics of the rest of your site. Perhaps the pages have video content or messy code – whatever the reason, you’ll want to locate and repair those that are returning a ‘poor’ or ‘need improvement’ score.
On the same Core Web Vitals display will be an option to ‘open report’. Select this for either your mobile or desktop data, and click on any of the issues listed under ‘Why URLs aren’t considered good’. You can then see data for individual URLs, and use the data provided to inform your next steps.
- Monitor key pages
By monitoring for poorly performing pages, you can determine whether your efforts are having a positive impact. Decide which pages you’re going to monitor (these should be ‘poor’ URLs, key high-traffic pages, and equivalent competitor pages), and benchmark the current performance.
Your benchmarks should centre around the three elements identified above: LCP, CLS and FID. Using a tool such as DebugBear, you can discover the elements on your pages that may be causing a less than satisfactory score, and measure their load time.
- LCP measures how soon after navigation the largest content element appears on the page. This is commonly an image or video. The tool will show you the current load time and make recommendations for improving it.
- CLS measures how stable the layout is after rendering. The tool can tell you which page elements change position after the initial load, and again offers recommendations for improvement.
- FID measures how soon after a user interaction the page starts processing any user input. It’s difficult to replicate this with a tool, but you can identify long Central Processing Unit (CPU) tasks that might impact the speed at which the page handles user input.
- Begin optimising
When you have made a note of the current speeds and identified recommendations that can be implemented, it’s time to begin optimising your Core Web Vitals. Typically, you might implement the smaller, easier changes first and monitor how much difference this makes to your URL scores. Here are some improvements you might need to make:
Optimising images is a simple way to improve the LCP score. There are lots of tools that can help you compress imagery without losing quality.
Specifying room for images and graphics can help the loading to remain stable when slower-loading content appears – and therefore improve the CLS score. How many times have you thought that a page has loaded, then gone to click on a button only to find that it shifts, and you end up clicking a different button? By specifying room for images and graphics – that is, by adding dimensions for them in the CSS – you can avoid that content shift that causes frustration for users.
Deferring JavaScript loading helps to boost your FID score by loading JavaScript elements after other page content, rather than forcing the page to wait until all files have finished loading before displaying the content.
Caching content enables you to store static HTML versions of your pages, and can reduce the load on your server. This creates faster loading times whenever a user re-visits your site.
Implementing lazy loading prompts images to load as users scroll down, rather than allowing them to load alongside the other content, thereby slowing it down. Not only is site speed improved by this, bandwidth usage can also be limited, and visitors will be less likely to leave your page in frustration, which results in a higher bounce rate.
Help with Core Web Vitals and SEO
Here at Whitefish Marketing, we specialise in SEO services for accountants, and can help you assess the performance of your Core Web Vitals and make improvements that will boost your rankings. Whether you have specific issues that need attention, or simply need assistance with improving your online presence, our experts in accountancy marketing can develop a bespoke strategy that helps you achieve your goals. Contact our team today for more information.
