Technical SEO for accounting firms is mostly about trust and housekeeping. A practice website typically carries years of tax guides, a set of near-identical office pages and a client portal bolted on the side, and each of those creates technical problems that quietly stop the firm ranking for the services it actually wants to sell.
Five technical mistakes I see on accounting firm websites
1. Office pages that are the same page with a different town name
Firms with several offices, or ones trying to attract clients from surrounding towns, often publish a page per location with identical text. Search engines treat these as duplicates and pick one to show, often not the one you want. Each office page should carry its real address, phone number, the partners or managers based there, opening hours, directions and the services that office actually handles. If a “location” has no office behind it, the honest fix is usually to remove it or fold it into a service-area statement rather than keep a thin page alive.
2. Tax guides that go out of date every year
Budget announcements, filing deadlines and threshold changes keep accounting content timely, and also make it stale fast. The common pattern is a new URL every year (“tax-deadlines-2023”, “tax-deadlines-2024”), with each version competing against the last and older ones still indexed with wrong figures. I usually recommend one evergreen URL per recurring topic, updated each tax year with a clear “last reviewed” date, with old yearly URLs redirected into it. Where an archived version has genuine reference value, it stays live but is clearly labelled and linked from the current page.
3. Client portals and upload links showing up in search
Document exchange portals, e-signature pages and secure upload links are meant for clients only. I regularly find their login pages, and sometimes parameterised URLs, indexed under the firm’s brand. The login page itself is low risk, but it should not outrank your services for your own name. Anything that reveals client documents or names is a different matter: that needs fixing at the portal level by your provider or IT team, not just hiding from Google. I flag these first in any audit.
4. Calculators and tools that search engines cannot see
Salary, VAT, sales tax or capital gains calculators can attract useful traffic, but many are embedded via an iframe or rendered entirely in JavaScript, with no explanatory text on the page. The page ends up looking empty to a crawler. A short written explanation of what the tool calculates, its assumptions and when to speak to an adviser, in plain HTML around the tool, usually solves it.
5. Service pages buried under a blog
Many practice sites have hundreds of blog posts and only a few thin service pages: bookkeeping, payroll, tax returns, audit, advisory, company formation. Internal links all point into the blog, so the commercial pages are the weakest on the site. I restructure navigation and internal linking so guides feed authority into the relevant service pages rather than the other way round.
Trust signals search engines can read
Finance is a “Your Money or Your Life” area, and searchers choosing an accountant are deciding who to trust with their records. Search engines pay attention to the same signals a cautious client would. The technical side of that is making those signals crawlable and consistent:
- A real page for each partner and qualified adviser, with their professional body membership stated as text, not only shown as a logo.
- Bylines on tax and finance guides that link to those adviser pages, with a reviewed-on date.
- Firm registration details and regulator information where your jurisdiction requires them, in the footer or an “about” page that is indexable.
- AccountingService markup (schema.org’s type for accounting practices) on each office, with address, phone and opening hours matching the Google Business Profile.
- Person markup on adviser pages, connected to the firm through worksFor.
I deal with the technical presentation only. The accuracy of tax content, and any regulatory wording about what your firm may claim or advertise, needs to be checked by your own partners or compliance lead.
Busy season is the wrong time for a migration
Accounting search demand rises sharply in the weeks before filing deadlines, which is exactly when your team is least available to deal with a website problem. I plan any structural changes (new CMS, URL changes, domain moves after a merger) for the quieter months, and freeze risky work during your peak. Mergers deserve a special mention: when two practices combine, both old websites need a page-by-page redirect map into the new one, otherwise the acquired firm’s rankings for its own name and services simply disappear.
What I deliver for a practice
- A crawl and indexing review covering the main site, portal subdomains and any old domains from mergers
- A duplicate content report for office and service pages
- An evergreen URL plan for recurring tax content, with a redirect map
- AccountingService, Person and Organization markup
- Core Web Vitals fixes on service page templates
- An internal linking plan from guides to services
Everything else I cover sits under my main technical SEO services, and you can read write-ups of previous audits among my case studies.
Questions accounting firms ask
Should we delete old tax articles with outdated figures?
Not automatically. If an old article has links or traffic, update it or redirect it to the current version. If it has neither and is simply wrong, removing it is fine. What you should avoid is leaving outdated figures live with no date, because that misleads readers and weakens trust in the whole site.
We serve clients nationwide but have one office. Do we need location pages?
Not fake ones. A strong single office page, a clear statement that you work with clients remotely, and service pages that explain how remote engagements run are usually better than a page for every city. Industry pages (for example accountants for contractors or for medical practices) are often a more honest and more useful way to expand.
Can you work with our existing web developer?
Yes, and that is the most common setup. I write specific, testable tickets for each fix and check the results after they ship. I do not need admin access to your portal or practice software.
If your practice website has grown by accumulation over the years and you are not sure what search engines make of it, book a free audit of the practice site, and you will hear which issues matter most before the next filing season.