SEO for Accountants: What Works and What Wastes Your Time

There is a lot of crap being sold to accountants right now, and most of it arrives as a warning that SEO is dead. Now you need AEO, or whichever three letters the agency leader decided was in fashion that month.

Last month, as I started to redevelop my website, a close accounting friend of mine in the States told me, plainly, that I need to mention AEO, not just SEO, because AEO is being pushed to accountants and I needed to make sure my content felt up to date. She is right about the mood, AI terms creating mass hysteria. But I can’t put a word on my own site that I cannot explain and stand behind. I spend a lot of time keeping up with what is current and real. My view is that search is still search. It is the user behaviour that has changed.

AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation. SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.

So what is the difference and what is my problem with AEO? To answer that, we need to start with the person that the question is really about.

A distressed business owner is sitting at their kitchen table on a Sunday night. Their last accountant missed a deadline, or went quiet for three weeks, or made them feel stupid for asking a question. What they do next depends on many variables. What type of business owner are they? Are they on the tools all day? Do they have an internal finance person? Do they know the problem they want to solve, or do they need the support of someone who knows the problems, not just the solutions?

Scenario 1. If they are less IT savvy, they may just reach for Google and type in “accountant.” If this happens, the location kicks in and Google will serve the most likely result to make them happy. I.e. an accountant near them.

Scenario 2. They try and find the answer to the problem they have. They use Google search and, instead of having a ton of accountants to choose from, they get an AI result first, which either satisfies them (no click result) or they ask further questions until they get to a point where they ask Gemini to find them an accountant.

Scenario 3. They are relatively proficient in using LLM tools like Claude or ChatGPT. They have trained the tool on who they are, what problems they are experiencing, and the tool looks for the best solution for them. This occasionally is a link to an accountant. But most of the time it is the LLM using your content to formulate a response. The prompt for finding an accountant might be something more akin to “find an accountant who can help me work out if I can afford to purchase my competitor.”

So you can see, there are now variations in how a user achieves their desired results. But no matter what way they search, your website needs to be set up in a way that can be found by bots that crawl it.

Answering questions well, the work that gets you cited in an AI result or ranked for a how-do-I search, builds authority. What it does not do is reliably bring business, and that is the part the AEO pitch leaves out. A lot of those answers are the no-click kind, where the person gets what they came for and carries on, and you never hear from them. The work still matters, because authority is what makes you the name the machine reaches for when someone is finally ready to act.

Being the answer is not the same as being hired. The search that ends in an engagement letter is the high-intent one, and it still runs mostly through Google. Everything below is the work that reaches that buyer, and the parts you can stop worrying about.

Intent beats volume, every time

The searches that bring you clients are smaller than you would think, and the big ones are rarely what they look like. Take a town term. “Accountant milton keynes” pulls around 880 searches a month, which sounds worth having until you read what sits right next to it. “Accountant milton keynes jobs.” “Accounting jobs in milton keynes.” “Accounts jobs milton keynes.” Another couple of hundred searches each, and every one of them is a person after a payslip, not an engagement letter.

Now take a narrow one. “Accountants for content creators” gets about 70 searches a month. Tiny. Nobody types that phrase unless they run a channel and need help with the tax on it. “Buy to let accountants” gets 170. “Landlord accounting” gets 480, and behind every search is someone with property and a problem. Small numbers, warm people. That is the trade you want.

Firms get talked into chasing traffic. Traffic is not the point. The handful of searches that only a ready buyer would ever type, that is the point. Rank for those and a slow month of enquiries beats a busy month of nobody.

Your niche is your SEO strategy

The single biggest lever you have in search is how narrow you are willing to be. No one selling a “10-point SEO checklist” will tell you that.

“Accountant” is unwinnable; it has been since the early 2000s. Every firm in the country is fighting over it. “Ecommerce accountant” or “accountant for dentists” or “contractor accountant” has a fraction of the competition and a far warmer searcher on the other end. Heck everyone who ever mentions the word Accountant is competing on some level. The firm that has decided what it is turns up first, because Google can finally tell who the page is for.

Your positioning and your rankings are the same decision, made twice. Get the first one right and the second mostly takes care of itself. If you have not pinned down what your niche actually is, that is the place to start.

Local SEO is real, and it is brutal

If you serve a town rather than a sector, local search runs most of your visibility. Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, a proper location page. That part is straightforward.

The trouble is that local terms are often highly contested by established websites. Firms that have held the top three spots for “accountant in [town]” for a decade are hard to shift, and they know it. You can compete on place, but you are up against incumbents with a ten-year head start. This is the clearest argument there is for niching by sector instead. It is easier to become the obvious ecommerce accountant nationally than the fourth-best general accountant in your postcode.

I have only suggested going local once in the past few years and that is because competitor research genuinely found there to be a gap. Plenty of accountants, none of them ranking well for local search terms.

Google (and AI) treats money as sensitive

Accounting sits close to what Google calls “your money or your life” territory, and it holds anything touching people’s finances to a higher bar. Named authors with real credentials. Honest reviews. A registered firm with a real address and real people behind it. These carry more weight in your sector than in almost any other. Thin, anonymous, churned-out content gets buried faster here than it does elsewhere. Using AI to help you write is fine. Publishing slop with nobody’s name on it is not. So your SEO plan needs to address real concerns and questions for a specific audience.

That is not a reason to fear publishing. It is a reason to put your name and your face on what you publish.

A page called “buy-to-let accountant” in the UK, or “sales tax for ecommerce sellers” in the US, is what ranks for a buying search and what turns a reader into an enquiry. It is also the page your schema draws on, the structured data that tells a crawler in plain terms what the service is and who it is for. Blog posts exist to build the topical authority that lifts those pages. A firm that only ever blogs, with weak or generic service pages, leaks the very traffic it worked to earn. Write the money pages like they are the ones doing the closing, because they are. The blog is there to feed them. Running that as a system, month after month, is what marketing management for accountants covers.

Seasonality you already know, and the edge you’re not using

Self assessment in January. Tax year end in April. Making Tax Digital deadlines landing on a schedule you could recite in your sleep. Search spikes on that calendar every single year. Content timed to those windows compounds. Content published whenever you happen to find a spare hour does not.

That is your calendar, and every firm in the profession shares it. The edge is your clients’ calendar. An ecommerce seller drowns in transactions after Black Friday and goes hunting for help in January. A wedding photographer earns the whole year between May and September, then finally has the headspace to sort their tax in the autumn. You already feel these rhythms if you know your sector. Almost nobody has the page live and ranking before that search arrives. That is the real advantage of niching: you are not guessing what your clients will ask, you know when they will start searching.

The competition is thinner than you think

Fighting for a whole town is expensive and slow. “Accountant milton keynes” carries an SEO difficulty of 22 and a paid difficulty of 55, and the firms already sitting in the top few spots have been there for years. “Uk accountants” scores 62. These are the terms everyone piles into.

Then look at the niche. A firm that made itself the accountant for content creators ranks number one for “content creator accountants,” a term with a difficulty of 8. Another owns the top spot for “accountant for musicians,” difficulty 9. Nobody was defending those. They were open ground, and one firm walked in and planted a flag. The niche term for your sector is very likely sitting there right now, because the competition in most sectors is a row of near-identical firms whose websites never say who they are actually for.

Should you be worried about AEO?

Someone told me flat out in a group recently: SEO is dead, people use AI to search now. I get it, it is a fashionable thing to say, it feels like they are part of the dot.com boom and they get to feel clever. But it is wrong.

In this blog we have only really talked about content. Content is the part that you can easily control. But that is not the full picture. So if this caught your interest, why not jump over to our blog that discusses the more technical side of SEO. SEO is the foundation everything else is built on.

The real question to ask yourself

Forget rankings for a second. Do you actually know whether your website brings in a client a month, or none at all? If you cannot answer that, the gap is the real problem sitting underneath the SEO one.

If you are not sure where your marketing actually stands, start with the free Marketing Maturity Score. A few honest minutes, and it tells you whether SEO is even the thing you should be fixing first.

Take the Marketing Maturity Score