Google Ads for professional services: CPC, budget and campaigns (a London accountant's lead costs £190)

Google Ads for professional services works when the campaign is a local Search campaign that buys "profession + city" and "service + client type" searches, excludes people looking for a job or free information, and sends the click to a page with an indicative price, reviews and a phone number. A click on "accountant london" costs £9.48 (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242): with a 5% conversion rate, one enquiry every twenty clicks, a lead for an accountant in London costs around £190.

That's the first number to put on the table before you open an account.

And it isn't even the highest.

A click on "limited company formation" costs £26.50. One on "independent financial adviser" £20.78.

So what does a small daily budget actually buy?

Not much, if you spread it. On small budgets there's no room for Display, video or national campaigns: every pound goes on the searches of people choosing a professional right now.

The mistakes we see in practices' accounts are almost always these:

• the click sent to the home page, with no price and an eight-field form;
• Performance Max from day one, without a single conversion to learn from;
• no negatives, with part of the budget going to people looking for a job at a firm.

So why listen to us?

Because we've seen the mechanism work for a local advice business. Contesini, two advice offices in the province of Mantua in Italy, used local Search and then Performance Max to collect 299 leads in 7 months at €7.20 each, and 68% became sales opportunities.

Here you'll find:

• what a click costs across 21 searches for accountants, architects, surveyors and advisers;
• what an enquiry costs and how much you can afford to pay for it;
• which campaign to open, with which keywords and which negatives;
• what goes on the landing page and what you can say in an ad without trouble from the ASA or your professional body;
• the minimum sensible budget, worked out from CPCs.

A note on the numbers: the keyword "google ads for professional services" has no volume in the planner, and "google ads for accountants" gets about 10 searches a month in the UK. The figures below come from the searches of the firms' clients, not from firms looking for an agency. The organic side is covered in the companion article SEO for professional services.

Let's start with prices.

How much a click costs for an accountant, an architect or a financial adviser (from £4.24 to £43.28)

On city searches accountants pay roughly what solicitors pay ("solicitor london" £10.19, "accountant london" £9.48); the real gap is on searches that name a service or a type of client, where the click goes above £20. An accountancy client stays for years, and advertisers know it.

Keyword	Searches/month	Average CPC	Top of page bid (high)	Competition
online accountant	1,000	£43.28	£49.78	high
limited company formation	1,000	£26.50	£43.81	medium
accountant for small business	2,900	£21.85	£50.73	medium
independent financial adviser	4,400	£20.78	£20.97	medium
sole trader accountant	390	£20.60	£18.34	high
financial adviser	22,200	£19.08	£17.47	medium
cheap accountant	590	£15.69	£16.70	high
accountant for self employed	1,000	£13.38	£13.27	high
accountant	40,500	£11.92	£12.38	low
accountant london	3,600	£9.48	£12.60	medium
accountant manchester	1,900	£9.22	£12.13	medium
architect london	2,400	£8.75	£6.38	medium
payroll services london	260	£8.50	£63.25	low
accountant birmingham	1,900	£7.95	£12.27	medium
surveyor near me	1,900	£7.01	£9.76	medium
accountant leeds	1,000	£6.65	£10.93	medium
accountant near me	12,100	£6.62	£12.61	medium
building surveyor near me	1,900	£5.41	£6.21	high
architect leeds	480	£5.29	£5.91	medium
architect near me	6,600	£5.20	£6.94	medium
architect manchester	1,600	£4.24	£4.89	medium

Two readings.

One: the click costs more where the client is worth more.

"Limited company formation" at £26.50 and "sole trader accountant" at £20.60 are the searches of people about to become recurring clients. Advertisers know it.

"Online accountant" at £43.28 is where the national fixed-fee firms fight each other.

And "cheap accountant"?

£15.69. More than the London city query, because the same national firms bid on it.

Two: outside London the click gets cheaper.

"Accountant birmingham" £7.95, "accountant leeds" £6.65, "architect manchester" £4.24 against £8.75 for "architect london".

A practice in a regional city buys the same kind of client for two thirds of the price or less. And an architect or building surveyor working on "near me" searches pays around £5 a click.

How much an enquiry costs, and how much you can afford to pay for it (from £54 to £190)

The cost of an enquiry is the average CPC divided by the landing page conversion rate: at £9.48 and 5% an enquiry costs £190, at 10% it costs £95. In Leeds, at £6.65, that becomes £133 and £67; for a building surveyor on "building surveyor near me" at £5.41, between £54 and £108.

So what decides whether you're at 5% or 10%?

The page.

5% is the rate we see on badly built pages: generic home page, long form, no price.

10% is achievable with a page built for the campaign.

At Contesini, local Search plus Performance Max produced 299 leads at €7.20 each. CPCs there were far lower than those of UK accountants, but the mechanism is the same.

Then there's the missing line. And it's yours.

How much a client is worth in the first year, and how many years they stay.

Let's do the sum. A sole trader client pays you for three years. An enquiry at £190 with a 30% close rate costs about £630 per client won: compare that with what the client pays you over those three years.

For an architect selling an extension or a refurbishment, the sum is done on the single job.

It's the only calculation that tells you whether Google Ads makes sense for you. And it has to be done first, not after three months of spend.

Further reading: when Google Ads makes sense.

Local Services Ads: available in the UK, but not for most professions (only legal services, only in Greater London)

Local Services Ads are ads at the top of the page with a verification badge, paid per lead instead of per click; they're live in the UK, but as of September 2026 the open categories are mostly home services, with one professional exception: legal services for firms in Greater London. In the United States they include lawyers, tax preparers and financial planners, which is why anyone reading American guides finds them everywhere.

We checked the UK position in September 2026 on Google's support page.

The categories open? Plumbers, electricians, roofers, removals, pest control, cleaning, appliance repair and similar trades.

The one professional exception covers legal services, from family and employment law to property, probate and tax law, but only for firms in Greater London.

Accountants, architects, surveyors and financial advisers are not among the eligible categories. Google points to an eligibility check for individual cases.

Practical conclusion: for a UK accountant, architect, surveyor or adviser, the tool is still the Search campaign.

It's worth rechecking the category list once a year, because it grows.

Which campaign: Search first, Performance Max later (at least 30 real conversions a month)

Start with a Search campaign with tight location targeting for the first 2-3 months, and add Performance Max only once the account has at least 30 real conversions a month. Google pushes Performance Max at anyone who opens an account, but for a professional with zero recorded conversions it's the worst choice.

Why?

Because without data the algorithm optimises for clicks. And the easiest clicks to get are from people looking for a job or a course.

Once the 30 conversions arrive, the Performance Max campaign should be linked to the Google Business Profile: it adds Maps and Display on an audience that has already shown it converts.

Contesini got to €7.20 per lead with this sequence, not by starting with Performance Max.

Display on its own, video campaigns and Demand Gen campaigns? No, not on a professional's budget.

Remarketing only makes sense if the site gets more than a few hundred visits a month, otherwise the audience is too small to serve ads to.

Further reading: how to do remarketing.

Account structure, keywords and match types (one campaign, four ad groups)

A professional's account has one campaign and three or four ad groups. More than that is unmanageable on a modest daily budget.

• Profession + city: "accountant london", "accountants in london", "accountant [area]". These are the keywords with high CPCs and the best conversion.
• Service + client type: "sole trader accountant" (390 searches, £20.60), "accountant for self employed" (1,000, £13.38), "limited company formation" (1,000, £26.50), "accountant for small business". For an architect: "house extension architect", "planning drawings". For a surveyor: "homebuyer survey", "party wall surveyor", "EPC" with the town.
• Proximity: "accountant near me" (12,100 searches, £6.62), "building surveyor near me" (1,900, £5.41). Here location targeting does the work of the keywords: a 10-15 km radius around the office.
• Brand, if your name is already searched for. For a local practice it deserves a separate ad group only if a competitor is buying your name.

Match types: phrase and exact at the start.

Broad match on a small daily budget brings the wrong traffic before smart bidding (automated bids) has the data to correct it. You open up to broad later, on the keywords that convert, with the negative list already built.

Location targeting: "presence" and NOT "presence or interest".

Otherwise someone searching "accountant london" from Glasgow sees your ad.

Ad schedule: most searches happen in office hours.

Our Saturday pull of the "accountant london" SERP (the results page) showed no paid results at all. Whoever buys the evening and weekend hours pays less per click, but talks to fewer people.

Negative keywords matter as much as positive ones (Indeed is tenth on "accountant london")

A share of the people typing your profession don't want to hire you: they want to be hired, or they're studying. In the SERP for "accountant london" the tenth organic result is Indeed with job listings.

The related searches include "accountant london jobs", "accountant london salary" and "free accountant london", and one of the People also ask questions is "Who are the big 5 accountants?" (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026).

Every one of those clicks is paid by you.

The negative list we start with on a professional's account:

jobs, vacancies, salary, how much does, how to become, course, exam, trainee, apprenticeship, graduate, free, famous, big 4, big 5, list, directory, university, degree.

Then the specific negatives:

• for an accountant "HMRC login" and "tax calculator" and any service you don't offer;
• for an independent financial adviser the names of banks and wealth managers you're not tied to;
• for an architect "software", "rendering", "3D".

The search terms report should be opened every week in the first month and every two weeks after that.

In the accounts we inherit, the biggest line of spend that nobody looks at is almost always there.

The landing page: price, reviews, phone number (three questions out of four are about money)

The landing page must answer the price question first, because it's the one almost everyone asks: of the four People also ask questions under "accountant london", three are about money. "How much does an accountant cost in London?", "Is it worth paying an accountant?", "Do accountants give free advice?".

Under "online accountant" the first one is "How much does an online accountant cost?".

A page that doesn't answer loses half of the paid clicks.

So do I have to publish a price list?

No. You need a "from" price or a range for the most requested service (annual self assessment, year-end accounts for a limited company, a house extension design), the factors that change it and a three-field form.

The rest of the page:

• Google reviews with the count and the average: the three firms in the London local pack have between 37 and 106 reviews, all rated 4.9 or 5.0;
• a tappable phone number;
• the address;
• a photo of the professional;
• the professional body membership.

Sending the click to the home page is the most common and most expensive mistake. A practice's home page talks about everything; the campaign page talks about the service the user has just searched for.

Call and location assets should always be on: part of a professional's conversions is a phone call straight from the ad, without visiting the site.

Further reading: how to build a landing page that converts.

Track real conversions, not technical events (15,267 "conversions" on 5,467 clicks)

A professional needs to track three conversions: form submissions, taps on the phone number on mobile, taps on WhatsApp. Calls from call assets are counted by Google itself, with a minimum duration you set (30-60 seconds filters out dead calls); page views, scrolls and menu clicks must not be marked as conversions.

It sounds obvious. It isn't.

At Valore Solare the account we inherited counted 15,267 "conversions" in a month against 5,467 clicks.

Three conversions per click. All technical events.

At Sunscape in 2024 there were 1,487 conversions at €0.61 each. None was an enquiry.

In both cases smart bidding was optimising on a number that meant nothing, and the first job was rebuilding the tracking.

And after that?

At Valore Solare we went from 9 enquiries at €212 each in the first month to 1,506 enquiries in 11 months at an average of €70.78.

For a professional with a small daily budget the damage is proportionally worse: with few conversions a month, three fake events a day are enough to make the campaign optimise for nothing.

Further reading: setting up Google Analytics for the events that count.

The minimum sensible budget, worked out from CPCs (£10 a day in London is a lottery)

To decide anything, a campaign needs at least 10 clicks a day and 15-20 conversions a month. Below that, the numbers swing too much to tell a keyword that works from one that doesn't.

Scenario	Reference CPC	Budget/day	Clicks/month	Enquiries/month (5-10%)	Cost per enquiry
Accountant in London	£9.48	£80	about 250	13-25	£95-190
Accountant in Leeds	£6.65	£60	about 270	14-27	£67-133
Architect in Manchester	£4.24	£40	about 280	14-28	£42-85
Building surveyor, "near me" searches	£5.41	£40	about 220	11-22	£54-108
Independent financial adviser (national)	£20.78	£150	about 220	11-22	£208-416

The number that often surprises people…

£10 a day in London on "accountant london" buys about one click a day. Around 30 a month. 1-3 enquiries.

That's not a campaign. It's a lottery. And after three months you won't know whether it worked.

Better £80 a day for three months than £10 a day for a year.

And seasonality?

It weighs more than people think:

• "accountant london" goes from 1,900 searches in June and July 2026 to 6,600 in September 2025;
• "self assessment accountant" from 2,900 in September 2025 and 1,900 in January 2026 to 390 in August 2026;
• "independent financial adviser" from 1,900 in December 2025 to 9,900 in February 2026;
• "architect london" from 3,600 in February to 1,000 in August.

Budget should move to the months when people search: for an accountant autumn through to the 31 January self assessment deadline, for a financial adviser the run-up to the end of the tax year, for an architect late winter and autumn.

What you can say in an ad, and what you can't (informative yes, comparative no)

Every UK ad falls under the ASA's CAP Code: claims must be truthful and, where objective, backed by evidence. On top of that, the professional bodies have their own rules: the ICAEW and ACCA codes of ethics rule out exaggerated claims and disparaging or unverified comparisons with other firms.

A side-by-side example:

• Yes: "Accountant in London, sole trader self assessment from £X, ICAEW Chartered Accountants". It's informative.
• No: "The best accountant in London" or "pay less tax than with anyone else". It's a matter for the ASA and for your professional body.

For architects, remember that "architect" is a protected title in the UK: only people on the ARB register can use it in an ad.

Financial advisers have an extra layer: their ads are financial promotions under FCA rules and must be fair, clear and not misleading, so promises about returns or comparisons with other firms are out.

Google's financial services policy for the UK also requires advertisers to be FCA-authorised and to complete Google's verification before ads can run. Check this in your account before launching.

What about buying a competitor's name?

Conquesting is technically possible on Google. In a regulated profession it's a choice we advise against: it costs little and can earn you a complaint.

The mistakes we find in professional firms' accounts (seven, always the same)

The most frequent mistakes in practices' accounts are seven, and none of them depends on budget.

• The click goes to the home page. No page for the campaign, no price, a form with eight fields.
• Performance Max from day one, with no conversions to learn from.
• "Presence or interest" targeting across the whole country for a practice that sees clients in one city.
• Broad match with no negatives, and the search terms report never opened.
• Conversions counted on technical events, as at Valore Solare and Sunscape.
• A £5-10 daily budget kept for months, which never produces enough data to decide anything.
• Call assets switched off, or running at night when nobody answers the phone.

Honestly?

There's a limit to our data: we don't have a public case of an accountant or architect with numbers we can quote.

Our first-hand references are Contesini (local walk-in advice offices) and B2B accounts such as Macropix, where cost per enquiry fell from €94 in 2024 to €39.44 in 2025 with the same logic of local Search and clean tracking.

Sector CPCs are measured; the 5-10% conversion rates are our experience on similar pages.

Google Ads or SEO for a professional practice? (Perrys ranks without paying £9.48 a click)

Google Ads brings enquiries from the first week and stops when the budget does; local SEO (Google Business Profile, service pages with the city, reviews) takes 3-6 months and then stays. Perrys Chartered Accountants appears both in the local pack for "accountant london" (4.9 stars, 37 reviews) and fifth in the organic results, without paying £9.48 for those clicks.

For a practice starting from zero the sequence is:

1. profile and website straight away;
2. local Search for the first 6-12 months;
3. then cut Ads back to the keywords the organic results don't reach ("limited company formation", new services, the peak season).

The reasoning on the organic side is in SEO for professional services, the general one in SEO and Google Ads together. For small practices the budget question is the same one we cover in Google Ads for SMEs.

Lawyers have their own CPCs, seasonality and professional conduct limits, from comparative claims to naming clients in ads: you'll find them in Google Ads for lawyers.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start (the page first, then the account)

Not £10 a day for a year, but £80 a day for three months.

Not 15,267 technical events, but three real conversions: form, phone, WhatsApp.

Not the home page, but a page with a price: three questions out of four ask for it.

Not Performance Max straight away, but local Search until you reach 30 conversions a month.

Now, two concrete things.

One: before opening the account, write the landing page. The most requested service, a price range, the reviews, the phone number, a three-field form.

Two: search for your profession and your city during office hours. Look at who is buying ads and where they send the clicks. If everyone sends them to the home page, your page with a price is already an advantage that costs nothing extra in CPC.

If you want us to look at the CPCs in your city and the sum against your client value together, book a strategy consultation. The service page is Google Ads.

See you next time!