If you are looking to grow your practice, SEO is a great resource that will only become more and more relevant in the future. With high SEO ranking - being listed on the first page of the three major search engines - people who are looking for your services can find your website more easily. If you already have a full practice and use your website primarily as a means to communicate with current clients, SEO may not make sense for you.

By definition, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is commonly called, is a way to optimize your website’s performance onsearch engine rankings like Google, Yahoo and Bing. There is a lot of intensive programming that goes into it, but SEO companies take care of that for you and its "back-end," meaning that the appearance and content of your website will be unaffected. SEO companies will build links that go to your website, submit your site to all the major search engines, submit your site to directories, and use many other strategies to gradually bring up your ranking.

Google and the other search engines have algorithms that decide which sites should be ranked at the top for certain keywords. They send out robots (or "spiders") to crawl all the sites on the World Wide Web to gather information. Your website is usually crawled once every few months. Thus an SEO campaign takes at least a few months to be effective and sometimes six months to a year to get your Website up to the top of the rankings. Because of this, most SEO providers have a minimum of a three-to-six-month contract.

The pricing usually starts around $200 per month and goes up from there. Pricing depends on your competition and location. If you are in New York City, it will be much harder to get ranked high for a search like "CPA New York" compared to a local market with less competition like "CPA Tucson." This is because SEO is becoming increasingly popular and in large metro areas like NYC, there are going to be many other competing firms who are also using SEO. Your SEO provider will give you performance reports that will allow you to see who is coming to your website, where they went on the site, what search engines are crawling your site, and other useful pieces of information that allow you to track the success of the SEO campaign.

SEO is not to be confused with Ad Words or Pay-Per-Click. These are also effective ways to market online, but SEO is used for improving your ranking in the organic or "natural" results, not within the sponsored links. Studies have shown that 70 percent of people click on the organic results, as opposed to the sponsored links. Thus SEO is an excellent long-term solution for gaining clients and growing your practice.