We understand that the radical accountant of today is more CFO than number cruncher and more tax planner than tax preparer. Those are the types of professionals we attract and help to market. If you are looking to grow your practice, command higher fees and convert more referrals to clients, you need to start utilizing the power of the web to build your brand.Aside from your email newsletter, organic search is the #1 driver of traffic to your website; 60% of direct traffic is actually organic search traffic. That is the good news. The bad news is that if your website is having problems ranking, you will have fewer visitors to engage with. There is a lot of noise about search engine optimization and how your website should rank in search. The truth is it takes a long time to dominate search results.In this era of intense competition, you have to optimize your brand. How you are displayed online affects every other aspect of your business.

Here are 6 key online marketing strategies to get you started:

1) Embrace social media marketing – Set up and optimize your social media profiles. You want to make sure to use your brand name, whether that is your name or the business name, in these profiles. Try to be consistent. At minimum, you want a presence on the major sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter.

2) Start Blogging – Your business is built on your reputation and expertise. Showcasing your knowledge online and sharing it with clients and prospects is crucial to long-term success. More importantly, by blogging, you will start seeing traffic from long-tailed search terms. Consumers search using sentences, not just keywords. By writing more, you make it more likely that the phrases you write will match with consumers’ search queries.

3) Branded search results - You want to secure your virtual presence so that when a referral or potential client searches for your name or brand in a search engine, they will see only your web pages and profiles will be shown. Here’s a search video tutorial that explains why the difference between branded and non-branded search is important to you.

4) Use review sites to help clients sing your praises – Having more pages with five-star reviews will cause your website to be ranked more highly and your conversion rates to increase. It is important to attract glowing testimonials on Google and your TaxBuzz and CountingWorks profiles—at minimum. Surveys tell us that 88% of consumers trust what they read online.

5) Optimize your website – Is your site mobile-friendly? Do you have different meta titles and descriptions on every page? Do you use the name of the local city in your meta titles and throughout your website? These are all examples of on-page search engine optimization that can help you tell the search engines what your content is about and who should see it.

6) Create trigger points and a lead funnel – One of the biggest challenges facing web marketers is that getting more traffic to your website is meaningless unless the visitors convert. There is no single solution to ensure conversion, however. It takes rigorous testing of different copy and displaying reviews prominently on your website. It takes features such as online appointment-setting, white papers, newsletter opt-ins and compelling “contact us” offers. More importantly, it takes a process for handling new leads once they connect with you. Having more open funnels and trigger points is always better. That is why mastering social media, optimizing your website and reaching out through your email newsletter can deliver such sound and consistent results. If you embrace online marketing and are more responsive to your current clients, you will drive more traffic and convert more prospects into clients. Online marketing is a long-term game; there are no shortcuts. It requires consistency, dedication and wise decisions.