Your Money or Your Life!
Don’t worry, this isn’t a hold-up. It’s a neat summary of how Google prioritises quality content on matters affecting the health, finances or safety of its users.
Businesses operating in professional services such as accountancy, law or security sit firmly within the Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) arena – so providing helpful, reliable and people-first content is essential for making your business visible online.
This should form the core of your digital marketing or multi-channel strategy, ensuring every touch point your potential clients experience demonstrates your experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Read on to learn how to improve your digital footprint.
How to market a professional services firm
At R&Co, the three main marketing channels we use to run campaigns for professional services firms are PR, SEO and social media.
Why? Because PR gets people talking about you and searching for you, SEO ensures they can find you – either by name, product or service – and social media keeps you front of mind and helps drive leads.
How do we use these channels to support professional services businesses that want to improve their online profile?
- PR campaigns, such as the ones we execute for accountants and legal firms, enables us to develop a drumbeat of positive brand awareness, backed up by expert commentary from thought leaders within the business
- SEO is used to make your business more visible in search engines, by optimising content for your key business focuses and service areas, and using it to drive quality leads
- Social media provides another key touchpoint for brand awareness. We use thought leadership, case studies and creative content as part of a full funnel strategy to drive awareness, engagement and leads for your business.
These tactics work best when used together as part of an integrated digital marketing campaign for professional services firms. Plus, they can be targeted to a particular service or product area to increase leads.
Content marketing for professional services
Content marketing is a long-term strategy for growing and retaining customer trust, by providing helpful and trustworthy content which grows the credibility of a business – using both individual staff members and the firm as a whole.
This is also important for building trust and demonstrating authority and expertise to Google. Its priority is to provide the users of its search engine with helpful, reliable, people-first content, especially when it is about Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics.
What does helpful, people-first content look like for professional services?
Most users are looking to solve problems. They need an expert to provide simple answers to often complex financial, legal or business problems.
Before developing a content marketing strategy, you need to understand who your clients are, where they search for the information they need and their knowledge level.
By understanding your target audience and their pain points, you can create a content plan that meets their needs by addressing the challenges they face.
Start by looking at how your potential clients are searching – what are the questions they ask search engines? What social media platforms are they using? Which media titles do they read?
Knowing more about your target audience will help to unlock topics that will resonate with them across all channels.
Use our professional services events and awareness days calendar for timely content inspiration.
How to demonstrate E-E-A-T in professional services
Experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are the essential signals Google looks for both on your website and off site.
What are onsite signals?
These are the signals your website gives to Google to show that you are the authority on this topic.
They can include written and video content that is optimised for relevant keywords and structured in a way that is easy for readers and can be crawled by search engines.
Content that works well includes FAQs, how to guides, thought leadership articles, analysis, data storytelling and business investments, appointments and promotions.
Bio pages for staff members are also valuable for demonstrating expertise and experience. Ensure you list relevant qualifications and industry experience, and include links to LinkedIn profiles and other professional networks. Also add links to recent blog posts or articles that they have written.
Having authored articles on your website is also beneficial. These should link to the author’s bio page to reinforce to Google that this person is an expert in their sector.
What are offsite signals?
It’s not enough to demonstrate E-E-A-T on your website alone, Google needs to see that users and other websites also value your content.
PR, backlinks from other websites and social media can all be used to gain mentions and recommendations of your brand to show Google that others view your website and content as a valuable resource.
Top tips for demonstrating E-E-A-T
What do E-E-A-T signals specifically look like for businesses within the professional services sector? Our recommendations below act as a useful digital marketing checklist for improving your online visibility and gaining more website traffic and leads.
Experience
- Create bio pages for all staff members
- Add links to LinkedIn profiles from bio pages
- Highlight sector specialists and their areas of expertise
Expertise
- Publish content by named individuals both on-site and off-site, e.g. thought leadership articles, expert commentary
- Demonstrate knowledge through content – create tips and advice and case studies, like our professional services digital marketing case study for Prime Accountants.
- Show relevant industry accreditations
Authoritativeness
- Earn citations on high quality websites through PR
- Gain backlinks from high authority websites
Trustworthiness
- Provide resources that are useful for the user’s journey – FAQs, how to articles
- Achieve third party mentions and endorsements
- Create testimonials to demonstrate success
- Gain positive Google reviews
By building and actioning a digital marketing strategy that incorporates all of the above activities, you can get ahead of your competitors in search engines and social media, while building trust among your audience.
Marketing for professional services
Digital marketing for professional services can align with long-term commercial goals and be used to generate high-quality leads.
If you are looking for an agency to put the above into practice for you then contact our team.
We can provide advice and support to increase the number of leads your digital marketing generates.
Talk to our professional services PR and marketing team today.
