SEO for accountants
We measured every accountancy practice in Ireland — all 2,775 of them. 83.6% do not rank in the top ten for an accountant in their own town.
Not because the market is crowded. Because of things nobody ever got round to: an unclaimed Google profile, a homepage title that never mentions the town, no reviews. Below is everything that actually moves an accountancy practice up the page, in the order it pays to do it — with the numbers behind each claim. Take it and do it yourself if you would rather.
See where your practice ranks todayFree · a plain look at where you stand · no pitch unless you ask.
Most practices are not losing to better marketing
They are losing to unforced errors. These are measured figures from our own census of Irish accountancy practices, published in full with denominators — not agency estimates.
The listing exists and ranks without them. Claiming it is free and takes an afternoon.
The cheapest ranking signal in local search, and three in four leave it blank.
The median practice has 0. Reviews feed both the map pack and the decision.
Google has nowhere to send the click, so it sends it to a directory instead.
Search engines and AI assistants have to guess what the firm is and where it works.
Google writes the search snippet for them, from whatever text it finds first.
Source: the Irish Accountancy Visibility Report 2026 — 2,775 practices, 122 towns, collected 29 July 2026. Figures describe the Irish market; we work across Ireland and the UK. Methodology.
What your clients actually type
Almost nobody searches “chartered accountancy services”. They search a service and a place, or they search a problem. Getting this wrong is how firms end up ranking for terms that never produced an enquiry.
Service plus town is the whole game
“Accountant Galway”, “tax return Limerick”, “bookkeeper near me”. Across the 122 Irish towns we studied these run to roughly 6,480 searches a month, about 77,760 a year — and 83.6% of practices are not in the top ten for their own.
Then the problem searches
“Do I need an accountant for a limited company”, “how much does a tax return cost”, “changing accountants”. These arrive earlier, convert more slowly, and are far less contested. They are also what AI assistants quote when someone asks for advice.
The specialisms worth owning
Contractors, landlords, dentists, publicans, crypto, e-commerce. A page that says exactly who you are for beats a page that says you serve everyone, because the person searching has already decided what they are.
What to leave alone
Salary, jobs and qualification terms carry enormous volume and no buyers. They are the most common way an SEO report is made to look impressive without producing a single enquiry.
The map pack decides it before the website does
For a search with a place in it, Google shows three local results above everything else. That block takes most of the attention. It is also where accountancy practices are weakest, so it is where the fastest gains are.
Claim the profile, then actually fill it
42.9% of Irish practices have never claimed theirs (n = 2,775). Claiming is free. Then the categories, services, service areas, hours and photos all have to be filled in, because the pack ranks completeness.
Keep it consistent everywhere
Name, address and phone identical on the profile, the website and every directory you appear in. Inconsistency is one of the quieter reasons a firm sits fourth when it should sit first.
Reviews, asked for properly
50.8% have none at all and the median practice has 0 (n = 2,775). Ask at the point the client is happiest — the year-end filed, the refund landed — not in an annual round-robin.
Who you are actually competing with
Often not other accountants. In our census 30.8% of page-one slots went to directories rather than practices, and 67.1% of firms were absent from the pack for their own town. You are usually competing with a listings site that knows nothing about accountancy — an easier fight than it looks.
The words on the page, in the places that count
On-page work is unglamorous and it is where most of the remaining gap sits. None of it requires rebuilding your website.
Put the town in the title
74.8% of live practice sites do not (n = 1,582). The homepage title is the strongest single on-page signal for a local search and it is one line of text.
Write the meta description yourself
34.9% have none, so Google writes the snippet from whatever it finds. That snippet is your advert on the results page — it decides the click even when the position is already won.
One page per service, one per place
A single “Services” page listing eleven things ranks for none of them. Separate pages for tax returns, payroll, audit and company formation — and for each town you genuinely serve — give Google something specific to rank.
Link the pages to each other
Service pages should link to the town pages and back. Internal links are how Google finds new pages and how it works out which of yours matters most.
The parts a client never sees but Google does
Usually a short list for an accountancy site. Worth checking precisely because it is invisible until it costs you.
Does the site load at all
Not hypothetical: 15% of the practice websites listed on Google profiles did not load when we crawled them (n = 1,861). A dead site still listed is worse than no site.
Secure, and on a phone
16.7% of live practice sites still have no HTTPS and 13% have no mobile viewport set (n = 1,582). Most searches for an accountant happen on a phone, and Google indexes the mobile version first.
Fast enough not to be abandoned
Core Web Vitals matter less as a ranking factor than people claim and more as a conversion factor than they admit. A slow site loses the enquiry whether or not it loses the position.
Being readable by machines, not just people
Increasingly the answer arrives before the click — in an AI Overview, or from ChatGPT. Those systems read the structured version of your site. Same discipline as SEO, done for a different reader.
Say what you are in markup
41.3% of live practice sites publish no structured data at all, 60.4% have no LocalBusiness markup and 95.6% no AccountingService markup (n = 1,582). A firm that states plainly what it is and where it works is unusually easy to cite.
Answer the question in the first paragraph
Assistants lift self-contained passages. A section that answers its own heading in two sentences, before the throat-clearing, is the one that gets quoted.
FAQ markup still earns citation
Google retired FAQ rich results for everyone in May 2026, so this is no longer about a bigger listing. It is about giving an answer engine clean question-and-answer pairs to quote.
Answer the question everyone refuses to answer
The single largest content gap in the profession is not a topic. It is a price.
Publish what you charge
61.1% of the questions Google surfaces about accountants are about cost. 92.7% of practice websites publish no fees at all (n = 1,582). You do not need a full price list — a from-price and what changes it is enough to win the search and filter the enquiry.
Write to the year, not to a calendar
Preliminary tax, the October and November deadlines, payroll year end, the Budget. Timely, specific and genuinely useful beats another general post about bookkeeping.
Experience is the ranking asset you already have
Google rewards demonstrated expertise. Named authors with real credentials, actual client situations, specifics only a practitioner would know. This is the one area where an accountancy firm starts ahead of a marketing agency.
Links matter less here than anyone will tell you
This is where most agencies sell hardest, so it is worth being straight about what our own research found.
What the SERP actually shows
We pulled the full backlink profile of every site ranking on page one for this term. The site sitting third has thirteen referring domains, every one an auto-generated scraper, and no domain authority to speak of. It ranks on relevance.
So what is worth doing
Your professional body, your software partners' advisor directories, your local chamber, the client whose site credits you, genuine local press. Ten relevant links beat five hundred bought ones — and bought directory packages are the one category of link that can actively harm you.
Marketing that will not embarrass you at inspection
Accountancy is a regulated profession and the advertising rules are real. Most SEO advice is written for businesses that have none.
The claims you cannot make
Chartered Accountants Ireland, ACCA, CPA Ireland and ICAEW all constrain how you describe your services — no misleading comparisons, no unsubstantiated superlatives, correct use of protected descriptions. “Ireland's best accountants” is a ranking tactic that creates a professional problem.
Reviews and confidentiality
Client confidentiality does not stop you collecting reviews, but it does shape how you ask and what a case study may say. Anonymised outcomes with the client's written consent are the safe form, and they still rank.
Order matters more than effort
Most of the gap closes in the first fortnight. Anyone selling you content volume before the profile is claimed is selling you the expensive part first.
Claim, fix, measure
Google profile claimed and filled, titles and meta descriptions rewritten, structured data added, the baseline recorded so every later claim is checkable.
The pages that rank
Service pages and town pages written and linked, the pricing page published, the site made fast and secure where it is not.
Proof accumulates
Reviews arriving steadily, seasonal content going out, citations and relevant links built. Positions begin to move in the pack first.
Compounding
New pages for the specialisms and towns that are working, monthly reporting on position, calls and enquiries. If a month does nothing, you see that too.
The questions accountants ask
The honest answers, including where we are not a fit.
See where you actually rank
We run your practice through the same checks we ran on all 2,775 of them, and send you the result: your position for the searches that matter, how you sit against the firms above you, and the three things worth fixing first. Do them yourself if you would rather.
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