The number of management consultants in the US has grown rapidly over the past decade.
In fact, there are now well over 700,000 consultants as of the end of 2019 in the US alone. Not to mention, the top ten consulting firms, including the likes of Accenture and KPMG Advisory, take in more than $130 billion of the industry total $246.5 billion in revenue.
That leaves a very competitive market for smaller consulting firms. With that in mind, we have put together six marketing ideas for consulting firms to improve visibility. That way, even the smaller firms can take their piece of that $246 billion in industry revenue.
Table of contents
1. Start content marketing with a blog to improve your website’s visibility in search engines
Content marketing is a must if you want to stand out in the crowded consulting industry. The fact is, websites that have blogs attract 55% more visitors. Not to mention, B2B companies who blog consistently receive 67% more monthly leads than those that don’t. For consulting firms who can make so much from a single lead, that’s a big deal.
And management consulting firms large and small have taken note.
Here’s one marketing idea for consulting firms, from KPMG advisory, one of the top ten consulting firms in the nation.
They regularly publish on their blog with each industry they provide consulting for having its own unique, well-written content.
Even boutique consulting firms, like Sendero Consulting, have blogs they regularly maintain. Providing advice for clients and site visitors is valuable in so many ways.
Creating a blog can be labor-intensive, but the results for your website are well worth it. Not only is blogging the ideal lead generating tactic, but it also makes your site appear more authoritative and helps position your consulting firm as an industry leader with quality content.
2. Create and optimize your GMB profile to draw in local customers
A Google My Business (GMB) profile is a free tool that allows you to manage your business’ listings, information, and appearances in Google.
For example, a GMB profile will enable Google to rank your consulting business higher in local search results, which appear above organic search results, but below paid ads.
And, your GMB profile will create a listing for your business in Google Maps, as well.
These listings are great inbound marketing tools, and this strategy for consulting firms helps to legitimize your consulting services and target clients looking for your niche services, such as tech or organization design consulting. Plus, through what’s called local search engine optimization, your business appears in top spots in these results, which is incredibly valuable in terms of lead generation.
It’s all free too, so take advantage and claim your GMB profile as soon as possible.
3. Secure citations in business directories to improve local SEO
Local SEO services help to improve the three factors that Google says affect local search results: relevance, distance, and prominence.
One of the ways this is done is by securing citations in business directories that feature consultants. What are citations? They’re an online reference to a business.
Citations help improve a business’s prominence in the eyes of search engines like Google. Not to mention, they can act as lead generators and create a more professional company image.
One of the most recognizable examples of a citation is when a company pays to secure a listing in a general business directory like the Better Business Bureau (BBB). The BBB provides a citation that includes a business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) as well as a link back to their site, a place to leave reviews, and more.
Listings like the one featured above act as permanent inbound marketing sources without you having to put in any effort. Plus, they help with local SEO.
Another common spot to secure citations is in consulting firm-specific directories like this one from Managementconsulted.com.
These directories provide quality citations that are also very relevant, which makes them more useful in the eyes of search engines. Plus, if you want to stand out from the global competition, you can always pay a small fee and be listed in featured spots in the directory, a great marketing idea for smaller consulting firms.
4. Establish your thought leadership by publishing in industry association journals and online publications
Another great marketing tactic to help your consulting firm stand out from the crowd is getting published in industry association journals or online publications. By creating content that shares your expertise freely with other authoritative sites, you can establish your firm as a thought leader.
Take this recent piece that was featured on the high traffic site, the Society for Human Resources Management, entitled 10 Performance Management Tips For Measuring Employee Impact.
Being featured in an article like this is something to point to for clients that illustrates your connection to the community and positions you as a thought leader.
Plus, these pieces are great for search engine optimization (SEO).
Digital PR, much like regular public relations, works to improve brand awareness and reputation.
You are also getting the search engine optimizing benefit of backlinks, which help your website rank for important keywords in search engines. And the higher you rank in search engines, the more inbound leads you’ll receive.
5. Improve your website’s mobile user experience
In the modern marketing world, your website needs to be as mobile-friendly as possible. That’s because a whopping 58% of all Google searches are conducted on mobile phones. And because the decision-makers who solicit consulting services are typically busy executives, a mobile-friendly site ensures you’re as accessible as possible from anywhere.
At the end of the day if 58% of all searches are from mobile customers you have to cater your efforts towards the mobile experience. It should be as smooth as your consulting firm’s desktop version.
Here are a few ways to improve your mobile user experience:
- Use Google’s Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) open-source project. AMP pages are optimized for mobile using CSS code. It can take a few days to convert all your pages to AMP, but it’s well worth the effort for the native feel and insane speed that users will experience.
- Try minifying on-page resources to improve mobile site speed. This means getting rid of any excess, unused code left over when your site goes mobile.
- Compressing images further and removing any unnecessary page elements that slow down mobile speed and hinder UX.
- Use Schema.org structured data to snag rich snippets that stand out even more on mobile phones.
6. Implement on-page optimizations to improve the way Google crawls and indexes your site
Implementing on-page optimizations to improve the way Google crawls and indexes your site can make a huge difference in competing against firms like Bain or Deloitte.
- The most common on-page optimizations include:
-
- Creating keyword-rich title tags
- Ensuring proper use of Headers H1, H2, H3, etc. in order of importance
- Securing authoritative, relevant external links and a consistent internal linking structure
- Creating quality, unique content for a human audience
- Imagining catchy, informative meta descriptions
- Finding quality, unique images and formatting and compressing them correctly.
Most of these on-page optimizations fall under the category of technical search engine optimization (SEO). The goal of technical SEO is to prevent site errors from causing hangups in communication with search engines because that slows organic traffic, which in turn hurts lead generation.
- Common Google crawl errors that optimizations can help avoid include:
-
- DNS errors
- Server errors
- Robots.txt errors
- 404 errors
- Malware errors
- Mobile-specific errors
All of these crawl errors need to be corrected ASAP if encountered, which can be difficult to do without the right experience.
Then, you’ll also need to check proper indexing. All you have to do just input your site’s URL without the “http://” or “https://” prefix into Google with ‘site:’ in front of it.
Like this “site:consultingexample.com”, for example, then the results will show what Google knows about every URL attached to your site.
If you have a larger site, 500+ pages, consider looking into your Index Coverage Report, it shows the indexing state of every URL that Google has visited or attempted to visit from your website.
Ensuring proper communication between your site and search engines is critical to the success of digital marketing strategy for consulting firms. Of course, all of this can get a little complicated–which is where the SEO experts come in.
Need some consulting firm marketing help? Call the experts
If you liked these marketing ideas but need some help with the execution, feel free to contact us for more information. We’d be more than happy to get you started.
And if you feel you can’t do it on your own, we’d be happy to step in and help you increase your business’ revenue with digital marketing and SEO.
Markitors is a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO. We help small businesses rank higher on Google to get more traffic to their websites and increase revenue. Explore what’s in our SEO toolbox: audits and keyword research, digital PR, technical SEO, and local SEO.
