Of the sectors I look at, accountancy is the one I’d say is most exposed to AI answering the questions that used to bring practices their traffic.
A tax question has a definable answer, sits in public guidance, and is exactly the kind of thing an assistant handles confidently. So the blog post explaining what you can claim as an allowable expense is worth less than it was two years ago, and a fair number of practice websites are built largely out of those posts.
So this is about what’s left that still earns its keep.
Compliance and advisory are two different businesses in search
The searches split cleanly. Practice websites tend not to.
Compliance work, the returns and the accounts, gets searched for on price and convenience. Somebody looking for a self assessment done is comparing cost and turnaround, and there’s software competing for that search as well as every other local practice.
Advisory is where the margin is and the search behaviour is nothing alike. Somebody wondering whether to incorporate, how to structure a sale, what to do about a growing payroll or whether they need an accountant at all isn’t comparing prices. They’re looking for somebody who knows what they’re doing.
If the site treats both as one list of services, it competes on price for the work you’d rather do less of.
Seasonal work has to be published long before the season
You know your own busy season better than I do. The part that catches practices out is that search doesn’t run to your deadline.
A page published in December for a January deadline has almost no chance of ranking in time. If the January searches matter to you, the work has to be done and indexed months earlier, then improved each year instead of rewritten each year.
The same applies to year end, to any budget announcement and to payroll changes. Look at when your own enquiries actually arrived last year, not when you were busiest.
What to write now that assistants answer the basics
The general question is answered elsewhere. What isn’t, and can’t be, is anything that requires knowing a specific situation.
Write about the decisions rather than the definitions. What actually changes when a sole trader incorporates and when it’s premature. What a business in a particular sector gets caught out by. What the real cost of getting it wrong looks like. Why the cheapest option is sometimes correct and sometimes expensive.
That writing also happens to be what an assistant draws on when somebody asks a question it can’t answer generically, and it’s what a prospective client reads to decide you’re worth calling.
Local still matters underneath all of this. A great many people want an accountant they can sit down with, and the map listing carries that. Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence.
Where I’d start
Depends on the practice. Indexing problems and a broken enquiry route come before any of it, as does being unable to trace a client back to the search that found them.
After that, roughly:
- The kind of client you want more of. A practice chasing sole traders and one chasing owner-managed businesses need different sites, and that decision drives everything else.
- The service pages, separated properly, with the advisory work given the same weight as the compliance work.
- Replacing the general explainers with writing that needs your judgement to produce.
- The measurement, including which enquiries turned into the clients you actually wanted.
Anything published needs to sit within your professional body’s rules on advertising and on giving advice. I’d rather build around those than have the work unpicked afterwards.
Would Google Ads help?
It can, particularly for a specific service or a specific kind of client, and particularly ahead of a deadline where the content route has run out of time.
Accountancy terms are competed for by practices and by software companies with far larger budgets, so going broad tends to be expensive and poorly targeted. Know what a client is worth across the years you keep them, not per job, before setting a budget. There’s more on my Google Ads service.
What about AI answers?
This is the sector where I’d take it most seriously, and where I’d least recommend buying a product for it.
Check it properly first. Take the questions that used to bring you traffic, run them through a few assistants, and look at whether the answer is good enough that nobody needs to click. Then look at your own Search Console and compare impressions against clicks over the last sixteen months on that kind of page. If impressions held and clicks fell, you’ve measured it on your own site instead of reading somebody’s headline.
What improves your position is being the named source for the things that need judgement. There’s more under AI search visibility.
Who this suits
Small and independent practices competing locally and against online-only providers.
Practices moving towards advisory whose websites still read as compliance-led.
Specialists in a sector or a niche, where far fewer firms have written anything useful and the client is looking for exactly that.
What does it cost to work together?
I can’t price this from a sector name. It depends on the state of the site, how much content is there already and what turns out to be wrong with it. I’d look at the site, whatever you can share from Search Console, and the practices you’re losing enquiries to. Then I’d tell you what I’d do first, why, and what it would cost.
Most of the work happens remotely, and I’m near Liverpool if a conversation in person would help.
Questions people ask
Is our blog still worth anything?
The parts of it that explain general rules are worth less than they were. The parts that carry your judgement about specific situations are worth more. It’s usually a case for rewriting a small number of pages, not for deleting the blog.
Should we compete on self assessment searches?
Only if you want that work and can compete on price and turnaround. It’s contested by software as well as other practices. Many firms do better targeting the client type they want to keep for years.
When should we publish for January?
Months before. A page published in December has little chance of ranking for a January deadline. Treat it as an annual asset you improve, not something you produce each season.
How do we handle professional body rules on advertising?
Build them into the plan from the start. I’d rather write within your obligations than produce something that has to be pulled, so that’s a conversation at the beginning rather than at sign-off.
Do you work with practices outside the North West?
Yes. The work is remote and my clients are spread around the country. Accountancy has its own page here because the AI exposure is sharper than in most sectors, not because location matters.
Start with an assessment
Tell me which clients you’d take more of and which you’d rather not, and where the enquiries come from now. I’ll look at the site, what’s happened to your impressions and clicks, and the firms you’re competing with, then tell you where I think the first useful change is. You can request a free assessment or get in touch. Other sectors are on the industries page.