Recently there have been stories in the news about big accountancy firms and how they have been accused of helping companies and wealthy individuals avoid tax payments.
With this in mind, we have compared the online standings of four top accountancy firms.
The four main competitors (the ‘Big Four’) are Deloitte, KPMG, PwC and Ernst and Young – all of whom have somewhat of a large presence online.
Through extensive research of our own data, we have discovered that there is a clear fight for online dominance, but there are improvements that can be made by all four companies, most notably PwC.
By assessing the results from Neil Walker Digital’ own Insights data platform, we have created this triangular visualisation to give an overview of the UK-focussed site for each company. In the case of KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young, they have correctly (in our opinion) formed the successful strategy of including their global websites with country-specific subfolders.
By contrast, the online strategy for the UK chosen by PwC – a UK focussed domain name that is separate to their .com domain – is one that we feel does not help it to compete effectively with the competition.
Links from sites pointing towards the Big Four
A major factor in determining success in Google searches is the strength of a website in terms of the number of links pointing to it from other quality sites (in this case, such as reputable financial or accountancy news portals). Because PwC choose to split their sites, they make themselves weaker online whilst the competition reap the rewards of all links from other sites pointing to a consolidated, global site.
Because of the pwc.co.uk domain, PwC’s share of inbound links in the UK is only around 3% when compared to the other companies listed in this report. Should they switch to a global site strategy like the others, their link share could be as high as 27%, leaving them a close second behind Deloitte for this statistic. This further highlights the benefits of PwC switching to such a strategy.
The graph below shows just how small the PwC UK site appears to Google when comparing UK search data with the competition. The closer a site is positioned to the top-right of this graph, the better. pwc.co.uk is a distant 4th place as you can see.
Now compare pwc.com to the competition and you can see it’s much more of a fair fight. If the strength of the PwC UK site was added to the .com domain, greater online success would be undoubtedly had – across all search territories.
This circular visualisation shows the number of links that each site has pointing towards it. While this graph doesn’t determine the quality of each link, it is an indicator of the reach that each site has on the web. Once again, the UK site of PwC looks distinctly out of place.
By replacing the UK domain of the PwC site with the .com domain you see that there is much more of a fair fight again, as with the scatter graph example.
If the number of links pointing toward the PwC UK site were pointed to the .com site, this circle would grow even further and be more fitting for a company of such stature.
Offline vs Online
According to data cited by Wikipedia, PwC revenue tops that of the other three companies in the big four. Based upon these figures, you could argue that online, PwC are underperforming.
This is our point of view about the big four online.
We want to know yours. Let us know at [email protected] or tweet us @theukseo