SEO for accountants: how to get found by the clients you actually want

Referrals are lovely until they dry up and you don’t know where your next client is coming from. In Jonathan’s recent webinar with Ellie McIntyre from Conversion Zoo (the marketing specialist for accounting firms) they walked through how to build a steadier pipeline beyond referrals. This post shares some of the core principles covered by Ellie, and there was even more in the full webinar.

Start with what a client is worth

Before you spend a penny on marketing, Ellie's first question is always the same: what is a client worth to you over their lifetime, not just this year?

The rule of thumb that follows is to spend 5 to 10% of that lifetime value acquiring each client. On a £17,000 client that's £850 to £1,700. If you're only relying on referrals, you are almost certainly underspending, and you have no control over when the next one turns up. Good SEO, done consistently, should bring in two or three new clients a month on top of referrals, which is what lets you say no to the wrong ones and put your prices up when you need to.

Pick a niche before you pick a keyword

Ellie's advice is to go after the higher-value clients: multi-staff businesses on recurring services like bookkeeping, payroll, or virtual CFO work. They pay more, they stay longer, and it takes about the same effort to win them as it does to win a one-off tax return.

To do that you need a niche. It can be an industry (hospitality, dentists, construction), a service (virtual CFO), or both (virtual CFO for hospitality businesses). You can still take on clients outside the niche. You just give them their own service or industry page on the site and leave it out of the main menu.

Do the keyword research before you write anything

Keyword research tells you what people are searching for each month and how many other firms are competing for it. Ellie uses Ahrefs; Semrush does the same job. They cost around $100 to $200 a month, and you don't need to keep them running constantly. Do the research once, work from it for six to twelve months, then renew for a refresh.

There are four kinds of keyword to look for, and they aren't equal. Ellie’s main advice was to start with location keywords ("accountant Bristol") to catch people who are ready to hire and want someone nearby.

One caution from Jonathan: be careful what you rank for. His firm accidentally outranked HMRC for "am I on the right tax code", which meant three or four calls a day from people who think they've phoned the taxman. Be deliberate with your content choices, because traffic you don't want costs your team time.

The quick wins that take an afternoon

Set up your Google Business Profile. Local search is where a lot of accounting enquiries start: someone opens Google Maps and types "accountant near me". List every service you offer, put your keywords in the description, add a booking link, and ask clients for reviews.

Create an author page. Google holds anything about money or health to a higher standard than other topics, so it wants to know who wrote your content and why they're qualified. A page with your credentials, years in practice, and qualifications (ACA, ACCA, CA, and so on) is the thing most accounting websites are missing.

One keyword per page. Don't put all your services on one page or all your locations on another. Virtual CFO gets a page, payroll gets a page, Bristol gets a page. Each page answers one search.

Then the basics: the site needs to be fast and work properly on a phone, because that's where a lot of your prospects are searching from.

Watch the full session

The recording has more on finding keyword data, setting up your website, writing content, backlinks, case studies, and the Q&A on budgets, attribution, and what to do about AI traffic. Register to watch it on demand (your details will be shared with Ellie).

Ellie offered attendees a free website review and a chat about what an SEO plan might look like for your firm. You'll find her at https://conversionzoo.com/.

If you want more sessions like this, contact us on the live chat to share the information you need to help you grow your firm.