Accounting SEO that brings you the clients you actually want.

Technical improvements show inside weeks, new service pages usually start ranking within two to three months, and an audit of 40 CPA practices found organic lead flow stabilises in nine to twelve months. That is the honest range, and it is why we agree the leading indicators up front — indexed pages, impressions on the searches that matter, map views and enquiries — so nobody is waiting a year for the first sign of life. Firms that already have a clean site and a well-kept profile tend to sit at the fast end of that range.

Referrals and search are not rivals; the referred prospect looks you up before they call, and what they find decides how the first meeting goes. Beyond that, organic search is already the largest single traffic source for practices in this profession at 48% of website traffic globally and 42% in the US, and it compounds instead of resetting each month. The practices that do best keep both: a strong referral culture, and a presence in the results that makes the referral easy to say yes to.

A fixed monthly fee scoped to the work, quoted after the audit rather than off a rate card, plus any one-off build. Judge it against the paid alternative you would otherwise buy: accounting search ads run about $4.44 a click at a $101 acquisition, so once organic enquiries arrive they keep arriving without a media bill attached. We set the target as cost per booked consultation, report it monthly, and will tell you when the useful scope is a one-off fix rather than a retainer.

Usually not, and we would rather spend the budget on the pages that earn. Most firms need a technical clean-up, three to six new service pages and a better contact path — work that sits on the site you already have. A rebuild is worth it when the platform is genuinely blocking you: unfixable speed, no way to add pages, or a design that no longer matches the firm you have become. In that case our web design team handles it with the ranking work running in parallel, so nothing is lost in the move.

Our writers draft it, your partners shape it, and nothing publishes without a name inside the firm signing it off. The raw material comes from the questions your people already answer on the phone every week, collected in a short interview rather than invented by someone who has never filed a return. That is the difference between content that ranks and content that also wins the meeting. Where a topic needs a licensed opinion, we flag it for sign-off before it goes near the site.

For a practice with an office it is often the single highest-intent surface, because searches with nearby intent show the map before the blue links. The work is unglamorous and continuous: a complete and correctly categorised profile, consistent details wherever the firm is listed, photographs that look like the actual office, regular posts, and a review routine your team can keep during tax season rather than one burst in June. Multi-office practices get a real page per location instead of one contact page carrying three addresses.

Not if the pages answer questions cleanly, which is the same standard good content has always been held to. 58% of small business owners now use AI tools to research accounting services, and those tools quote sources that state a clear answer with the detail attached — pricing posture, who the service is for, what happens next. We track assistant visibility beside traditional rankings through our AI search tracking, so you can see where the firm is being cited rather than guess.

The opposite, as long as you are specific. National brands win generic head terms and are weak everywhere that requires local proof or a narrow specialism, which is exactly where the profitable searches live: restaurant bookkeeping in one metro, R&D credits for software companies, sales tax for ecommerce sellers, expat filings. A two-partner firm that owns three specific niches will out-earn a generalist chasing “accountant”. We pick the niches with you based on the engagements you want more of, and we hold category exclusivity by market so we are not running a competing practice next door.

One page, in plain language: enquiries and booked consultations by source, the searches gaining and losing visibility, map performance, what we changed and why, and what happens next month. Underneath it sit Search Console, analytics and your CRM, connected so an enquiry can be traced back to the page that produced it. We also say plainly when a month was flat — this channel has slow quarters, and a report that only ever contains good news is not a report.

It is planned for rather than survived. Benchmark data puts 60% or more of annual acquisition in the January to April window, so the pages, the profile and the booking path have to be finished in the autumn, not fixed in February. During the season we run a lighter touch: no risky site changes, content queued in advance, review requests automated so nobody on your team has to remember, and a shorter weekly note. The heavy build resumes in May when your people can breathe again.

That works well and we do it often. Where there is an in-house marketer we take the specialist load — engineering, content production, local — and leave brand and events with them, with one shared plan so nobody duplicates work. Where another agency runs paid, we align on the conversion definition so a booked consultation is counted once rather than claimed twice. Everything we build lives in accounts you own, documented well enough that another supplier could pick it up, because a programme only we can operate is not an asset.

In our experience, four kinds. Service pages that state what the engagement includes and roughly what it costs. Niche pages for a specific client type — dentists, restaurants, ecommerce sellers, contractors. Location pages when there is a real office behind them. And question content: entity choice, catch-up bookkeeping, notices from a tax authority, what to bring to a first meeting. Those last ones look like education and behave like sales, because the person reading them is mid-decision. We build them in that order, since the first two convert fastest and fund the rest.

Yes, and the numbers get more honest when one team holds them. Our paid search, landing page and analytics specialists work from the same plan as the organic team, so a booked consultation is attributed once instead of claimed by three suppliers. It is equally fine to hire us for search alone while somebody else keeps the rest — we document the setup and leave every account open in your name.