Lead Generation For Accounting Firms | Accountants Leads

James Dooley: Hi so today I'm joined with Kazra Dash and we're talking about lead generation for accounting firms. So Kazra if you're an accountant and you're looking to grow daily leads what do you think the main ways are to try and build more leads for your accountancy firm?

Kasra Dash: I think one of the main ways is doing local SEO so ranking within your local area so if somebody's searching for accountants London or accountants or chartered accountant Edinburgh you're actually showing up within the map pack and also in your local area as well.

James Dooley: Yeah so obviously within the map pack that used to be called GMB SEO now it's changed to GBP Google Business Profile. So with regards to can that does that generate some inquiries and some leads?

Kasra Dash: Yeah for sure that typically generates a lot of phone call inquiries because a lot of people are on their mobile. If you're searching it on your actual desktop like your computer it actually links through to your website so you'll probably get some more web lead submissions as well or web form submissions people call them. So doing that definitely does help there's a lot of accountants that we've obviously helped as well doing that exact same method.

James Dooley: So that's local SEO leads then what about SEO leads using organic SEO from your website not from your Google Business Profile?

Kasra Dash: Yeah so when it comes to ranking organically your website there's a variety of different ways to actually do that. So for example you can go after keywords like payroll accountant in Bolton or you could go after R&D tax specialist accountant in Manchester. All of these keywords they get maybe I don't know 20 30 searches a month but when you start going after each of these services individually on your website you're going to start to scale out your website a lot and you're going to get a click and also traffic every single month.

James Dooley: Which sounds great but as we all know search engine optimisation isn't quick so if someone wants leads tomorrow and they're saying SEO is too long term for me there's too many different SEO agencies out there that promise the world and they don't deliver the results so I don't want to be buying SEO leads I want to be doing let's say pay per click. So what's your thoughts on PPC for lead generation specifically for accounting and accountancy firms?

Kasra Dash: Yeah so every single strategy that we're going to talk about today obviously has got its pros and cons to each. SEO is a long term play. PPC is a lot quicker to get results. You can literally set up a campaign in an afternoon and very quickly you should be able to start generating some form of inquiries. Now the downside to PPC like anything is that you can overspend on PPC you can obviously not have a good PPC agency for example and they could not be keeping your negative keyword list up to date so there are some downsides and obviously you do have click fraud as well. So for anybody that doesn't know any of this PPC is the paid listing at the top of Google and in some cases your competitors click on your PPC listings trying to spy on what you're doing and that can very quickly burn out your PPC budget because every time somebody clicks on a PPC listing it charges you.

James Dooley: So PPC leads generally can cost a lot more money but you can generate the results faster. The downside the minute you stop paying your listing's gone. SEO more of a long-term strategy for generating leads costs more long term but you've got long-term sustainable consistent flow of inquiries coming in. What about social media ads so like YouTube ads Twitter ads Facebook ads what's your thoughts on that for trying to grow leads for an accountancy company?

Kasra Dash: Again if you are trying to do it yourself it's going to be very hard to set up like anything so I would recommend just hiring someone to do it. But for example there's a lot of accountancy firms that offer a free company tax audit and that's their way of essentially trying to win a company tax refund and stuff so you could potentially go down that route. The only issue you've got is Facebook ads kind of similar to PPC it is getting expensive over time because there's more people actually advertising on it. So I mean it can definitely work but like anything even like with PPC you just need to spend a lot of time on it.

James Dooley: Yeah I think with regards to social media ads for lead generation specifically for accountancy firms you need to if you're going to do it you need to have the hook like you said you need to have a great offer that's going to grab a business owner's attention to say actually I might check this out this seems like a great opportunity. If you're just saying we can do your year end accounts you're like well so can loads of other accountants. So there needs to be some sort of hook and some sort of offer there if you're trying to run social media ads specifically for lead generation. Then the last one lead generation companies. So there's many companies out there like Bark and many others that sell leads on a cost per lead basis. What's your thoughts on the cost per lead lead generation model?

Kasra Dash: So the cost per lead generation model can definitely work but when you're dealing with some of these bigger companies you typically see that they actually sell the lead to like four five different accountancy firms. So let's say for example if we're competitors and Steve down the road's also a competitor we're all paying 25 pounds for that lead so Bark has made 75 pounds from us and we're all fighting over the exact same lead. So it's kind of like well how much are you going to charge the potential lead? Okay you're doing 400 I'm doing 500 Steve's doing 600 so you're ultimately going to win that job. So it's kind of like driving each other's prices down. Whereas with Fat Rank it's completely different. So I would say that the cost per lead model works if you're getting exclusive leads but with a lot of the actual lead generation companies or the bigger ones that are well known they're not exclusive leads at all you're actually sharing the leads.

James Dooley: For sure for anyone that doesn't know if you head on over to Fatrank.com they've got a lead generation model which is zero risk for accountancy companies. What actually happens is we do a blended mix of everything we've spoken about here so search engine optimisation pay per click in Google AdWords social media ads whatever we think would work best for your accountancy company depending on where you're based we would do all that at our cost we would provide you with the leads you don't pay anything for the inquiries you only pay on converted jobs so it is literally a no win no fee lead generation model. But we are quite selective with who we choose. So with regards to obviously Fat Rank's model supplying inquiries for accountancy firms how would you say would you say just throw all your eggs in the one basket for using Fat Rank as a lead generation company and that's it?

Kasra Dash: No definitely not I think it's silly to just do that. What I would be looking to do is going and testing out a few different lead generation companies and picking out the best. Look at the ROI look at the KPIs of each individual lead generation business that you're actually spending money on and potentially you might start off with investing into five different ones and then at the end of it you might say right I'm going to stick with these two.

James Dooley: For sure in my opinion if you're an accountancy company what you should be doing you should be setting certain budgets proportioned to each one of the things that we've mentioned. So having some long-term investment into your SEO also looking to do it to improve your branding online having some like even if it's just for your brand terms on PPC for brand protection then making certain that you're active on social media organically if you can run retargeting get your retargeting pixel set up that means if someone comes through to your website and doesn't inquire you can be retargeting them on Facebook or on YouTube and stuff like that and then using one or two different lead generation companies heading over to Fatrank.com. We don't accept all companies we need to make certain that you're good enough to be able to take the leads and respond to the leads in an efficient manner but if you are accepted that could just be one way of you generating a consistent flow of quality inquiries for your accountancy firm.