SEO for accountants who are tired of waiting on the next referral.

Six to twelve months for meaningful results, and anyone promising faster is selling you something. It usually arrives in an order. Local searches move first, often inside 60 days, because the map pack is the least competitive thing you’ll compete for. Service page rankings follow at three to six months. Authority from content and links compounds after that. You’ll see movement in Google Search Console long before you see it in the diary, which is why we report on leads rather than impressions.

Yes, and it’s usually the fastest win available. Even firms serving clients nationally get most enquiries from a radius, because a business owner handing over their books wants to know they could sit across a table from you if it came to it. Local SEO puts your firm in the map pack for local searches, where national accountancy firms rarely compete. Get your Google Business Profile right, request reviews properly instead of hoping for them, and the local business enquiries start arriving with a postcode attached.

By choosing what you rank for. A firm that ranks for “tax return help” gets sole traders. A firm that ranks for “tax planning for company directors” gets retainers. Same keyword research process, different target audience. We map every term to who’s typing it and why, build your service pages around the searches your right clients run, and leave the rest alone. You’ll get fewer enquiries. More of them will be worth answering.

Every core service, yes. One page trying to cover tax planning, payroll, audit and R&D will rank for none of them, because the search engines can’t tell what it’s about and neither can the reader. Each of your accounting services needs its own page, built around the searches for that service and tied together with internal links so authority flows between them. Specialist services are usually where the fees are and where the competition is thinnest, so those web pages earn their keep fastest.

No. We write it, a partner reviews it for accuracy. That’s the only part we can’t do without you, because website content about tax has to be right and only your team can sign that off. What you won’t get is keyword stuffing or another blog post about Making Tax Digital that says nothing. Content marketing works for accountancy firms when the content is worth a prospective client’s time, and it keeps working for years after it goes live.

They do different jobs. Paid advertising brings enquiries this week and stops the day you stop paying. Organic search takes longer and keeps going. Most marketing strategies for accounting firms use both, with ads covering the gap while SEO builds. If you can only fund one, organic search is the better bet for a firm with a long client lifetime, because you’re buying an asset instead of renting attention. Just don’t expect it in month one.

Ask for three things. Google Search Console access, so you can see the searches you’re showing up for and your real keyword rankings. Google Analytics access, so you can see what organic traffic does once it lands. And the list of terms they’re targeting. If those terms are questions rather than hiring intent, you have your answer. Both tools are free, the accounts should be in your name already, and an agency reluctant to hand them over is telling you something.

Google gives ten results and lets the reader choose. AI search engines give three names and a reason. The work overlaps but it isn’t the same. Traditional SEO for accountants gets you into the results. Getting named in Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT needs content structured so a machine can lift a clean answer out of it, schema markup and structured data so it knows what your firm is, and enough corroboration elsewhere that it trusts the answer. Do both. They feed each other.

Usually, yes. Google indexes the mobile version of your accounting website first, so if it’s awkward on a phone it’s awkward for the search engines. Core Web Vitals are confirmed ranking factors, which in plain terms means page speed and how the page behaves while it loads. HTTPS matters more for financial websites than most, because you’re asking small businesses to hand over their books.

None of that wins you rankings on its own. It’s the floor. Fix the technical performance first and on page optimisation starts working. Skip it and you’re publishing good content onto a site that can’t carry it. We check all of it in the free SEO audit before we quote, because there’s no point selling you content if the foundations won’t hold it.

More than most agencies would like you to know. Google Keyword Planner and Google Search Console are free tools and they’ll tell you what your firm already ranks for and what people type before they land. Start there.

Then the basics: put the target keyword in your page titles and meta descriptions, give each core service its own page instead of one page covering everything, and claim your Google Business Profile properly. Write one genuinely useful article for the clients you want and see what it does. Educational content works for accountancy firms because business owners research a financial decision before they make it, and the firm that answered the question is the firm they call.

Do that and your SEO efforts will already be ahead of most firms. Our free library has the checklists and templates if you want them. You don’t need us to start.