How Do I Get More Clients For My Accountancy Firm?

Work through these in order. The client-type pages come first because they are where the business owners you do not already know come from, and the fees come second because they decide whether those owners ring you or the online firm.

A contractor searches ‘accountant for contractors’ and the town. A landlord with three flats searches ‘accountant for landlords’. A founder searches ‘accountant for startups’. A shop owner searches ‘small business accountant near me’. Each one is a different person with a different worry, and most firm websites answer all of them with a services list and a ‘who we help’ line in the footer.

Give each client type you want more of its own page, written for that owner rather than for another accountant. What they usually need from you, the thing that trips people like them up (IR35, section 24, marketplace VAT, the first year-end), how you work with them through the year, roughly what it costs and which accountant in the firm looks after them.

A page like that ranks for the search the owner actually makes and gives them somewhere to see themselves. A list of twelve industries does neither.

Year-end accounts, self assessment, corporation tax, VAT returns, payroll, bookkeeping, management accounts, company formation. Different searches at different points in the year, some from people in a panic in January and some from a company outgrowing its bookkeeper in June, and most firm websites answer all of them with one page and a list.

Google cannot rank a list against a page that explains the service properly, and the owner reading a list cannot tell whether you do payroll for fifty companies or reluctantly for three.

Write a page for each service you want more of. What it involves, who it is for, what you need from the client, what usually affects the cost and what happens after they get in touch. Start with the two or three services that bring the monthly clients, not the full list.

Business owners search ‘how much does an accountant cost’ before they ring anyone, and the online-only firms answer it with a monthly price on the homepage. If your site says ‘contact us for a quote’, the owner assumes you are the expensive one and either rings the online firm or arrives at the first meeting negotiating.

Explain the fee model in plain text. Monthly packages for a limited company and what each includes, a from price for a sole trader return, what adds to it (payroll, VAT, a second director), and when it is invoiced. You do not have to publish a full rate card. You have to be the local firm that explained how it works when the others said ‘it depends’.

That page is also what AI tools cite when someone asks what an accountant should cost, so it earns its place twice.

A business owner is choosing the person who will see every bank statement they have, and a firm with a team grid of headshots and ‘Director’ under each one tells them nothing. The online firm at least has a chat window with a name on it.

Give each accountant a page: qualification and professional body, what they specialise in, how long they have done it, the kind of clients they look after and a direct way to reach them. Link it from the client-type pages they cover. Then fix the reviews. Most firms’ Business Profiles carry a handful of reviews, some from staff, so ask clients at the year-end meeting, with the link, and ask them to mention what you sorted out.

A review that says ‘took over our limited company accounts mid-year and got the VAT straight’ does more than ten that say ‘great accountants’.

Business owners do not want a quote from a form. They want a short conversation with the person who would look after them, and a form that asks for turnover, entity type, employee count and current accountant before it asks what they need loses the enquiry on a phone.

Ask for a name, an email, what they need help with and when suits. Say plainly what happens next: a call with a named accountant, no charge, and no pressure to move before the year end if that is easier. Put a phone number next to the form that goes to a person, not a voicemail that says the office is closed for lunch.

Then send the enquiry to the accountant who covers that client type, not to a shared inbox that gets looked at on Friday.

A firm’s website can double its visits and win no new clients, usually because the visits are people looking for a job in accounts, students, or existing clients looking for the portal login.

Put a tracked phone number on the site, keep the enquiry form short and give it a field for what they need, and record where each new-client enquiry came from and what type of client it was. In Search Console, look at which searches you appear for and whether they are the client-type and service searches you want. If your biggest search is your own name, the site is not bringing you anyone new yet.

Once you can see enquiries by client type and service, you know which page to write next and which accountant the website is actually feeding. Report that to the partners instead of the visit count.