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An accounting firm nowhere on Google. Under a year later, number one in Hampshire.

When Cathy and Wayne set out to grow Green Zebra Business Solutions across Hampshire, the firm was nowhere on Google for the searches that matter. 

We rebuilt the website with SEO inside the build, then ran one focused campaign at the county’s bookkeeping and accountancy terms. 

Within a year of the new site launching, Green Zebra sat at number one on Google for “bookkeepers in Hampshire” and in the top three across their core bookkeeping searches.

Client Overview

About Green Zebra

  • Industry: Green Zebra Business Solutions
  • Sector: Accounting & Bookkeeping
  • Services: SEO
  • Date: November 2025 – August 2026
  • Target Location: Hampshire
  • Website: greenzebraltd.com
See the results

What Cathy had to say on the 11th of May, 2026.

The starting point: A strong firm that Google couldn’t see.

  • Invisible for every county term: Accountants Hampshire, Hampshire accountants, accountants in Hampshire, bookkeeper Hampshire, bookkeeping Hampshire and bookkeepers in Hampshire all sat outside the top 100 in November 2025.
  • No coverage of the towns the firm serves: Southampton at 1,000 searches a month, Bournemouth at 870, Basingstoke and Portsmouth at 690 each. Green Zebra worked across all of them and ranked for none of them.
  • Nothing built for the industries they specialise in: Landlords, consultants, HR businesses, restaurants and motorsport each carried real search demand, with no page on the site to answer it.
  • No measurement in place: No GA4 or Tag Manager, no Search Console benchmark, no reporting. There was no way to see what search was doing for the firm, or whether anything was working.
  • Thin technical foundations: Outdated and missing schema, an unrefined sitemap and a robots file sending crawl budget to the wrong places.
  • An authority profile with nothing behind it: No consistent NAP citations across directories and no earned links pointing at the pages that needed to rank.

The results at a glance.

  • #1 – On Google for “bookkeepers in Hampshire”. The firm’s core search, won county-wide.
  • Top 3 – “Bookkeeper Hampshire” climbed from position unranked to position 3. Two of the three core bookkeeping terms now sit in Google’s top three.
  • 11 – New location and industry pages built, from Southampton and Portsmouth to landlords, consultants and restaurants.
  • 66% – Engagement rate from organic visitors, at 51 seconds per session. The most engaged traffic on the site.

What we did: One site, designed around the people it had to win over.

Accounting is a Your Money or Your Life sector. Google will not rank a finance site without strong E-E-A-T, and an owner will not hand over their books to a firm that looks anonymous online.

Everything went at one outcome: own the Hampshire searches an established business owner types when they are ready to change accountant, then answer the situation behind each of those searches on its own page.

Volume for its own sake was never the target. Green Zebra’s ideal client turns over £1 million or more, so we chased commercial county and town terms rather than the informational traffic that fills a report and wins nothing.

Everything measured before anything was changed.

  • GA4 and Google Tag Manager implemented across the site.
  • Google Search Console set up and every target keyword benchmarked, so the starting positions went on record.
  • A live Looker Studio dashboard built, pulling GA4 and Search Console into one view.
  • Keyword research and mapping, matching every opportunity to a specific page in a hub and spoke structure.
  • Four audits inside the first month: content, on-site, off-site and technical.

One hub, with every town and sector sitting under it.

  • A “who we work with” category page built as the hub, holding every location and industry page beneath it.
  • Location pages mapped to the towns Green Zebra actually serve, not a scattergun list of postcodes.
  • Industry pages mapped to the sectors the firm wanted to win.
  • Internal linking structured so authority passes from the hub down to the pages that need it.

Written for the owner reading it.

  • Location pages for Hampshire, Southampton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Basingstoke and Andover.
  • Industry pages for small businesses, landlords, consultants, HR businesses, restaurants and motorsport.
  • A reusable tabbed accordion template built once, then rolled out across the key pages.
  • FAQ sections written and added to the Hampshire, Southampton, Basingstoke and Portsmouth pages, capturing long-tail questions and answering the objections that stop an owner enquiring.
  • Every page uploaded, formatted, internally linked and given its own meta data, rather than handed over as a document to deal with later.

Technical SEO: The signals Google reads.

  • Two schema audits, with new Organisation, Service, FAQ and Review markup written and validated.
  • The XML sitemap reviewed and rebuilt so only indexable priority pages sit inside it.
  • The robots file refined to stop crawl budget going to duplicate and low-value URLs.
  • Schema added to each new page as it went live, instead of retrofitted months later

One quality link a month, nine months running.

  • A DA 30 do-follow guest post every month on a relevant niche blog, all pointing at the Hampshire accountants page.
  • A natural anchor mix led by accountants Hampshire, balanced against brand and domain anchors.
  • Directory listings submitted with consistent NAP details, building the trusted citations local search runs on.
  • No bulk link spam and no private blog networks at any stage of the campaign.

The rankings: The county’s bookkeeping terms, won from nothing.

Green Zebra started at zero. All three core bookkeeping terms sat outside the top 100 in November 2025.

By the summer, the firm held number one on Google for the search that matters most.

What this meant for Green Zebra

  • #1 on Google for “bookkeepers in Hampshire”:

    The firm’s core commercial search, won across the whole county, from outside the top 100.

  • “Bookkeeper Hampshire” at position three:

    Also unranked a year earlier. Two of the three core bookkeeping terms now sit in Google’s top three.

  • Relevance beat authority:

    National directories and comparison sites hold these results with decades of citations behind them. A page written for the exact search, sat on clean technical foundations, is what got past them.

  • Organic is the most engaged traffic on the site:

    A 66% engagement rate at 51 seconds a session. People arriving from search searched for exactly what Green Zebra do, landed on a page written for that search, and stayed.

  • The traffic is spread across the site, not stacked on the homepage:

    Eleven new location and industry pages pull visitors in on their own terms, each answering one search rather than describing the firm in general.

Results Carousel

What Cathy says

“We’re right at the top of Google search on certain keywords, and that’s definitely driving more traffic and more engagement to our business.”

  • “We engaged with HandL Agency around a year ago as a website revamp and they were wonderful. They explained things in really easy terms and they are incredibly easy to work with.”
  • “Our website is looking phenomenal. On top of that they also then helped us with our SEO.”
  • “They’ve been incredibly proactive, hugely supportive and super patient with us, as we’re not the most techie business out there.”
  • “Our tracking for page views has increased significantly.”
  • “If you’re looking for somebody to help you with the back end of your business, driving through new clients and referrals, I would highly recommend HandL Agency.”

Cathy Vass, Director, Green Zebra Business Solutions

Your firm could be our next success story.

In 45 minutes, we will show you exactly where you are losing hours, where your pipeline is leaking clients and the two or three things that would make the biggest difference to your firm in the next 90 days.

Whether that is AI, marketing or both, you will leave the call with a clear picture you did not have before.

If a meeting does not suit, you can reach us on 0117 457 6659, email contact@handlagency.com or message us on WhatsApp.

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