Making your practice website MTD-ready
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is phasing in. The four pages your website needs, why landlords need their own version, and how to write it so it gets found and stays accurate.
In short
- MTD for Income Tax began phasing in from April 2026 and the thresholds have moved before. State the current position with a date, and check GOV.UK before publishing.
- Answer the four questions every client will ask once, on your website, rather than individually on the phone through the autumn.
- Four pages earn their place: does this apply to me, a readiness checklist, a software comparison, and an onboarding page for clients whose accountant has gone quiet.
- Landlords need their own version. Accountants for property gets 720 UK searches a month at a keyword difficulty of zero.
- The head terms sit at difficulty 35 and are a Phase 2 target. The long tail is winnable now.
On this page
Where MTD for Income Tax has actually got to
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax began phasing in from April 2026, starting with the highest qualifying income band and widening in stages after that. The thresholds and the timetable have moved more than once, so the single most useful thing your website can do is state the current position with a date attached rather than describing the scheme in general terms.
For a practice, three things follow. Your clients need to know whether it applies to them and when. They need software. And they need someone to tell them what changes about how they keep records, which is the part they will find genuinely disruptive.
Check the current thresholds and dates at GOV.UK before publishing anything. They have changed before and they may change again. Anything you publish should carry the date you checked.
Why this is a website problem, not just a compliance one
Every client above the threshold will ask you the same four questions. If you answer them individually you will spend the autumn on the phone. If you answer them once, properly, on your own website, three things happen: the calls reduce, the page ranks, and prospective clients whose current accountant has said nothing start arriving.
That last one is the opportunity. MTD is the largest change to personal tax administration in a generation and a great many practices have published nothing about it. Landlords and sole traders are searching for answers right now and finding software vendors rather than accountants.
The four pages worth building
1. A "does this apply to me?" page
The most valuable page you can build. Current threshold, current dates, and a simple path to work out whether a given client is in or out and when. Keep it short, keep it dated, and update it when HMRC moves.
2. A readiness checklist
What the client needs to have in place before their first quarterly update: software, bank feeds, a habit of recording things more often than annually, and an understanding that the deadline is no longer just January. This is the page that reduces your call volume most.
3. A software comparison
Which packages you support and why. Clients will otherwise choose on price or advertising and arrive with something you cannot work with. Being explicit here saves everyone a migration later, and it is a page that earns search traffic in its own right.
4. An onboarding page for new clients
For the practices whose accountant has gone quiet. Something that says plainly: if your current accountant has not spoken to you about this, here is what should have happened by now, and here is how switching works. That page will bring you work.
Landlords deserve their own version
Property clients have a distinct problem. Qualifying income is assessed across property and self-employment together, joint ownership complicates matters, and a landlord with four properties who has always done a single annual return is facing a genuine change in habit rather than a change in software.
If you serve landlords, the general MTD page will not do. The commercial case is straightforward too: accountants for property gets 720 UK searches a month and accountants for landlords another 260, at a keyword difficulty of zero. A property-specific MTD page is one of the cleaner openings available in accountancy search right now.
How to write it so it gets found and quoted
MTD content is a good test of whether a page is built for how people search now. Four rules:
- Answer in the first two sentences. Not "Making Tax Digital represents the most significant change in a generation" but the actual threshold and the actual date.
- Use the questions people type as your headings. "Do I need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax?" is a real search. "MTD Overview" is not.
- Date every figure. "As at September 2026" makes a claim checkable and is exactly what an AI answer looks for when deciding what to quote.
- Add FAQ schema. It is invisible to visitors and it is the most commonly missing item on practice websites.
The head terms here are competitive, at a keyword difficulty of around 35, so ranking for "making tax digital for income tax" itself is a Phase 2 ambition rather than a launch target. The long tail is not: readiness checklists, software questions, landlord-specific queries and "what if my accountant hasn't mentioned it" are all winnable now.
Keeping it accurate is the hard part
MTD content ages badly. Thresholds move, dates slip, software gets approved and withdrawn. A page confidently stating a superseded threshold is worse than no page, because it damages exactly the credibility it was meant to build.
Two practical habits. Put a visible "last checked" date on any MTD page, and set a calendar reminder each quarter to re-check GOV.UK and update it. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between an asset and a liability.
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