SEO for accountants
SEO for accountants, where the work has to be done six months early.
Self assessment demand builds through November and peaks in the last days of January. A page published in December arrives too late to establish itself, which is why most practices spend their budget in the month it can do the least good. The other problem is harder: bookkeeping, payroll and year end accounts are the same words on every accountancy site in the country.
Straight answer
Your service pages are identical to everyone else's.
Not badly written, just indistinguishable. Every practice describes the same services in the same order, so nothing on the page tells a search engine or a reader why you rather than the firm two streets away.
What most practices publish
- Bookkeeping, payroll, year end, VAT, in that order
- Tax deadline content written in January
- Advice bylined to the firm rather than a qualified person
- A fresh URL for each tax year, discarding the last one
- Fees hidden entirely behind a contact form
- Qualifications shown as logos with no alt text
What actually differentiates
- Pages for the clients you specialise in serving
- Seasonal pages live months before the demand
- Named accountants with ICAEW or ACCA registration
- One durable URL per topic, updated each year
- Fee bands and what moves them
- Credentials marked up so they resolve as data
The specialism point, said plainly
Contractors inside IR35, dental practices, e-commerce sellers with overseas VAT, landlords with several properties. Each is searched, each is far less contested than accountants near me, and each lets you write something a competitor cannot copy because they do not do that work. A practice that picks two or three of these will outperform one competing on generic terms with ten times the budget.
Scope
What accountancy SEO covers here.
Weighted towards the two things the sector consistently gets wrong.
Seasonal architecture
Durable URLs for recurring deadlines, updated rather than recreated, live months ahead. Last year's page merged rather than left competing with this year's.
Specialism pages
Pages built around the clients you genuinely serve rather than the services you list. Lower volume, far less contested, and impossible for a generalist to copy.
Credentials as entities
Named accountants with qualifications and professional body registration that resolve, connected in schema to the advice they are responsible for.
Local where it pays
Profile, citations and reviews where local intent is real, and deliberately skipped where a practice has specialised nationally instead.
Rate and threshold freshness
Anything citing allowances, thresholds or rates decays on a published schedule. A review cycle so a stale figure is caught by process rather than by a client.
Fee transparency
Bands and the factors that move them, which answers a real query most competitors leave unanswered and filters out enquiries that were never going to convert.
Cost
What it costs.
The £95 blended hourly rate, or a monthly package which is those hours multiplied out. Minimum engagement is 4 hours.
Audit and specialism review
From £650
Which specialisms are realistically winnable for your practice, plus the seasonal structure and the technical layer assessed together.
Foundation, 4 hours a month
£380/month
Suits a settled practice: seasonal pages maintained ahead of time, credentials kept current, regressions caught.
Growth, 8 hours a month
£760/month
Specialism pages built out against a roadmap, with the local and technical work running alongside.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
When should we start work if we want January enquiries?
By late summer at the latest, and that is the single most useful thing on this page. Self assessment demand builds through November and peaks in the days before the deadline, and a page published in December has no chance of establishing itself before the demand arrives.
Pages need to be live months ahead, accumulating authority quietly, then updated rather than recreated each year so the history is not thrown away annually.
Everyone offers the same services. How do we not sound identical?
By being specific about who you serve rather than what you do. Bookkeeping, payroll and year end accounts are the same words on every accountancy site in the country, and no amount of rewriting makes them distinctive.
What separates firms is the client: contractors inside IR35, dental practices, e-commerce sellers with overseas VAT, landlords with several properties. Those are searched, they are far less contested, and they let you write something a competitor cannot copy.
Do our qualifications actually matter for rankings?
They matter more here than in most sectors, because accountancy advice affects people's money and Google weighs expertise accordingly. ICAEW, ACCA and AAT registration, named authors and real credentials are signals a content site cannot fabricate.
Most accountancy sites publish genuinely qualified advice under no byline at all, which throws away the one advantage they hold over a generic finance blog.
Is local SEO worth it for an accountant?
Usually yes, and more than firms expect. A great deal of accountancy search still carries local intent even though the work is done remotely, and the map pack decides a meaningful share of it.
The exception is a firm that has genuinely specialised nationally. If you serve e-commerce sellers across the country, local signals earn you little and the effort belongs in the specialism instead.
Should we publish our fees?
Bands, yes. Exact figures, only where they genuinely are fixed. Publishing something is nearly always better than the industry default of hiding everything behind a contact form, because the visitor is trying to work out whether you are plausible before they call.
Firms that publish a range filter out the people who were never going to buy and get better conversations with the ones who stay. It also happens to answer a query with real volume that most competitors leave unanswered.
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Want to be visible before next January?
Send the practice and the clients you most want more of. You get a straight answer on which specialisms are winnable and when the work needs to start.