Optimise your QBO Profile - Part 1: How to get to #1 and stand out in the search

Hey, welcome. Are you a QBO Pro Advisor? Well, if you are, in this video, you're going to discover how you can use your QBO Pro Advisor profile to go to number one in the rankings and to stand out. You're also going to learn about how a bookkeeper got 70% of her business from her profile and over a few years, generated almost half a million dollars in in new clients. Now, what you're going to discover in this video, it's from a live webinar we did for the Value Pricing Academy community. The webinar was delivered by one of our star trainers in the academy. Her name is Jessica Fox. She's an amazing bookkeeper from Florida in the US and at the end of this video, I'm going to share with you some free stuff I have for you. So let's hop over now, and here's some great insights from Jessica.

Thank you, Mark. And hello, everybody. If you haven't met me, I am Jessica Fox, and I am the founder of Florida Virtual Bookkeeper. I have been in the accounting industry for over two decades. But when I started, I was a corporate bookkeeper, and I didn't have my own business. So when I decided to start my own business, I really knew nothing about marketing and sales. I had this mentality of, I'll build it and they will come. I build a website, I tell the world I'm open, and the leads will just come.

If you've tried that approach, you may have found that that's not quite how it works.

So months went by, and I'm like, okay, my website is live. Come on. Where are the people and crickets? And I am twiddling my thumbs. At that time, I was transitioning from supporting any accounting software out there. If you have a pulse, I don't care what you're using, I'll serve you to specializing in just QuickBooks. So since I passed the QuickBooks certification examination, I got the opportunity to be included and to have a profile in the QuickBooks ProAdvisor directory. That is one of the great perks that you have because only those that have been certified can be listed in that profile. So I thought, great. I filled out that profile. I just took just a few minutes. I hit publish, and once again, I sat and waited. Once again, nothing was happening. It wasn't until about a year later, in 2016, when I was talking to my Intuit contact. Back then, Intuit actually used to give us a dedicated account manager. They told me, hey, we just revamped our ProAdvisor profile. And I looked at yours and I think that there are some things you can do to make it better. I'm like, oh, really? Let's hear it. I really didn't know that there were any best practices. I just created my profile.

I got some tips from Intuit directly on how I can improve and optimize my profile. And it really worked. It didn't take long to implement and then the leads started to come in. So today I will be sharing some of those things that I learned and the tweaks that I implemented that made me successful because it took me a few more years before I got the hang of marketing. So for about four years, the QuickBooks ProAdvisor directory accounted for about 70% of my revenue. The rest was referrals. So for something that is free, it can be very valuable. I haven't done the exact math, but I would say about half a million dollars worth of revenue in the last few years have come from the ProAdvisor directory. So it can be very underutilized and very ignored because you think, oh, my profile is just lost there. But there are things that you can do to stand out. So I am going to show you now what this looks like. I am in the ProAdvisor website.

And this is a website that a lot of people think, well, prospects are not Googling QuickBooks ProAdvisor. They're not going to find this. But believe it or not, they are routed to this website many different ways. Is LinkedIn within their product in QuickBooks online?

When somebody reaches out to QuickBooks support, and QuickBooks support is meant to really help with the technical issues. If the software is not working right, if you're getting an error, if the customer is asking for accounting questions, they direct them to this website. Also, those that may have tried to use QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping, and they're not really a good fit because they have a very narrowly defined ideal client, they are sent to this directory. So there are a lot of eyeballs on this website every day. I don't know the most recent count, but the last time there was a virtual QuickBooks Connect, it was announced that this website gets about a million views per year. That's a lot of potential customers. The one thing about this site is that it's based on location. So as a virtual business, I can serve anybody, anybody, anywhere in the United States. Doesn't matter if they're in Hawaii, in Alaska, I am all the way down in Florida, and that's not a problem. But those are not the people that will find me here. The people that find me here in the ProAdvisor website are those that are in my area. So I'm going to do a search for my zip code and show you what we get.

Look who's there at the front. Look familiar? One of the reasons why I am successful in getting leads from the ProAdvisor profile is because I am ranking number one in the search results. And there are several things that account for that. And I will make sure that you know those tips and tricks that I've implemented to help you also rank high. Because it's not just about having a profile. You also need to be found in the search results. If you're buried 10 pages down, prospects aren't going to click that far. And when prospects are seeing so many options, you need to stand out to make them want to click and contact you. So now I'm going to show you some of the things that I did that I learned that affect your ranking in search results.

Intuit tends to from time to time, adjust the algorithm, the ranking, but these things I have found that years later are still accurate. And that one number one is having reviews. If you do not have reviews on your profile, start getting them. Start asking all of your clients, past clients, anybody you've ever worked with, start collecting those reviews. Because when everything else is equal, having reviews is going to move you to the top.

And they don't need to be long reviews. I tell my clients one sentence because really what the algorithm is looking is for the five stars. It's not looking for a whole lot of detail in the actual meat and body of that review.

Another thing that affects where you land in the search results is what types of certifications you have. When two Pro Advisor profiles are equal in all other criteria, the one that is Advanced Certified will rank higher. So if you haven't done that yet, I recommend that you add that to your to do list for this year. I find that advanced certification, not only does it help me with ranking, but I learn all of this cool tips and tricks and workarounds about the software that the majority of other provisors don't know. So you are getting tangible skills out of it. It's not just, oh, I have to take this test so that I can rank higher. There are a lot of benefits to that. And the more certifications you have, some people will argue that it will rank higher. In my experience, that has not been the case. But it ultimately depends on who you are trying to serve. If you are supporting QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Payroll, the Point of sale which is being eliminated now. But until now that was a certification option. If you serve those, then yes you want to collect those badges because prospects do have the option of filtering when they are searching to only view proadvisors that are certified in that. But like me, I do not support desktop or enterprise. I specialize in QuickBooks Online. There is no point in me paying to get those certifications and maintain them. And I haven't found that they hurt me because those are not my ideal clients anyway.

Then the other thing that plays a role is location. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a location based directory because it has been around since long before virtual bookkeeping was a thing. If you work brick and mortar first to face whether you have an office or you visit clients, that is great for you. If you work virtually, it means that you're going to be attracting a narrow radius of prospects. For me the average radius is 10 miles. Sometimes I will have somebody from the next town over contacting me, but that is not that common. Now the challenge with this is that depending on where you live there can be lots of competition. I live in what's considered a medium city in Florida, so when you saw earlier and I searched my zip code there were 22 results. Back when I lived in Miami, Florida it was about three times that. So if you live in a large metropolitan area, just keep in mind that there may be more pro advisors that you are competing with and it can become like a little fun little game to try to outrank because these rankings are dynamic. There are some times where I check and I am number two, I'm like oh, okay, well that just means I am going to ask for another review to get back to number one. And it can become a fun little game. Lately I haven't had time for that. But years ago there was this little bit of competition with a local bookkeeper and it's really invigorating to see that because it motivates us to keep constantly innovating. When you do a search in the proprical profile directory, you can search by zip code or by city where you end up in the results can vary depending on how that person search. When I had shown you the example earlier, I had searched by zip code so I was number one. But if I search by city I live in Port St. Lucie, Florida, I am number two and that's okay. I am still top three which is my goal. So don't be too bogged down about the location because that's not Something that you can really control. Over the last few years, Intuit has been cracking down on proadvisors misleading about their location. So you cannot just say, well, I'll enter a zip code from a different area where I have less competition. Because now they have a process. Whenever you update critical information in your profile like that, they will ask for verification. And you may have encountered this where your profile may have been temporarily unpublished. And then they're asking you to upload your id, to upload your business license or articles of incorporation because they are wanting to make sure that only legitimate proadvisors that are looking for clients are listed. I know that not everybody likes that approach, but I will tell you it really cleaned out a lot of garbage out of directory because before they did that, anybody could Sign up for QuickBooks Online Accountant, pass the very easy basic test. And then they have a profile. And some of those profiles were really bad. They were essentially examples of things not to do. Now something else that affects your ranking is having a photo. Now there's two things about photos from the Intuit side. They just care that you have one. If your profile does not have a photo, you will rank lower than those that do later on. I will go into additional details on some best practices for the photos from the human perspective, from the eyeballs that are going to be looking at that photo. But for now, if you do not have one in your profile, that's a quick and easy fix. It only takes seconds to upload and then that will help with your positioning. Then the other thing that Intuit ranks, and this one, I will tell you, I've been doing some experimentation over the years and I don't understand their algorithm. Maybe they're tweaking with it is responsiveness. Intuit wants pro advisors to reply to their leads in a timely manner. It doesn't mean that when somebody contacts you at three in the morning, you. You are supposed to get up and reply immediately, but they want to know that you replied. Now, there's different ways that prospects can contact you through the profile. They can call your number, they can click on your website link, they can click on any of the social media profiles that you may have added. Or they can use the contact form. There is a contact form on the profile itself and that's the most common method. And that's what Intuit is looking for, where if somebody fills out that form that you are replying relatively quickly. How quickly? I haven't seen a figure. But I recommend the best practice reply by the next business day. I Personally don't like to reply as soon as the message comes in because many of my leads coming on weekends and evenings, that's when the business owner is thinking about it and doing it, which is fine. But I also don't want to give the impression that I am working at that time and that I will reply immediately. So I personally build that expectation that I reply during business hours.

Now it's important if you are not getting these notifications that somebody contacted you via the form that you address that because there's two ways that intuit lets you know you got a message. One is in your QuickBooks Online Accountant platform, but it's not front and center. Unless you are going to the ProAdvisor section and there's this very easy to miss leads section, you are not going to see it. So the second way and what I recommend is email. Now, most of us, the email that is in our QuickBooks account is our primary email. But I have talked to some proadvisors that perhaps they've had this account for years and they set it up over an old email address that they used back then, but now they have a branded email or they may have rebranded and used a different address for day to day communications. So in those if that is you, you are putting yourself at risk of not replying to things timely. So there are two things that you can do. Number one, you can update the email address that it comes to your new one on. Number two, slightly more technical, you can set up a forwarding rule so that old email address you get notified a new one, there is a message that you need to reply to. So you determine which one is the best approach for you.

So the goal when you are optimizing your profile is you want to be the top result. Now I know that that's easier said than done, especially if you're starting out and you don't have any reviews yet and there's somebody in your area that has 60 reviews that can feel kind of daunting. But just chip away at it because eventually you can inch your way up. And the thing that you want to aim for is to be one of the top three results, preferably first and second, but third is also pretty good. Now why is ranking high important? A lot of people think, well, you know, I'm not number one, I'll just land wherever I land. This is why when somebody contacts a Pro Advisor using that form that I was talking about, which is the most frequently used method, even though they didn't click on your profile, if you're first or second, they're gonna get this pop up that gives them the option to reach out to other pros as well. I blurred this information because I didn't ask permission for these pros to blast their face all over. But essentially I just sent a message to myself and I got this pop up to be able to contact the other top two contacts. So that's an easy way to get more people to contact you even if they didn't click on your profile.

So definitely something to strive for if you are able to.

Wow, wasn't that extraordinary? Jessica is amazing. So if you've got some value from that, please click the thumbs up the like button if you got some value from that. And also if you want to get notified of more videos as we put them onto our channel, then make sure you hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. But also whether you haven't have or haven't subscribed yet. Also hit the bell notification because that will tell you then as we upload brand new videos okay, I said at the outset I would share with you some free resources. Let me tell you what what they are. So a little while ago I did a research study of thousands of bookkeepers and accountants to look at how do we price bookkeeping services. And I'd like to give you a completely free copy of that research report. I will put the link below the link to go to when you go to the page to grab your free copy, you can actually choose whether or not you want a version that we did for the us, Canada or the uk. So we have three versions. The next free resource I have for you as well as pricing bookkeeping, another thing the profession struggles with is pricing cleanup work when the books and records are a mess. So a little while ago I wrote a 28 page ebook teaching how to price cleanup projects. If you'd like a copy of that again below this video I will share the link so you can grab your copy of that. And if you really love free stuff, then I put another link below where which is to my LinkedIn profile. You see, when you connect with me on LinkedIn, I will then send you a message usually within a few days with some links to some other resources. So go and check out those links. They are below. Now people often say to me so Mark, where should I go next with your stuff? And as you can perhaps tell, I run the Value Pricing Academy. It's a a membership platform, but you have to be. You have to wait until we open it. It's not open all the time. So my advice to people when they say what should I do next? Is always start with the free stuff. Check out my YouTube videos, come to my free live streams, check out my free resources like the ones below. When you are ready and you want to move to another level, get deeper training, I always recommend the next place to go is what we call the Profitable Growth Account Academy, which is always open. It's our entry level academy. I will put the link below. It'll take you to a page that looks something like this. You'll see a video from me. It also talks about the four foundations that we teach. Videos from me on how to build a more profitable accounting firm. But most important, the things that people love the most about the Profitable Growth Academy is every month you, you get 90 minutes of live training with Jessica Fox. So you've met Jessica now on video and she teaches some amazing stuff every single month live for 90 minutes. So click on the link, find out more about the academy and I will hopefully see you on one of those sessions at some point in the future. Finally, what you've just seen is a quick introduction to this topic of how to maximize optimize your QBO Pro Advisor profile. This there's more for you. You see, there's another video I'll put a. We'll put somewhere on here the next video in the series. And what you will learn in the next video is what Jessica's going to start talking about is the three things that you need to do to get prospects to click on your profile. She'll also talk as well about what to do with negative reviews. So if you want to learn more about optimizing your QBO Pro Advisor profile, then check out the next video in the series and you'll get more from the Amazing Jessica. Okay, bye for now.