Low Volume, High-Quality Leads

for Recurring Revenue Clients

A Single Location Service Area Business SEO Case Study

January 31, 2024

1. SEO Client Overview and Scope

When Chris of Hogan CPA Financial Services first reached out to us in November of 2022, he was in progress of leaving his old firm and starting out on his own. He had a handful of clients that would help sustain him after initially leaving, but was starting his own business from scratch and needed help with his online presence.

In our initial call, Chris mentioned that he didn’t want to focus on individual people needing taxes, but instead a B2B approach as those were going to be more lucrative and better clients for him. One thing I mentioned to him was that I expected the top 10 organic results to produce a higher volume of traffic for him than Google Business Profile, and that Maps metrics will likely be more click-heavy than call heavy. Working in the B2B space before, these are common trends that we have seen across varying industries as B2B clientele are going to be more interested in his expertise and will be more diligent in looking for the right person. This is contrary to a Maps-heavy business like an emergency plumber where someone needs a company to come to their house ASAP. I told him the content on his site is going to be critical for both SEO and conversion.

He showed us the existing site which was was a “generic template” website that had very few details, was not getting any traffic, and wasn’t even ranking well for his brand name. Other CPAs with a last name of Hogan were out ranking him.

After understanding his B2B intentions, we got to working doing some keyword research. We found that people searching for a CPA used keywords related to industry (Real Estate CPA) or by location (CPA Columbus Ohio). Using these details, we recommended to build out specialized pages for each industry he wanted to target and cities/suburbs near his office for people to hire him. These became the focal point of pages to build we were going to build out during the redesign of the site.

As Chris mentioned, he was just starting his business and to accommodate a lower budget, we started with a redesigned site and Chris chose an initial 2 industry pages. We completed the website redesign to make the site more robust, user friendly, added various conversion elements, added pages for all the services he wanted, and made it more SEO friendly. In successive months, we continued to build 2 more industry pages each month and over time, built all industry and location pages for targeting various clientele of his choice. These are now the most trafficked pages on his website as they:

  1. Speak the client’s industry language
  2. Identify the type of products or services his clients provide
  3. Provide detailed information about potential deductions and strategies for their industry
  4. Identify that he’s local and wants to help clients in his town
  5. Are heavily SEO optimized for 1 industry or 1 location

2. Results

Conversion: Web Forms and Google Business Profile

While keywords for his most competitive city are still a work in progress, we focused on targeting long tail keywords and were able to get his website to the #1 ranking for Real Estate CPA and #3 for Real Estate Accountant in his area, among other industry and city related keywords in the top 10 results.

number 1 real estate cpa

In the 13 months of working with his business, his website went from getting zero visits in December of 2022 to reaching 290 organic visits in January of 2024. The website had 1218 organic users out of a total of 1394 users (including non-organic), and 82.5% of his traffic was desktop, which makes sense considering business clientele.

While this may not seem like a lot of traffic, it’s very high-quality and targeted with users spending an average of 2:16 minutes on his site, over 50% more than industry average of 1:30. Out of these visitors, the website converted a total of 85 legitimate lead form submissions on 12 different webpages (excluding 279 spam submissions) which equates to a whopping 6.1% conversion rate! This is excluding any phone call conversions as the client didn’t understand the importance of needing Google Tag Manager to track call conversions (this has now been implemented)

Organic and Total Users from the Hogan CPA site
Form Submission URLs

In many of the form submissions, users are quoting on-site content talking about “1031 exchanges, in-state or out-of-state investors, sales tax difficulties for e-commerce, taxes complications with inherited homes, travel nurses, trucking authorities, telehealth businesses, Youtube revenue” and more.

These are IDEAL clients with businesses that are looking for a CPA and possibly bookkeeping help – meaning recurring revenue clients, not one-off personal taxes clients.

Some examples of these form submissions can be viewed at the bottom of this document as we screenshotted them from the back end of his WordPress dashboard.

Total Form Submissions

Additionally, when we started, Chris had zero presence in Google Maps as his Google Business Profile had yet to be verified even though he initiated the request in October. We got his profile verified at his new office, completed our optimization strategies over a number of months, and got him to be the top business for the keyword “CPA” that is searched over 135,000 times per month. He has the most visibility within a 2-mile radius of his business at 43% visibility with the next competitor at 33%, including surpassing his former employer.

Hogan CPA Maps Rankings - 43% visibility
Hogan CPA Maps Rankings 2 - Graphical overlay of Columbus rankings

Despite success in the maps campaign in terms of getting visibility, performance metrics for the GBP were always relatively low, even being the top ranking company in Maps in his area. While these numbers were lower than we expected, this was something we had anticipated from our initial conversation targeting B2B customers and in an industry that is historically busy between January and April, but slower the rest of the year.

As noted by the client in another meeting, form submissions are actually his preferred contact method as they give him the ability to schedule calls and work on his timeline. Since he is the primary owner-operator without a front desk person, phone call interruptions are less preferred.

NOTE: The client works in a share office building which skews the “direction requests” metric.

GBP metrics for Hogan CPA

3. Client Testimonial

While the SEO campaign is far from complete, it has been very successful for Chris as he has been able to transition into running his business smoothly and was able to hire his first employee internally to help with the workload as he continues to grow and bring on more clients. As he states in the testimonial video, he now has 40 business clients with 38 of them recurring monthly for bookkeeping work.

4. Tasks Completed

On-page Optimization

  • Redesigned Website in WordPress
  • Built 15 industry pages (5 waiting for client review for multiple months)
  • Built 8 location pages
  • Updated page titles for better optimization
  • Added meta titles and descriptions for optimization and conversion
  • Cleaned up and optimized the use of H-tag Headings
  • Added local business schema
  • Add minor interlinking between relevant pages

Off-page Optimization

  • Google Business Profile optimization
  • Built 60 business directories
  • Built 100+ social profiles – FB, Twitter, etc…
  • Secured a total of 36 high-quality links

Actual Submitted Web Forms

Real Estate

Forms Submissions - Real Estate 1
Forms Submissions - Real Estate 2

Healthcare

Forms Submissions - Healthcare

Ecom and Online Businesses

Forms Submissions - Ecom Online Business 1

Trucking

Forms Submissions - Trucking 1

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