Local SEO for accountants
Local SEO is the work of appearing in the map pack when someone searches for an accountant near them. For most single-office practices it produces enquiries before organic rankings do, sometimes within four to six weeks, and it is included in every SEO and AI visibility retainer from £497 a month.
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Local SEO for accountants is the work of appearing in the Google map pack, the three-result block with stars and phone numbers that sits above the ordinary results when someone searches for an accountant near them.
It is won on the Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, consistent name, address and phone details across the web, and a page for each area you actually serve. From £497 a month, no contract. The profile itself is free and is the single highest-value thing most practices have not done.
Six things you get
Google Business Profile, properly
Categories, services, service areas, opening hours, posts, Q&A and photos. Most profiles are set up once and never touched, which is why most of them do not rank.
Review generation
A repeatable way to ask, at the moment a client is most likely to say yes. Review count and recency are among the strongest local ranking signals there are.
Location pages that differ
Each one written individually, with its own practice count, landmarks and FAQs. Not one page repeated with the town swapped.
Citations and consistency
Name, address and phone identical everywhere it appears. Inconsistent details across directories quietly suppress local rankings.
Service area strategy
For practices without a walk-in office, set up as a service area business rather than pretending to a location you do not have.
Reporting that means something
Calls, direction requests and enquiries, not impressions. Monthly, in writing, on two pages.
Want a price for this?Four details and we come back within one working day with a fixed number and a launch date, in writing.
Why the map pack matters more than position four
The three map results sit above the organic list and carry a phone number, a review score and directions. In a borough like Croydon, where 228 accountancy practices compete inside five kilometres, appearing in that box is worth more than ranking fourth in the blue links underneath it.
The location page mistake
Most agencies build location pages by copying one page and swapping the town name. Google has been demoting that for years and it is obvious to a human reader too. Every location page we build carries its own local practice count, real landmarks, unique FAQs and links to its nearest neighbours. If a page could be find-and-replaced into another town, it is not doing its job.
What actually determines the map pack
Google states the three factors itself, and they are not the same three that drive normal search results. Understanding which one you can move is most of the strategy.
Proximity
How close your registered business address is to the person searching. You cannot change this without moving, and you must not fake it. A virtual office you do not staff is a suspension waiting to happen.
Relevance
How well your profile and website match what was typed. This is the one you have most control over: the primary category, the services listed, and whether your site has a real page about that service in that place.
Prominence
How well known the firm is, drawn from reviews, links, directory listings and mentions across the web. Slow to build, and the reason an established firm two miles further away can outrank you.
Practices lose on relevance far more often than on proximity. A profile with the primary category set to “Accountant”, no services listed and no matching page on the website is competing with one hand tied.
Setting up a Google Business Profile properly
It is free, it takes about an hour, and it is the highest-return hour available to a local practice. Here is the order we do it in.
- Claim or create the profile at the address that appears on your letterhead and in Companies House. If you already have a profile you have never logged into, claim that one rather than creating a second. Duplicates suppress each other.
- Set the primary category precisely. “Accountant”, “Certified public accountant”, “Tax preparation service” and “Bookkeeping service” are different categories and rank for different things. Add the others as secondary.
- Fill in every service. Self assessment, VAT returns, payroll, corporation tax, company formation, Making Tax Digital, management accounts. Each one is a matching opportunity you do not otherwise have.
- Write the description around who you serve, not around how long you have existed. Contractors, landlords, e-commerce sellers, locums, restaurants.
- Set hours, including the ones in January. If you open on a Saturday in tax return season, say so. It affects both ranking and whether someone calls.
- Add real photographs. The building, the front door, the people. This is the one place stock imagery is instantly obvious.
- Link to the right page. Not always the homepage. If the profile is for a branch, link to that branch’s page.
- Ask for reviews, and never pay for them. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, publishing fake or concealed incentivised reviews is a banned practice with serious penalties. Asking a happy client for an honest review is not.
- Reply to every review, including the difficult ones, without disclosing anything about a client’s affairs. Confidentiality still applies in a public reply.
Setting this up is included in every website build at no extra cost, because a practice site without it is competing for the results below the map rather than the ones inside it.
Name, address and phone number, everywhere the same
Google builds its confidence in a business from how consistently the same details appear across the web. Accountancy practices are unusually bad at this, usually through history rather than carelessness.
| Where | What to check |
|---|---|
| Your own website footer | Registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office. Legally required for a limited company and the reference point for everything else. |
| Google Business Profile | Identical address formatting, including whether it is “Street” or “St”. |
| Your professional body’s directory | ICAEW, ACCA, AAT or CIMA firm listings. Often set up years ago and never revisited. |
| Companies House | The registered office on record. If it is your old accountant’s address, fix it. |
| Directories | Yell, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Thomson Local, local chamber of commerce. |
| Old profiles you forgot | A previous trading name, a closed branch, a partner who left. These actively work against you. |
An audit of these is part of the first month of any local SEO retainer, and we will send you the list of what is wrong whether or not you go ahead.
How to build a town page that is not a duplicate
One page per town is the right instinct and the usual execution is the thing that kills it. Google collapses near-identical pages, so thirteen copies with the place name swapped count as roughly one.
What makes each page different
The business mix that town actually has. The industrial estate, the high street, the hospital, the university, the port. Who your likely client there is, and what they would be searching for.
What does not
Swapping the place name. Adding a map embed. Listing the postcodes. Repeating “accountants in Croydon” nine times. All of these are visible to a reader as filler, and Google reads the way a reader does.
Be honest about presence
If you do not have an office there, do not imply one. Say you serve the area, from where you actually are. Fabricating a location is the fastest route to a suspended profile.
Give each one a job
A town page that does not lead anywhere is decoration. Each should link to the services most relevant there and carry its own enquiry route.
Local SEO for accountants, answered
How long before we appear in the map pack?
Often four to six weeks for a profile that has never been optimised, which is faster than organic rankings. It depends on how competitive your town is and how complete your profile was to begin with.
We have no office. Can we still rank locally?
Yes, as a service area business. You set the areas you cover rather than an address, and the profile does not display a location. Trying to fake an address is the fastest way to get a profile suspended.
How many location pages do we need?
Fewer than most agencies sell you. Twelve well-written pages beat fifty thin ones, and we cap a launch at twelve for exactly that reason. We screen every location for search volume and difficulty before building a page for it.
Do reviews really matter that much?
Yes. Count, recency and whether you reply are all signals, and they also do the persuading once someone sees you. A profile with four reviews from 2022 is a weak result even if everything else is right.
Is local SEO separate from the main retainer?
No. It is included in all three SEO and AI visibility tiers, including Local at £497 a month. We do not sell it as an add-on.
How much should I pay for local SEO?
For a single-location UK practice, local SEO work usually sits somewhere between a few hundred pounds a month and around a thousand, depending on how many towns you are competing in and how much content is being produced. Our retainer starts at £497 a month with no minimum term. The Google Business Profile setup itself is free and included in every website build, so nobody should be charging you separately for it.
Is local SEO free?
The Google Business Profile is free, and claiming it, categorising it properly, listing your services and asking clients for honest reviews costs nothing but time. What is not free is the ongoing work: the content, the location pages, the citation clean-up and the monitoring. A practice willing to spend an hour a week can do a surprising amount of it themselves.
Can I do local SEO myself?
Yes, and the highest-value parts are the ones you are best placed to do. Claiming and completing your Google Business Profile, asking satisfied clients for reviews, replying to every review, and keeping your address consistent everywhere are all things that need no agency. What gets harder alone is the website structure, the location pages and knowing which of a hundred possible tasks is actually worth the hour.
Can I get a free local SEO audit?
Send us your website address and the towns you want work from, and we will send back what is wrong with your Google Business Profile, where your details are inconsistent across the web, and whether your site has pages capable of ranking locally. In writing, at no cost, with no obligation and no call required.
What is SEO in accounting?
It is the work of making a practice appear when someone searches for an accountant, rather than only when they search for your firm by name. In accountancy specifically it means three things at once: the map pack, where a Google Business Profile decides whether you appear at all; the organic results, where a page per service and per specialism decides what you can rank for; and increasingly the AI answer above both, which quotes pages that state facts plainly.
Can ChatGPT do SEO?
It can draft and it can research, and it is genuinely useful for both. What it cannot do is claim your Google Business Profile, decide which terms are worth competing for in your town, or take responsibility when a page makes a claim your professional body does not allow. Practices who publish unedited AI copy tend to end up with pages that read like every other firm’s, which is the opposite of the point.
How do we get into the AI answers as well as Google?
Largely the same work, pointed slightly differently. Assistants quote pages that answer a question plainly in text near the top, carry structured data a machine can read, and agree with what the rest of the web says about your firm. A consistent name, address and professional body across every listing matters more here than it ever did for ordinary search.
Do we need a physical office to rank locally?
You need a real address you can receive post at and that Google can verify. A home address can be used and hidden from public display if you serve clients at their premises. What you cannot do is rent a mailbox in a town you do not work in and present it as an office. That gets profiles suspended, and reinstatement is slow.
How many reviews do we need?
There is no threshold. What matters is having more than the firms currently above you, receiving them steadily rather than twenty in one week, and replying to all of them. A practice with eleven honest recent reviews usually outperforms one with forty from four years ago.
Does local SEO work for a practice with clients all over the country?
Partly. If location genuinely does not matter to your clients, the map pack is worth less to you and specialism pages are worth more. The honest answer for a fully remote practice is to spend the budget on being the obvious choice for a type of client rather than for a postcode, and we will tell you that rather than sell you twelve town pages.
What practices say once they are visible locally
We're getting better enquiries
Sarah M.Chartered AccountantSince launching the new website, we've seen a noticeable improvement in the quality of enquiries coming through. Potential clients understand our services before they even speak to us.
Professional, clear and easy to navigate
Emma C.Chartered Certified AccountantOur new website makes it much easier for clients to understand what we do and how we can help them. We've had fantastic feedback from both existing and prospective clients.
A website that reflects our firm
James R.Managing PartnerOur previous website felt dated and didn't represent the quality of our practice. The new site looks professional, modern and gives prospective clients confidence from the moment they visit.
Collected directly from practices we have built websites for. Names are shortened at their request. We do not publish reviews we cannot evidence, and we do not add star rating markup to our own pages.
Tell us about your practice
A fixed price, a page plan and a launch date within one working day. In writing, with no obligation.