Businesses looking for an accountant search a small, predictable set of terms.
Most practice websites are invisible for every one of them, and it is rarely because the site is bad. It is because nothing on it was built to be found. Glide does the search and AI-search work for UK accountancy practices, inside one monthly retainer from £1,000 plus VAT.
What a business owner types
Almost nobody searches "accountancy services". What they type is a place plus a job, or a problem plus a deadline. "Accountant near me". "Small business accountant Chelmsford". "Accountant for limited company". "Do I need an accountant for self assessment". Four different people at four different stages, and only one of them is ready to buy.
That matters because most practice websites are built to serve the last one and nothing else: a services page, a contact page, done. The person searching "should I incorporate or stay a sole trader" is six months from needing you and will remember whoever answered the question properly. There is no page for them, so they go to a national brand or an AI answer instead.
The opportunity is rarely a better ranking for a term you already target. It is the three or four terms you have no page for at all.
What the work is, in order
1. Find out what is broken first
A page Google has never crawled cannot be fixed with better copy, and a practice site often has several. Indexation, crawlability, speed and structure come before a single word is rewritten, because everything else is wasted until they are right.
2. A page per service, per place
One page cannot rank for year-end accounts, payroll and self-assessment at once, and one page cannot rank in two towns. This is the unglamorous work that moves the needle most, and it is the part template providers cannot do because the template decides the structure.
3. The Google Business Profile
For "accountant near me" the map pack sits above everything organic, and it is won on category, proximity, reviews and activity rather than on your website. A practice with no review cadence is conceding that slot before the search happens.
4. Answer the questions you already answer
The questions from your onboarding calls are the questions being typed. Written properly, they rank, and they are what an AI answer quotes when someone asks how to choose a practice.
5. Be a citable entity, not a brochure
AI answers are built from sources that are clearly structured and clearly attributable. Schema, a real about page, named people, consistent details across the web. Dull work, and increasingly the difference between being summarised and being ignored.
Square 4 Partners is an FCA regulatory compliance consultancy rather than an accountancy practice, and it is where the search numbers we can evidence come from: average Google position moved from 28 to 14 and held there for nine months, on 843,000 impressions and 18,200 organic clicks over sixteen months.
Aireside Accounting is the accountancy client, and they are the website and trust story rather than a ranking one. Dawn left an unprompted five-star review. We do not hold their analytics, so there is no traffic figure here and we are not going to estimate one.
That is the whole of it. If you want an accountancy practice ranking case study with numbers, we do not have one yet, and you should hear that now rather than on the fourth call.
The Glide Retainer, from £1,000/mo
The search and AI-search foundations sit inside the retainer, alongside the website, hosting and the compliance-aware marketing. A heavier ongoing campaign is priced separately, and we will tell you if you do not need one.
See pricingAccountancy SEO, answered
Three to six months in most local markets, longer in a city where several practices already invest in it. Anyone quoting faster is guessing. The honest sequence is that technical fixes and a service-page rebuild can move things inside a quarter, and the authority that holds a position takes longer than that.
Local, almost always, and it is not close. Business owners searching for an accountant overwhelmingly qualify by place, because they still expect to be able to meet you or at least to share a timezone and a working week. A practice chasing "accountants UK" is competing with national brands for traffic that will not convert, while ignoring the term that would have brought a real client eight miles away.
A blog written to hit a word count does nothing. What does work is answering the questions from your own onboarding calls, because those are the questions your prospective clients are typing. The MTD deadlines, whether to incorporate, what a director really has to file. One genuinely useful answer beats twelve pieces of filler, and it is the kind of page that gets quoted in an AI answer.
It matters more here than in most sectors, because a business owner asking ChatGPT or Copilot "how do I choose an accountant" gets a synthesised answer rather than ten links. Being the source that answer is built from is a different job from ranking first: it rewards clear structure, a genuine answer near the top of the page, and being an identifiable entity rather than an anonymous brochure site.
Often, yes. We will tell you straight if a migration makes more sense than a rebuild. What usually decides it is whether the current site can be edited quickly and whether its structure can carry the service pages the search work needs. A site nobody can update is a search problem before it is a design problem.
The search and AI-search foundations sit inside the retainer from £1,000 a month plus VAT, and for a lot of practices that is enough. A separate ongoing campaign, from £1,000 a month on top, is what you add when you want genuinely competitive terms in a city. We will say which one you need rather than selling you the larger number.
SEO for other regulated sectors
The same search work, written for the rulebook and the buyer each sector has.
SEO for financial services firms
Every page you publish is a financial promotion, which is why most agencies produce work your approver sends back. We rank firms inside the rules.
SEO for financial advisers and IFAs
You cannot outrank the national comparison sites on head terms, and you do not need to. The winnable ground is local plus specialism.
SEO for mortgage and protection brokers
Rate moves drive search demand in bursts. Ranking is what lets you catch a burst instead of paying for it.
SEO for fintech firms
Fintech search is half category creation and half AI answer engines. Both reward being the clearest explanation, not the loudest brand.
Need the site itself rather than the rankings? Websites for accountancy practices covers the build. For the whole retainer, see marketing for accountancy firms.
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