An accountant in London competes with 3 Google Business Profiles, a carousel of 5 directories and two review sites on page one. An online accountant competes with The Accountancy Partnership, which ranks for 8,679 keywords and draws an estimated 76,231 visits a month. These are two different games, and the first thing to decide is which one you are playing.
SEO for professional services is the work that puts an accountant, an architect, a financial adviser or a surveyor in front of people who search Google for "accountant london", "architect near me" or "independent financial adviser" without knowing their name. It rests on three pieces: the Google Business Profile with its reviews, a website with one page for each service and each location, and a small amount of content on questions that HMRC or the local council explain badly. The professional's name comes later, and it is the result, not the starting point.
Below are the SERPs measured with DataForSEO in September 2026, a comparison between a national leader and a local London firm, and the method we use with professional firms. Lawyers, therapists and dentists have numbers of their own: SEO for lawyers, SEO for therapists and SEO for dentists.
How clients search for an accountant or an architect
We pulled the SERP for "accountant london" (3,600 searches a month, CPC £9.48) on desktop, Google UK, searched from London, on 26 September 2026. At the top is a "Find results on" carousel with 5 sources: Bark, Yell, Tipped, a Facebook video and Infoisinfo. Below it, a local pack with 3 listings: Perrys Chartered Accountants (37 reviews, 4.9), Clarkwell & Co (106 reviews, 5.0) and Mysimplytax (58 reviews, 5.0).
The ten organic results, in order: saffery.com, londonaccountants.co, unbiased.co.uk, accountsandlegal.co.uk, perrysaccountants.co.uk, hwfisher.co.uk, vouchedfor.co.uk, howladerandco.com, fusionaccountants.co.uk, oasisaccountants.co.uk. Eight firms, two review and referral sites. No AI Overview and no ads in the snapshot.
The related searches include "Accountant London jobs" and "Accountant London salary". It means that some of the people typing "accountant london" are looking for a job, not an accountant. It is a detail that comes in handy when choosing negative keywords in the companion article on Google Ads.
The "People also ask" questions are about money: "How much does an accountant cost in London?", "Is it worth paying an accountant?", "Do accountants give free advice?". The related searches add "free", "independent", "for self-employed", "small business". People looking for an accountant want to know what they will pay before they call.
For architects the SERP takes a different shape. On "architect london" (2,400 searches, CPC £8.75) there is an image pack at the top, then a "Find results on" carousel of trade directories (Checkatrade, TrustATrader, Yell, Bark, Cylex) and a local pack with three practices. The organic results: a Houzz list ("Best 15 Architects in London"), an Instagram profile and seven practices with their homepage or a London page: Architecture for London, Extension Architecture, MATA Architects, Corstorphine & Wright, YARD Architects, qR Architects, Make Architects. Here too, two of the four "People also ask" questions are about cost.
Recommended reading: how to read search intent from a SERP.
Local or national: two markets in the same profession
"Online accountant" has 1,000 searches a month in the UK, less than a third of "accountant london", but a CPC of £43.28 and high competition (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026). The SERP is completely different: no local pack, no directories, an AI Overview at the top quoting prices "from £15 per month", and seven national online firms out of nine organic results: theaccountancy.co.uk, morethanaccountants.co.uk, a-wise.co.uk, cheaperaccountant.co.uk, mazumamoney.co.uk, hippoaccountants.com, gorillaaccounting.com. The other two are a Reddit thread and a review site.
This is the gap in scale between the two markets.
| Domain | Model | Organic keywords | Estimated visits/month | Equivalent Ads value | Keywords with a city |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| theaccountancy.co.uk | online accountant for sole traders and small companies | 8,679 | 76,231 | £271,818/month | 0% |
| londonaccountants.co | local small business firm in London | 67 | 725 | £7,397/month | 45% |
The Accountancy Partnership has 105 times the traffic of London Accountants. But London Accountants is second for "accountant london" in the live SERP, and The Accountancy Partnership does not appear on that search. Two strategies that never touch.
The choice is made before you write a single line. If you see clients in your office and your catchment is a city or a county, the game is local: Google profile, service pages with the city, reviews. If you work remotely with sole traders and companies across the UK, the game is national and is won with content and brand, at a different level of investment.
What search is worth for each profession
The sector keywords, with volume and CPC, are useful for two things: seeing where the demand is and seeing how much advertisers pay for it, which is a good indicator of what a client is worth.
| Keyword | Searches/month | Average CPC | Top of page bid (high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| accountant | 40,500 | £11.92 | £12.38 |
| financial adviser | 22,200 | £19.08 | £17.47 |
| register as self employed | 18,100 | £4.61 | £7.10 |
| set up limited company | 14,800 | £25.93 | £64.78 |
| accountants near me | 12,100 | £7.77 | £11.10 |
| architect near me | 6,600 | £5.20 | £6.94 |
| structural engineer near me | 6,600 | £3.46 | £3.86 |
| independent financial adviser | 4,400 | £20.78 | £20.97 |
| accountant london | 3,600 | £9.48 | £12.60 |
| architect london | 2,400 | £8.75 | £6.38 |
| accountant manchester | 1,900 | £9.22 | £12.13 |
| surveyor near me | 1,900 | £7.01 | £9.76 |
| financial adviser near me | 1,900 | £20.89 | £23.64 |
| online accountant | 1,000 | £43.28 | £49.78 |
| structural engineer london | 1,000 | £6.44 | £7.07 |
| surveyor london | 480 | £8.00 | £15.46 |
| financial adviser london | 210 | £16.09 | £13.65 |
Three things the table says on its own. First: financial advisers and the "online" and company formation searches have the highest CPCs. "Online accountant" at £43.28 is the most expensive click on the list, followed by "set up limited company" at £25.93, because someone setting up a company picks an accountant who will look after them for years.
Second: "near me" is bigger than the city. "Accountants near me" has 12,100 searches, more than three times "accountant london"; "surveyor near me" 1,900 against 480 for "surveyor london"; "structural engineer near me" 6,600 against 1,000. You don't catch those searches with a page, you catch them with the Google Business Profile and the physical location of the office.
Third: for financial advisers local demand barely exists. "Financial adviser london" has 210 searches, "independent financial adviser" 4,400 and "financial adviser" 22,200, with peaks of 33,100 in September 2025 and January and February 2026. A financial adviser plays on specialism (independent, pensions, inheritance tax planning), not on the city.
One limit of the data: for many niche keywords the planner returns zero even though demand exists. Search Console, after a few months of site history, is more reliable than the planner for long queries.
Recommended reading: how to do keyword research.
What a local firm that actually ranks does
London Accountants is the most useful example in the London SERP because it is a small firm, not a platform: 67 organic keywords and 725 estimated visits a month are numbers a single practice can reach.
The profile of its keywords is the opposite of The Accountancy Partnership's: 55% commercial, 45% with a city, and the top 15 keywords bring 90% of the traffic. The homepage is third for "accountants london" (3,600 searches) in DataForSEO's database, first for "accounting services in london" (210), fifth for "small business accountants in london" (390, CPC £28.18) and fourth for "accountants for small business london" (210, CPC £31.87).
Then there are the articles, and this is where the lesson is. It does not write about UTR numbers or the Government Gateway, where The Accountancy Partnership already ranks third and ninth. It writes about things a business client asks and finds poorly explained online: "mandatory payrolling of benefits" (position 7, 140 searches, CPC £12.72), "what is a cogs" (position 4, 590 searches), "cogs in accounting" (position 3). They are searches of a few hundred a month at most, made by people running a business who have a concrete question.
The site architecture that works for a local firm is the same one we see in B2B projects such as Macropix, where 79 keywords out of 135 are on page one because each product has its own page. Translated for a professional firm:
- a homepage that states the profession, the city and who you work for in the first two lines (London Accountants ranks it for a dozen commercial keywords);
- one page for each service with a name people search for: "self assessment tax return", "limited company accounts", "payroll", "planning drawings for a house extension", not "services";
- one page for each office or city served, if you have more than one;
- a blog with 10 to 20 articles on specific questions you can answer better than HMRC, not 200 articles on everything.
The model holds in any UK town: an accountancy practice in Leeds or an architecture studio in Bristol has the same three levers (profile, service pages, niche content), with a different local pack and a different set of directories.
Recommended reading: how to structure an SEO-friendly website.
The national model: answering the questions HMRC explains badly
Where a national leader gets its traffic
Of The Accountancy Partnership's top 100 keywords, 84 are informational, 10 navigational, 5 commercial and 1 transactional. None contains a city. The top ones by traffic are "accountancy" (40,500 searches, position 1), "government gateway login" (246,000, position 9), "utr number" (27,100, position 3), "personal tax account" (90,500, position 9), "tax code checker" (14,800, position 4) and "35k after tax" (6,600, position 2).
It also does it with tools: its salary calculator ranks for "salary calculator" and "take home pay calculator" (301,000 searches each, positions 18 to 27), and the tax code checker is fourth for its own query. The mechanism: catch people searching how a tax obligation works, convert a tiny share into clients and build a brand. "The accountancy partnership" has 3,600 searches a month: direct demand bought with years of content and advertising.
Why a sole practitioner should not copy it
The most common advice from people selling marketing to professional firms is "start a blog and write tax guides". The data say it is the most expensive and least profitable route for a local firm.
First: on those keywords the space is taken. The Accountancy Partnership is third for "utr number" and fourth for "tax code checker", and HMRC and GOV.UK sit above everyone on this kind of query; moving them takes years and a domain authority a small firm does not build. Second: 56% of the SERPs in The Accountancy Partnership's top 100 have an AI Overview. Guides on UTR numbers and tax codes are the first to lose clicks, because Google answers on its own. The live SERP for "accountant london", on the other hand, has none.
Third: the average CPC of London Accountants' keywords is £13.24, The Accountancy Partnership's £4.98. Local keywords are worth more per click than informational ones. An article ranking for "mandatory payrolling of benefits" at 140 searches is worth more to a London firm than a guide to the Government Gateway at 246,000: the person reading it is one step away from a phone call.
Recommended reading: how AI Overviews work and what they change for traffic.
The Google Business Profile is worth as much as the website
The 3 listings in the local pack for "accountant london" have between 37 and 106 reviews, all rated 4.9 or 5.0. The pack sits above the organic results, and for the "near me" search (12,100 a month) it is almost the only thing that counts.
What moves the profile in local projects is the primary category ("Accountant", "Architect", not "Business services"), the number and freshness of reviews, and consistency of name, address and phone number across profile, website and directories. The directories in the carousel are there for that: they rarely bring a client, but they keep consistent the data Google uses to trust the profile. Bark, first in the carousel, and Unbiased, third in the organic results, are the ones that also sell enquiries, for a fee.
Reviews have to be asked for: a firm that files a set of year-end accounts or hands over planning drawings has a natural moment to do it. On the rules: professional firms in the UK can advertise, but the ASA's CAP Code applies, so claims must not mislead and objective claims need evidence. Only members of a chartered body (ICAEW, ICAS, CAI, or ACCA for "chartered certified") can call themselves chartered accountants; "architect" is a title protected by the Architects Act 1997 and reserved for people on the ARB register. A profile with real reviews and a page explaining what you do is fine; an ad for "the best accountant in London" is a claim you would have to prove.
Recommended reading: guide to Google Business Profile and local SEO.
Personal brand is measured in searches for your name
Many professionals start from their name: a website with their surname in the domain, a homepage with their biography, a polished LinkedIn. The figure that puts this approach in proportion: "clarkwell" has 50 searches a month, while "accountant london" has 3,600 and "accountants near me" 12,100. Clarkwell has 106 reviews and a place in the London local pack, and its name is still worth about 1% of the local demand it can catch.
Brand works in the opposite direction: first you catch generic demand, then the name starts being searched. The Accountancy Partnership got to its 3,600 brand searches afterwards.
Where the name counts straight away is in how Google judges the trustworthiness of the site. An "about" page with your professional body membership and number, specialisms and a real photo, plus a linked LinkedIn profile and a Google profile with the same name: these are the signals we describe in E-E-A-T. For a financial adviser the FCA registration should be stated clearly, because the Financial Services Register is the first thing a client checks.
Architects, surveyors, engineers and financial advisers: what changes
The accountant is the most measurable case, but the method adapts.
Architects. "Architect near me" has 6,600 searches, "architect london" 2,400 and "architecture firms london" 1,600. The SERP has an image pack, a carousel of trade directories and a Houzz "best 15" list, so getting into those lists and directories is digital PR work worth as much as the site's SEO. The portfolio is the content that ranks, if every project has its own page with the type of work and the borough instead of one gallery. "Architect london extension" and "residential architect london" are among the related searches, and "loft conversion architect" (590 searches, CPC £6.22) and "house extension architect" (480, £6.05) peak in autumn: a "house extensions in London" page is worth more than a "projects" page.
Surveyors and structural engineers. Demand is almost all local and proximity-based ("structural engineer near me" 6,600, "surveyor near me" 1,900, "structural engineer london" 1,000, "surveyor london" 480) with CPCs of £3.46 to £8.00. Here the Google profile and pages by job (building survey, party wall, structural calculations, building regulations drawings) do the work; the blog helps little.
Financial advisers. Demand is national and topic-based. "Independent financial adviser" at 4,400 searches and a CPC of £20.78 is the keyword to hold if you are independent, and pages by topic (pensions, inheritance tax, retirement income) beat pages by city. Advisers are regulated by the FCA, whose rules require financial promotions to be clear, fair and not misleading, and "independent" can only be used if your advice meets the FCA's definition: every piece of content that mentions returns needs to be written with those rules in front of you.
The sample for these three professions is smaller: we measured the keywords and one SERP, not the full profile of the leading domains as we did for accountants.
What to measure, and what cannot be measured
A professional firm does not sell online, so the metric is not traffic: it is the number of calls, forms and WhatsApp messages that come from Google, and how many become clients. The minimum set-up is Search Console for queries and positions, Google Analytics with events on calls and forms, and the Google profile report. On Contesini, two advisory offices in the province of Mantua in Italy, tracking this way showed that 68% of the 299 leads received in 7 months were real opportunities, not time-wasters.
One thing that cannot be measured well: how much competitors spend on Google Ads. DataForSEO detects no paid keywords for either of the two domains in the table, even though "online accountant" is one of the most expensive clicks on the list: the paid database is partial. Better to look at the SERP during office hours and at the Google Ads Transparency Center.
Recommended reading: which SEO KPIs to watch and how to use Search Console.
SEO or Google Ads for a professional firm?
With a CPC of £9.48 on "accountant london" and a 5% conversion rate, an enquiry from Google Ads costs around £190. It is a cost that holds up if the client stays for years, and for an accountant that is usually the case. Ads brings enquiries from the first week and stops when the budget does; SEO takes months and then stays.
The sequence we recommend to a firm starting from zero: Google profile and a website with service pages straight away, a local Search campaign for the first 6 to 12 months while organic grows, then cutting Ads back to the keywords organic cannot reach. We have written up structure, keywords, budget and policies in Google Ads for professional services, and the general reasoning in SEO and Google Ads together.
Frequently asked questions
How much does SEO cost for a professional firm?
For a local firm the work is limited: profile, 5 to 10 service pages, around ten targeted articles and reviews. It is a project of a few months plus maintenance, well below the cost of a national project. The benchmarks are in how much SEO costs.
How long does it take to see results?
The Google profile moves within weeks if it starts from zero reviews. Service pages with the city take 3 to 6 months on searches of a few hundred a month. On Sunscape we went from 1 to 38 keywords on page one in six months, with impressions rising from 329 to 5,809 a month: a realistic order of magnitude for a firm too. The details are in how long SEO results take.
Do I need a blog?
Yes, but small and targeted. London Accountants ranks in the top 7 for its niche topics with a handful of articles. A blog that covers the whole of tax competes with The Accountancy Partnership and HMRC, and loses. Our rules for writing are in creating content for SEO.
Are directories such as Bark or Yell still useful?
They keep the firm's data consistent, and Google shows them in a block (5 in one carousel on "accountant london"). As a source of clients, only the ones that sell enquiries, such as Bark or Unbiased, have a mechanism for it, and you pay per contact. They replace neither the profile nor the website.
Recommended reading: the local and national markets compared.
Where to start
Search Google for "your profession + your city" during office hours and look at who is in the local pack and who the top three organic results are. If the pack has firms with 50 to 100 reviews and you have 4, the first job is not the website: it is asking every client whose work you complete over the next three months for a review. If the pack is weak and the organic results are directories, there is a service page with the city to write and a free spot to take.
If you would like us to look at the SERP for your city and your sector with you, get in touch. If you run a small firm, the general reasoning is in the guide to SEO for SMEs and on our local SEO service page.
