SEO for Accountants.

Your busiest search of the year happens in January.

Accountancy has a shape to its demand that almost no other profession has. A large slice of the year’s searching happens between November and the end of January, and by the time somebody is typing ‘accountant near me’ on 28 January they aren’t comparing carefully. They’re picking whoever looks capable and answers the phone. Being visible in December is worth several times being visible in June, and most practices only start thinking about it in the week the deadline lands.

We’re a family-run agency in Heathfield, building websites since 1997. What follows is what we’d actually do about SEO for accountants, including one thing we got wrong on our own profile this year.

The category on your Google profile decides which searches you appear in.

This is the part almost nobody gets right, and we can say that with some feeling, because we got it wrong ourselves.

We audited our own Google Business Profile in July 2026. We were sitting in the top three of the local map pack for every Sussex-wide web design search we tested, and completely absent from every SEO and pay-per-click one, even though those searches show a map pack too. The reason turned out to be embarrassingly simple. Our primary category was ‘Web Designer’. The pack holders we checked all had a different primary category. We were listed as the thing we were best known for rather than the thing we wanted to be found for.

The same trap catches practices constantly. If your primary category is ‘Accountant’ but the work you want is bookkeeping, payroll or tax advisory, you may be invisible on exactly the searches you care about. There are precise categories available, including Chartered Accountant, Tax Consultant, Bookkeeping Service and Payroll Service, and the primary one appears to carry more weight than the extras. Choosing it deliberately is free and takes about a minute. It’s the first thing we’d look at.

Niche beats broad, every single time.

‘Accountant Sussex’ is a fight with everyone. ‘Accountant for contractors’, ‘bookkeeping for restaurants’, ‘accountant for landlords’, ‘CIS returns for subcontractors’ and ‘R and D tax credits for small manufacturers’ are fights with a handful of firms, and they bring in the client you actually want rather than a sole trader after a cheap tax return.

Whichever specialisms you genuinely have get their own page. Not a paragraph on a services list. A page, written for that specific client, using the words they use rather than the words the profession uses.

Answer the questions, because that is where the AI answers come from.

A growing share of accountancy searches now returns a generated answer at the top of the page rather than a list of links, and Ofcom found in its 2026 report that 75% of online UK adults read those summaries at least sometimes. The pages quoted inside them are almost never service pages. They’re pages that plainly answer a question: what the Making Tax Digital thresholds are, when a limited company beats a sole trader, what you can actually claim if you work from home, what happens if you file late.

You answer these on the phone every week. Writing them down properly, once, is the most reliable way we know of getting a practice quoted in those answers. It’s also the best filter you’ll ever build, because the client who arrives having read your explanation of the sole trader threshold is already halfway to instructing you.

Local still matters more than you think.

Cloud accounting was supposed to make geography irrelevant and it hasn’t. People still search ‘accountant Uckfield’ and ‘accountant near me’, and they still like the idea that they could drive to you if it went wrong. If you serve specific towns, say so on pages that have something real to say about those towns. If you don’t, don’t build the page. Thin location pages made at scale are a well-documented way to get yourself into trouble.