How does SEO work for accountants? Seven steps for a small UK firm

The short answer

SEO for accountants means making it easy for Google to understand what your firm does, who for, and where, so the firm appears when someone searches for that. For a small UK firm it comes down to seven jobs: complete your Google Business Profile, give each service its own page, publish answers to the questions clients ask, collect genuine reviews, earn a few good links, check that Google can read the site, and measure the enquiries that result.

None of this needs special software or a large budget. It needs a few hours a month and someone who knows the firm's clients. Every claim below about how Google works is taken from Google's own published guidance, with a link, because a lot of what is sold as SEO is guesswork.

Search is one of several ways to win work. For the full list, including referrals and partners, see our guide to how accountants get clients. This page goes deeper on the search part only.

The two kinds of result you can appear in

A search such as "accountant near me" shows two different things, and each is earned in a different way. Knowing which one you are working on stops a lot of wasted effort.

• Local results.These are the map and the short list of businesses beside it. They come from Google Business Profiles, not from websites. Google's help page on improving your local ranking says they are based mainly on three things: relevance (how well a profile matches the search), distance (how far the business is from the person searching) and prominence (how well known the business is).
• Ordinary results. These are the links to web pages underneath. They come from the pages on your site: what each page is about, how useful it is, and whether other sites point to it.

A firm that serves one town should start with the local results, which is step 1. A firm that serves one kind of client across the country, such as dentists or contractors, depends more on its pages, which is steps 2 and 3. Most firms need both.

1. Complete your Google Business Profile

Your Business Profile is the first thing to fix, because it is what local results are built from. Google says that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local search results, and that a profile with inaccurate information might not show up for relevant searches in your area.

• Fill in everything, and keep it true. Address or service area, phone number, website, opening hours including special hours over Christmas and bank holidays, and the services you offer.
• Use your real name. Google's guidelines for representing your businesssay the name should reflect the business's real-world name, and that including unnecessary information in it is not permitted. "Smith & Co" is right. "Smith & Co Best Cheap Accountants Leeds" breaks the guidelines.
• Choose few categories. The same guidelines say to use as few categories as possible to describe your core business. Pick the one that says what the firm is, not a list of everything it does.
• Working from home is fine. If clients do not visit you, Google says a service-area business should hide its address from customers and show the area it serves.
• Keep one profile. Google says there should be only one profile per business. A second profile for the same firm competes with the first and can cause problems with both.

2. Give each service its own page

One page can only be clearly about one thing. A single "Our services" page that lists twelve services in a line each gives Google nothing to match against a search for any one of them. A page about Self Assessment for landlords, written for landlords, can appear when a landlord searches for that.

Start with the three or four services you most want more of, and the kinds of client you serve best. Each page should say who the service is for, what you do, what the client has to give you and when, what it costs or how the fee is worked out, and how to get in touch.

• Write a title for the page, not the firm. Google's SEO Starter Guidesays a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the page's contents. "Self Assessment for landlords in Leeds | Smith & Co" does that. "Home" or "Services" does not.
• Write a description for the page. The same guide says a good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page. It often becomes the two lines of text under your link.
• Use the words your clients use.Clients search for "tax return" more readily than "personal tax compliance". Say it once in the heading and write normally after that. Google's guide describes repeating the same words over and over as tiring for users, and its spam policies treat keyword stuffing as spam.
• Do not clone a page for every town.Google's spam policies give "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as an example of doorway abuse. A page for an office you really have, with its own address, staff and clients, is a different thing.

3. Publish answers to the questions clients ask

After service pages, the most useful thing a firm can publish is a clear answer to a question it is asked every week. "Do I need to register for VAT?" "What can I claim if I work from home?" "When does Making Tax Digital apply to me?" People type those questions into Google, and the firm that answers one well meets a possible client at the moment they need help.

Accountants have an advantage here, and a duty. Google's guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content describes topics that could significantly affect people's health, financial stability or safety as "Your Money or Your Life" topics. Tax and accounts fall squarely into that group. On the qualities Google looks for in content (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust), the same page says trust is the most important.

• Answer first. Put the answer in the first two sentences, then the detail, then the exceptions.
• Say who wrote it. Google strongly encourages accurate authorship information, such as bylines, where readers might expect it. A named, qualified person is exactly what a reader of tax guidance expects.
• Date it and keep it right.Thresholds and deadlines change. An answer with last year's figures is worse than no answer. Review each page when the rules change, and say when it was last checked.
• Link to the source. Point to the relevant GOV.UK page for the rule you are describing. It helps the reader and shows your working.
• Write it once, properly. Google says the length of content alone does not matter for ranking, and that there is no magical word count target. Answer the question fully, then stop.

If you are short of topics, the list in our 30 social media post ideas for accountants works for web pages too. Most of those ideas are client questions.

4. Ask for reviews the right way

Reviews help in two ways. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking, and a person choosing between three firms on the map will read them before calling anyone.

• Ask at the right moment. The best time is just after you have finished something the client was worried about: the return filed, the accounts signed, the HMRC letter dealt with.
• Make it one tap. Google's help page on reviews says you can ask customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code to leave a review. Put the link in your sign-off email.
• Never offer anything in return.The same page says offering incentives, such as free or discounted services, in exchange for reviews is prohibited, and that reviews must reflect a genuine experience. No discount on next year's fee, and no reviews from staff or family.
• Reply to every one. Google recommends replying to reviews as best practice. Keep replies short, and never confirm any detail of the work you did. The client chose what to say in public. You still owe them confidentiality.

Quoting a review on your own website is a separate decision. ICAEW's marketing helpsheetsays the relationship between a firm and a client is confidential, and that a testimonial is acceptable only where the client has consented to their comments being used in that way. Ask in writing before you copy a client's words onto a page. If you belong to another body, check its guidance on the same point.

5. Earn links and mentions, never buy them

A link from another website to yours tells Google that someone else thinks your page is worth visiting. A few links from relevant, real organisations are worth having. Links you pay for are a risk: Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam.

The links an accountancy firm can earn honestly are close to home.

• Directories you are entitled to be in.Your professional body's find-a-member listing, and the adviser directory of any accounting software you are certified in.
• Local organisations. The chamber of commerce, a business network you belong to, a charity or club the firm sponsors.
• People you work beside. Solicitors, mortgage brokers, financial advisers and bookkeepers who refer work to you will often list the firms they recommend.
• Your own expertise. A short article for a trade association in your niche, or a comment for the local paper at Budget time, usually comes with a link.

Make sure the firm's name, address and phone number are written the same way everywhere they appear. Google's guidelines ask you to represent the business as it is consistently represented and recognised in the real world, and a client who finds three different phone numbers will not ring any of them.

6. Check that Google can read your site

The technical side of SEO is smaller than it is made to sound. For a firm's website of ten or twenty pages, four checks cover most of it.

• Check you are in Google at all. Search for site:yourfirm.co.uk. Google's Starter Guide says that if you see results pointing to your site, you are in the index.
• Set up Search Console. Google describes Search Console as a free service. It shows which searches display your site and how often people click, and lets you fix indexing problems and ask for new or updated pages to be indexed again. You do not have to sign up to appear in Google, but without it you are guessing.
• Submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file listing the pages on your site that you care about. Most website builders create one for you. Submitting it in Search Console helps Google find every page.
• Open the site on a phone. Check that every page reads properly, that the phone number can be tapped, and that the contact form works. A page that ranks and then loses the enquiry has done half its job.

Your web developer may also offer to add structured data, which is a labelled version of your address, hours and other details for search engines to read. Google's page on local business structured data says it lets you tell Google about things like business hours and departments. It is worth doing, but the same page says Google does not guarantee that features using it will show up in search results.

7. Measure enquiries, and give it time

The number that matters is new enquiries from people who found you by searching. Rankings and visitor counts are only signs along the way.

• Ask every new enquirer how they found you.Write the answer down. "Google" is good. "I searched for a landlord accountant" is better, because it tells you which page is working.
• Look at Search Console once a month. It lists the searches your site appeared for. You will find questions you never thought to answer, and pages that appear often but are rarely clicked, which usually need a clearer title.
• Change one thing at a time. If you rewrite five pages and the profile in one week, you will not know which change helped.
• Be patient. Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months. Give each change a few weeks before you judge it.

What you can safely ignore

A good deal of SEO advice is out of date or was never true. Google's SEO Starter Guide has a section on things it says you should not focus on. These are the ones accountants are most often sold.

• The keywords meta tag. Google says its search does not use it.
• A keyword-rich domain name.Google says keywords in the domain name or URL path alone have hardly any effect. Do not swap your firm's name for "best-accountants-leeds".
• A target word count. Google says there is no minimum or maximum.
• Fear of a duplicate content penalty. Google says that if some content is reachable under more than one URL, it is fine and not something to fret about.
• Pages produced in bulk.Google's spam policies name using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users as scaled content abuse. A tool can help you draft. A qualified person still has to check that every page is correct and worth reading.

What about AI answers?

The same work applies. Google's guidance on AI features and your website says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no other special optimisations necessary. It says the best practices for SEO remain relevant, and that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.

In practice, that favours the kind of page described in step 3: one question, answered plainly in the opening lines, by a named person, with the source linked. A page written that way is easy for a person to trust and easy for a machine to quote.

Keep the firm visible while the pages do their work

Search work is slow, and it only reaches people who are already looking. In the meantime the firm still needs to be seen by clients, referrers and local businesses who are not searching today. Google's own Starter Guide lists social media among the ways to promote a website so that people discover it, next to word of mouth.

The two jobs feed each other. Each answer you publish in step 3 is also a post: the question, the short answer, and a link to the page.

Keeping that up through January is where most firms stop. This is the job Pillr does for accountancy firms: it reads your website, including the service pages and answers you have just written, drafts a month of posts in the firm's voice, and schedules them to LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram once a partner has approved each one. It does not do your SEO. It makes sure the pages you worked on are seen by the people who already know the firm.

Paste your firm's URL on the home page to see the posts Pillr drafts from your own website, or look at plans and pricing first.

Questions accountants ask