I get asked about local SEO on almost every call with a local firm, and the question is usually some version of “how do we get to the top of Google in our city?”
So this is how I actually think about it, after years of doing this only for accounting firms. Some of it is good news, and some of it is me being honest about what won’t work. If you want the basics first, like long-tail keywords and setting up your Google Business Profile, our 2026 SEO for accountants guide covers those. This one goes deeper into the local side.
What Is Local SEO for Accountants?
Local SEO for accountants is pretty much everything that decides whether your firm shows up when someone nearby types “CPA near me” into Google or asks ChatGPT for a good accountant in town. That’s your website, your Google Business Profile, your listings across the web, and what people are saying about you online.
Google is actually pretty open about how it picks. It looks at three things: how relevant your profile is to the search, how far you are from the person searching, and how well-known you are. You can’t do anything about where your prospect is sitting. The other two are where we do the work.
And honestly, SEO is SEO. The biggest mistake I see isn’t a technical one. It’s choosing places and keywords that are way too competitive, which brings us to the first decision.
I Almost Always Say Start With Your Home Market
My recommendation for most firms is to focus on your initial local area for the first few months, just to get traction. If you spread too thin, it just takes longer to start getting results, because your marketing is diluted across too many places at once.
I have firms come to me wanting to go after four cities at the same time. You don’t want to do that. Your resources get split four ways, and honestly, Google can see around it. Unless you actually have a presence in each of those places, it’s just not going to work.
There’s one exception I’ll mention. We have a client who’s been with us about five years. He started out going after his city, and it was so hard to budge. We got him to page two, but nobody’s really going to page two to look for their accountant. So we made a switch and he went into restaurants, a national niche, and now he’s doing really well. Sometimes the smartest local strategy is realizing local isn’t the right fit, and that decision shapes everything else on your site.
Your Pages Need to Say Where You Are, Over and Over
When you go after a place, you’re going to need to say the name of it repeatedly. So whatever your homepage is, it really needs to say the location, and so do your service pages.
This is also the answer to the “near me” question I get all the time. You don’t need a page called “CPA near me.” If your tax page says tax services in your town, that’s going to cover anybody typing in “CPA near me” or “accountant near me” while they’re in your town. Google handles the “near me” part on its own.
What doesn’t work is cramming a list of cities onto your homepage. If the copy says we’re in this city, we’re in that city, we’re in five other cities, Google is pretty much going to look at it and think keyword stuffing. It’s the same reason copying one page ten times and swapping the city name doesn’t hold up. Each page needs something real that’s specific to that place.
And the website has to close the deal once people get there. We had a local client go live with a new website recently, and he emailed me that in the past 10 days he’d never gotten this many leads from Google. A clearly local site does a lot of that work.
The Good News Is in Your Suburbs
Here’s something most firms don’t expect me to say. Whoever is on the first page for your big city has usually been there for years, and they probably have a great SEO team behind them. Where you’re starting from, we’re probably not going to budge them anytime soon.
The good news is that in all of your surrounding suburbs, everyone is kind of there for the taking. Each suburb on its own is low volume, but add them all up and it’s a real number of searches. Because they’re so much easier, once you capture those markets you can just keep expanding outward.
So the better strategy is to go after a lot of little towns and suburbs. When we do this for a firm, we do a big audit of all the potential suburbs, pick three or four to start with, and then keep a hit list of the next ones to add as the first ones gain traction. Before we build any of it, though, your Google Business Profile has to back it up.
Why You Need a Real Office for Local SEO
To be competitive in local SEO, you need an actual location in the market you’re going after. Even a city that’s only 30 minutes away is going to be a struggle without one. Google’s smart enough to see that you’re creating all this content about a city and then ask where your verified Business Profile address is.
And it has to be a real location. Google’s Business Profile guidelines say P.O. boxes and remote mailboxes aren’t accepted, and a co-working space only counts if it has signage and is staffed during business hours. If your clients never come to you, you can set up as a service-area business, hide the address, and list the towns you serve instead.
The other thing I tell every firm is to go check your profile regularly. Google will change your listed services based on feedback from users, so sometimes Google just adds some, and not all of them are right. Keep your real business name too. Adding “Tax Services” or your city to it is against the rules and can get the profile suspended.
What Else Makes Google and AI Trust a Local Firm?
Beyond your website and profile, it comes down to your reviews, your listings and your links. Picture someone typing “CPA near me,” looking at your firm, then looking at the next one. Besides reviews, what else differentiates you?
That’s why I want a firm to look like the trusted local choice before we start pouring marketing into it. Show your local team, how many clients you work with, and your reviews. Then make sure your name, address and phone number match everywhere you’re listed, on Google, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp and the directories, which is a big part of what we handle for every local client.
Links matter too. Think of your site’s authority as a power score out of 100. Links from real local organizations like your chamber of commerce, your state CPA society or a local college basically tell Google you’re not a spun-up website that nobody uses. One link from a college is worth more than a pile of spammy ones.
And then Reddit. I already know Reddit is a huge driver for local businesses, and most firms completely ignore it. A lot of what AI tools pull from is user-generated, like Reddit, LinkedIn and review sites, where people give their actual opinions. So being part of those local conversations helps you show up on Google and AI search both.
How Long Does Local SEO Take for Accountants?
For a local website, it usually takes about six to eight months to really start showing up on page one. A national site can take even longer. I don’t want to blow smoke and promise you the top of page one in six months if I can’t look at your data and tell you that honestly.
That’s also why I tell firms to get SEO going first, because it takes the longest. Your Google profile, your blogs, your Reddit presence and your social media all take a little while to compound, and then they start working together.
The firms that come out ahead aren’t the biggest ones in town. They’re the ones that picked the right market, made it obvious where they are, and kept adding one more town at a time.
If you’d rather have a team that only works with accountants handle this, that’s exactly what our SEO for accountants service does. Book a call and I’ll show you which towns around you are the easiest to win first.
