SEO for accountants: a practical guide for firm owners

1. Google Business Profile: the cheapest win in local search

If you do one thing this week, claim and verify the profile, then fill in every field.

• Name. Use your firm's real trading name. Adding keywords ("Smith & Co Tax Accountants Brisbane") breaches Google's guidelines and invites suspension.
• Category. Pick the primary category that matches most of your fees, then add secondary categories for the other services you genuinely offer. Choose from Google's list; you cannot invent one.
• Address. This is where firms trip. Google's guidelines say a virtual office (a rented mailing address you do not work from) is not eligible, and a co-working desk only qualifies if it has signage, is staffed in business hours and receives clients. If you work from home and visit clients or work remotely, set yourself up as a service-area business and hide the address.
• Services, description, photos. Each service in plain words; a description that says who you help and how to start; photos of your actual team, not stock.

Then keep it alive: answer reviews, post when a deadline approaches, and check the listing quarterly, because anyone can suggest edits to it. Repeat the same details on Bing Places and Apple Business Connect.

2. Service and location pages

Google ranks individual pages against individual searches. A firm with one "What we do" page listing tax, bookkeeping, payroll, SMSF and advisory has given Google one page to match against five quite different searches, and it will usually lose all five to firms that wrote a page each.

Each service page should answer, in this order:

1. Who this service is for, specifically.
2. What is included and what is not.
3. How it works: the steps, the timing, what you need from the client.
4. What it costs, or how you price it (more on that in our guide to whether to publish your prices).
5. The questions people ask before buying, answered.
6. One clear next step.

Location pages follow the same rule: write one only where you genuinely serve that place and have something specific to say. Google's spam policies target doorway pages, the familiar set of twenty suburb pages with the name swapped in. Our page-by-page website guide covers what each of these pages needs in more detail.

3. What to write: answer the questions clients already ask

You already hold better data than any keyword tool: every question a prospect or client has asked you by email, on a call or in onboarding. That is what the next prospect will type into Google or ask ChatGPT.

A workable routine for a firm owner:

• Keep a running list of questions. Ask the team to add to it.
• Once a month, pick the one that came up most and write a page answering it. Put the question in the heading and answer it in the first two sentences, then give the detail.
• Write for your market: a sole trader in Leeds asks about Making Tax Digital, a company owner in Sydney about Division 7A, an S corp owner in Ohio about reasonable salary. Local specifics are what generic content farms cannot match.
• Link each answer to the service page it relates to, and back.

One substantial, accurate page a month beats four thin ones, and an evergreen client question keeps working long after a post about last week's announcement has stopped.

4. Reviews: a process, not a favour

Most firms with few reviews have happy clients and no process. Build one:

• Ask at a natural high point: the return is lodged, the refund has landed, the year-end meeting went well.
• Send a direct review link (the Business Profile gives you one) in the same message, every time.
• Ask everyone. Google's content policy prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews and offering any incentive for one, and consumer law now backs that up in the US (the FTC reviews rule, in force since 21 October 2024) and the UK (the DMCC Act, since 6 April 2025).
• Reply to every review, briefly. Be careful with negative ones: confidentiality still applies, so do not confirm the person is a client or discuss their affairs in public. Thank them, say you would like to talk, and take it offline.

5. Technical basics, once

You do not need to be technical. You need to confirm these, and ask whoever built your site to fix any that fail:

• The site loads over https and works properly on a phone.
• Each page has its own title (under about 60 characters) and description, and one main heading.
• Your important pages are not blocked from search (a leftover "noindex" from the build is common).
• A sitemap is submitted in Google Search Console, and the Pages report shows your service pages indexed.
• Your firm name, address and phone match across the site, the Business Profile and directory listings.
• Structured data describing the firm (schema.org has an AccountingService type) is present. Most website builders and plugins add it.

How AI answers find and cite firms

Prospects increasingly ask an assistant rather than scroll a results page. What the platforms say, as at October 2026:

• Google says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisation needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that normal SEO best practice applies. Clicks from those features are counted inside the Web search type of Search Console's Performance report, not separately.
• OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is what surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. Check yours: some security plugins and hosting defaults block AI crawlers wholesale.

Beyond that, nobody outside these companies knows exactly how sources are chosen. Pages that answer a question plainly are the ones that get quoted, so write that way, and keep your firm details identical on your site, your Business Profile and your professional body's member directory. Be wary of anyone guaranteeing AI mentions.

Measuring it without a dashboard habit

Twenty minutes a month covers it.

• Google Search Console (free). The Performance report shows the searches you appeared for, impressions, clicks and average position, for up to 16 months. Watch two things: impressions on your service pages, and new queries appearing that match services you sell.
• Business Profile performance. Calls, website clicks and direction requests from the listing.
• Ask every new client how they found you, and record it as a field in your practice management system. This is the number that matters. Search Console tells you about attention; this tells you about clients.

Judge it over quarters. If impressions rise but enquiries do not, the problem is usually the page (unclear offer, no next step), not the ranking.

If you do hire someone

Plenty of firms reasonably decide to pay someone rather than write a page a month. How to judge an "SEO company for accountants":

• Ownership first. Your firm must own the domain, the Business Profile, Search Console and analytics, with the provider added as a user. Never let a provider register these in their name.
• Ask what will be done each month, in terms of the five jobs above. "Ongoing optimisation" is not an answer.
• No guarantees. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a number one ranking. Treat guaranteed rankings or guaranteed AI citations as a reason to walk away.
• Reports in your terms. Enquiries and clients by source, not ranking charts.
• Who writes the content? If they write it, you still review every word: your name and your professional obligations are on it, and a wrong tax statement on your site is your problem.
• Exit terms. Short notice, and you keep everything they made.

Brief them properly. Our website brief template was written for a site build, but its sections on who you serve, which services matter and what a good enquiry looks like are exactly what an SEO provider needs too.