Our previous website was little more than a digital business card containing static information, giving people little reason to come and visit. And it showed! For years, we languished around 500 visits per month. However, last month we had 21,834 visits! How did we do it? This post takes you through our DIY approach to blogging and search engine optimization.

We launched the current version of our website in June 2015. Our website developers, ByteJam, recommended that we blog to increase our website’s search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic, non-paid search engine results. The theory is that the higher your website is ranked and the more times it appears in the search results, the more visitors it will attract. Then, fingers crossed, these visitors can then be converted into customers.

The green bars in the chart above represent visits from organic search. Since we launched, we’ve had 234,573 visits, of which 189,137 visits (or 80% of total visits) were attributed to organic search.

This is awesome! What’s not great is that social media and email marketing only contributed 7,706 visits, or 3.2% of total visits. But that’s a topic for another post!

Visits are one thing, but are the visits coming from the right people?

As you can see, the top three companies visiting our website are: PwC, KPMG, and Ernst & Young. These three firms, along with Deloitte coming in at number six, are the largest accounting firms in the world. They are commonly referred to as the “Big 4.” As a training firm specializing in accounting and auditing training, I like to refer to them as my target clients!

In fact, six of the eight largest accounting firms in the world are in the top 15 companies visiting our website, and a seventh, Crowe Horwath is in the top 25. The only one we’re missing is RSM!

I must admit, I am a little nervous about the entity listed at #15, but hopefully they’re finding value in our blog too!

So, what are they reading?

They are visiting our blogs. In fact, 18 of the top 20 website pages viewed this year were blog posts! The top 10 most viewed pages this year related to the following posts:

1. Step-by-Step – Step 1: Differences in ASC 605 / SAB 104 and ASC 606
   
2. Principal vs Agent? GAAP Revenue Recognition Criteria (ASC 606)
3. Top 5 Biggest Changes with the New Lease Accounting Standard (ASC 842)
4. Don’t Be Scared of Revenue Recognition: Refresher of ASC 605 (SAB 104)
5. Navigating ASC Topic 805: Business Combination or Asset Purchase?
6. Accounting for Business Combinations (ASC 805): Contingent Consideration
7. All in the Family: Accounting for Intercompany Loans under IFRS 9
8. Accounting for Unasserted Claims under ASC 450 (old FAS 5)
9. Shipping and Handling: New Revenue Recognition Standard (ASC 606)
10. Accounting for Uncertain Tax Positions under ASC 740

We publish two blog posts per week, on Tuesday and Friday. The vast majority of our Tuesday posts are instructional posts related to either accounting or auditing. However, we also post about training, including eLearning and microlearning. Occasionally, we do feel-good or company spotlight posts. My personal favorite is our annual post on meme(ories) from the AICPA Conference.

The Friday post is our GAAP Flash. This is a curated post where we select four to five news stories from the past week that we believe are relevant to CPAs, adding our commentary on why we believe readers should care.

So, how did we do it?

There is no doubt that the explosion in organic growth led to more visitors to our website and that these visitors were attracted by our blog. But how? Specifically, I believe following these five steps contributed to our success:

1. Publish great, relevant, and timely content
2. Make the blog posts easy to read and visually appealing
3. Post religiously and never quit
4. Focus on attainable keywords, but not to the detriment of the content
5. Do it for your readers because you want to help, not just for SEO

Perhaps in another blog post, I’ll explore these five recommendations in more detail. However, I’m out of time because another recommendation from ByteJam is that our blog posts stay between 600 and 800 words (which, admittedly, we don’t always do)!

What do you like about our blog? How can we improve? What topics would you like to see discussed? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

As a special gift to our loyal readers, I’d like to offer you an opportunity for free CPE! We’re doing a webinar on May 3, 2018 at 11:00am EST covering the ASUs effective in 2018 and I’d love for you to join. Find out more about the course and register here or click the banner below. Hope to see you there!

Disclaimer  

This post is published to spread the love of GAAP and provided for informational purposes only. Although we are CPAs and have made every effort to ensure the factual accuracy of the post as of the date it was published, we are not responsible for your ultimate compliance with accounting or auditing standards and you agree not to hold us responsible for such. In addition, we take no responsibility for updating old posts, but may do so from time to time.