Ask an SEO agency to name the three firms currently outranking you for your highest fee service, and say why. An agency that has done the work answers in the call. An agency that has not will offer to send a report, and the report will arrive as a list of keywords with no firms in it. That single question separates the two faster than any proposal document, and it costs you nothing to ask.
Most practice principals buying SEO are buying something they cannot inspect. You can read a set of accounts and tell within minutes whether the person who prepared them knew what they were doing. A search proposal offers no such purchase. The vocabulary is unfamiliar, the deliverables are abstract, and every agency in the market says the same eleven things on its homepage. What follows is the instrument we would want a practice to use on us.
Key takeaways
- An agency that cannot name your actual competitors by firm name has not looked at your market.
- A case study without a before position, a date range and a named metric is a testimonial, not evidence.
- A ranking guarantee is a warning, because the agency controls none of the inputs Google weights.
- The right contract question is what happens to the work when you leave, not what happens if you stay.
- Sector knowledge shows up in what the agency asks you, not in what it tells you.
- Twelve questions, asked in one 30 minute call, will sort a shortlist of five down to one or none.
You do not have to run this alone. Our SEO for accountants programme exists to answer every question on this list for your practice specifically, and the 30 minute strategy call is where we do it, including the ones that end with us telling you a programme is not right for you yet. Book the call and bring the list.
What should you ask an SEO agency before you hire one?
Ask questions that force the agency to reveal work it has already done on your market, rather than work it promises to do later. The distinction matters because promises are free and research is not. An agency that has spent two hours on your sector before the call will say things you did not know about your own competitors. An agency that has not will talk about process, timelines and the importance of content.
There are twelve questions below, grouped in four sets: what they know about your market, what they can prove, what you are actually buying, and what happens when it ends. Run them in that order. The first set does most of the filtering.
Set one: what do they already know about your market?
1. Which three firms rank above us for our highest fee service, and why?
The answer should contain firm names, a service, and a reason that is not “they have more backlinks”. A practice doing probate and estate work across two counties competes with a specific, small and knowable set of firms for that phrase. Naming them takes an hour. An agency unwilling to spend that hour before asking for a retainer is telling you how the retainer will feel.
Watch for the reason given. “They rank because their domain is older” is an excuse with no action attached. “They rank because they have a page about probate and estate accounts and you have it as a bullet on a services list” is a diagnosis with a fix inside it. The second kind of answer is rarer than it should be: when we sampled 494 practice websites drawn from ACCA and ICAEW listings, 223 of them, 45.1%, named no particular client type anywhere on the site, which is the gap an agency looking properly would find in the first hour. That study is ours, self published with its method and fault definitions in full under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22280523, and we sell the work it points at, so weigh it accordingly.
2. What do our clients search for that we are not currently on a page for?
A good answer names services, not keywords. Practices tend to describe their work the way it appears on a fee schedule, and buyers describe it the way the problem feels. A company director worried about an enquiry letter searches for help with an HMRC enquiry, not for “tax investigation services”. An agency that has read your site will have spotted at least two of these gaps before the call.
Push for specificity here. “You need more content” is not an answer. “You have nothing for probate or estate work and there are firms in your county ranking for it with three hundred words” is.
3. What would you need from us that we probably would not want to give?
Ask this one to see whether the agency has an honest account of its own dependencies. Every real engagement needs things a busy practice resents supplying: access to the site, a named person who can approve copy, sign off on technical changes, and half an hour a month from someone who actually knows the work. An agency that says it needs nothing from you is describing a service that will produce nothing you recognise.
The best answer we have heard a principal give back was that their previous agency had never once asked them a question about tax. Sixteen months of invoices, and nobody had asked what the firm was good at.
Set two: what can they prove?
4. Show me a case study with a starting position, a date range and the query.
A case study is evidence when it carries three things: where the page sat before, over what period, and for which search. Missing any one of them, it is a story. “We grew their traffic by 340%” without a baseline could mean forty visits became one hundred and seventy-six. That may still be good. You cannot tell, and the agency knows you cannot tell.
Ask to see the Search Console screenshot rather than the agency’s own chart. Search Console is Google’s own reporting, the client owns the account, and the date range is not editable. An agency that will not show it on a shared screen, with the client’s permission, is protecting something.
5. Can I speak to a client in a practice like mine?
The answer should be yes, with a name, and the practice should look like yours. A generalist will offer a client from another sector instead, which tells you the accountancy experience is thinner than the pitch suggested.
Two questions make the call worth having once you get it: what surprised you in the first three months, and what would you tell someone considering this. Both invite honesty in a way that asking whether they were happy does not.
6. How does your own practice rank for the terms you are selling us?
A considered answer counts, and it does not have to be that they rank first. Plenty of strong consultancies grow entirely on referral and have never pointed the work at themselves, which is a defensible position when it is said plainly. An agency selling local visibility that cannot be found for its own town and has no account of why is a different matter. Check it yourself before the call, then ask, and listen for whether the answer is considered or flustered.
Set three: what are you actually buying?
7. What does the price cover, and what drives it up or down?
The number should be traceable to a quantity of work. Search costs vary with the size of the site, the competitiveness of the terms, how much of the technical foundation already exists and how much content has to be written from nothing. A practice with forty pages and a clean site is a different job from a practice with four hundred pages and eleven years of accumulated redirects.
Be careful with packages priced identically for every client. A fixed monthly figure that does not change with the size of the estate is a figure set by what the market will pay rather than by what the work requires. That is not dishonest, and it is common, but it means the first month either overserves or underserves you, and you should know which.
8. What will you do in month one, specifically?
The answer should be dull. A competent first month is an audit, a fix list ordered by what moves first, the technical repairs that need doing before anything else can work, and a plan for what gets written. Anything exciting in month one is usually a shortcut.
Compare the answers across your shortlist. Where three agencies describe the same first month and one describes something different, ask the fourth why. Sometimes the different answer is the right one.
9. Who does the work, and will I meet them?
Ask for the name of the person who will touch your site, and whether the person in the room is that person. Professional services firms recognise this problem, because you have all seen a pitch led by a partner and delivered by someone two years qualified. The same pattern runs through agencies.
Sector knowledge matters more here than in most industries. A practice answers to ICAEW or ACCA for how it markets itself, and copy drafted by someone who has never opened those rules comes back for rewriting or, worse, goes live. We have written elsewhere about the marketing rules ICAEW and ACCA members work under and how they shape what a practice can publish, and it is a reasonable thing to test in a call.
Set four: what happens when it ends?
10. Who owns the content, the site changes and the data?
Everything produced for you should be yours, without condition, from the day it is published. Ask specifically about the Google Business Profile, the Search Console and Analytics properties, the content, and any tracking set up during the engagement. Agencies occasionally create these under their own accounts, which turns an ordinary exit into a negotiation.
Get the answer in the contract rather than the call. A sentence confirming that the client owns all accounts, content and data, and that access transfers on termination, takes one line and prevents an expensive argument.
11. What is the notice period, and what happens in the last month?
Short notice is a sign of confidence. A twelve month lock-in tells you the agency expects results to arrive late enough that clients would otherwise leave first. Our own position is thirty days, cancel any time, because an engagement that needs a contract to hold it together has already failed.
Ask what the final month looks like. A good agency finishes the work in progress and hands over a written account of what was done and what remains. A bad one stops on the notice date and leaves a half rewritten site.
12. What would make you tell us not to do this?
The answer separates advisers from vendors. Real reasons exist and they are usually about the practice rather than the search market: an intake process already dropping the enquiries it gets, a site old enough that a rebuild has to come first, or a niche in your area already committed to a firm too far ahead to catch cheaply. An agency with no such list has never turned work away.
Should a practice hire a sector specialist or a generalist agency?
Hire the specialist where your market is crowded and the generalist where your work is unusual enough that nobody has specialised in it. Specialism buys you a shorter learning curve and a competitor set the agency already understands. It costs you a certain sameness, because an agency running twelve accountancy practices is applying a method it has run eleven times before.
The real risk with a generalist is not incompetence. It is that an accountancy practice looks, to a generalist, like any other professional services business, so the work arrives shaped for a solicitor or a consultancy and the vocabulary is subtly wrong. A buyer looking for help with a company restructure does not search the way a buyer looking for a conveyancer searches, and the difference shows up in which pages get written.
One useful test: ask how many accountancy clients the agency runs, then ask how many it has turned down in the same area. An agency that takes every practice that calls is selling you a place in a queue with your competitors.
Why accountancy is a harder buy than most sectors
Accountancy punishes a bad agency choice more than most sectors do, because the buying decision is slow, referral led and rarely urgent. A company director does not switch accountant because a website was persuasive. The website’s job is to be findable and credible at the moment a decision is already being made, which is why so much of the twelve turns on evidence rather than presentation.
The same twelve questions carry across the other professional services where trust is the product, with the evidence question doing most of the work in each. A law firm asks for a case study naming the practice area. A financial adviser tests whether the agency understands what may and may not be claimed in public marketing. A letting agency asks how the agency plans to compete with the property portals rather than pretending they are not there. Accountancy differs in that the fee at stake per client is high and the switching moment is rare, so a wasted year costs more.
Two shortlists, and what the questions found
Read both of these as composites rather than clients. They are drawn from shortlists we have sat on either side of, and they carry none of the three things question four demands, which is the reason they are labelled here instead of dressed up. Printing a story that fails the test this article sets would be a poor way to end it.
A four partner practice in the Midlands ran a shortlist of three agencies through question one. Two sent keyword reports afterwards. The third named four competing firms in the call, showed that all four had a dedicated page for probate and estate work while the practice carried a single bullet point, and said plainly that the phrase was low volume and high value rather than pretending otherwise. The practice hired the third and published the page. The page took a day to write.
A sole practitioner in South Wales asked question twelve of two agencies. The first said there was no reason not to proceed. The second said the practice was already turning away enquiries it could not service and suggested fixing the intake before spending anything on search. The practitioner spent three months on intake, then came back. The second agency had delayed its own fee by a quarter and won an engagement that has now run two years.
What a wrong hire actually costs
The cost of a bad SEO engagement is rarely the fee. It is the twelve to eighteen months of standing still while a competitor in your area publishes the pages you should have published, and the slow accumulation of changes to your site that someone later has to undo. Reversing a badly structured set of location pages, or recovering from a page that was stuffed to rank and then demoted, takes longer than doing it properly would have taken.
The second cost is the belief a failed engagement leaves behind. An engagement that produces nothing tends to convince a principal that search does not work for accountancy, and that belief is expensive. We see it most often in firms that have already paid twice. If your practice is in that position, the diagnostic sequence in our walkthrough of why an accountancy firm stops ranking and what to check in what order will usually locate the cause before you spend anything else.
Where the answers should take you next
Run the twelve questions, then check what the shortlist did with the keyword question in particular. Practices consistently find that the agencies who answered question two well are the ones who had already looked at how their clients search, and that is the work that decides which pages get written. Our guide to how a practice builds its own keyword list from the services it actually sells shows the same analysis from your side of the table, so you can tell a considered answer from a generated one.
Where you would rather have the analysis before you commit to anything, an independent SEO audit gives you the findings without the retainer, and you keep them whoever you hire. Where you want the strategy without the delivery, our SEO consultancy and mentoring does the thinking and leaves the implementation with your team.
Frequently asked questions
How much should an accountancy practice pay for SEO?
Expect the number to track the size of your site and the competitiveness of your area rather than the size of your firm. A single office practice in a county town is a smaller job than a four office practice competing in a major city, and a quote ignoring that distinction has been set by the market rather than the work. Our own figures and the three ways into the work are published on the SEO for accountants programme page rather than held back for a call, which is the test we would apply to anyone else.
Is a ranking guarantee ever legitimate?
A guarantee on rankings is not credible, because no agency controls Google’s weighting, your competitors’ investment or an algorithm update. A commitment on delivery is credible, and it is the one worth asking for: a written statement of what will be produced, by when, that you can hold someone to. Ask what happens if a milestone is missed, because a milestone with no consequence attached is a project plan rather than a promise. Our own commitments are set in writing at three, six and twelve months and the question of what follows a miss is one we answer on the call.
How long before an accountancy practice sees results from SEO?
Movement on low competition terms often appears within two to four months, and the competitive service terms usually take six to twelve. Practices with an older site and an existing body of content move faster than practices starting from a five page brochure. Anyone promising the competitive terms inside ninety days is either describing a very quiet market or has not checked yours.
Should we hire an agency or bring SEO in-house?
Neither, until the practice has decided what it wants to be known for, because the staffing question sits downstream of the positioning one. A hire made into an undecided practice produces activity nobody can evaluate. We have worked through the hire, the retainer and the fractional middle ground in what a practice actually gets from a fractional marketing arrangement, including the point at which each stops making sense.
What is the single best question if I only ask one?
Ask which three firms rank above you and why. It cannot be answered from a template, it requires work done before the call, and the quality of the answer predicts the quality of the engagement more reliably than anything else on the list.
See how the programme answers all twelve
Our figures, the three ways in, the niche scoring and who we turn away are all set out on one page, so question seven does not need a phone call.
Read the SEO for accountants programmeOr book the 30 minute strategy callBring the list to the call
Every question above is one we expect to be asked of us, and the 30 minute strategy call is built to answer them. We score your niche, name the firms ranking above you for the service you most want to sell, run the client value calculation against your actual fee scale, and say plainly where a programme is not right for your practice yet. You keep the analysis whether you engage us or not, there is no deck, and nothing longer than thirty days’ notice is asked for if you do go ahead.
Two answers before you ask for them. Your competitor cannot buy the same work from us in the same area, because we hold a niche to one firm per catchment, and you will hear on the first call whether yours is still open. And question seven is answered in public on the SEO for accountants programme page, because a price nobody will write down is the thing question seven exists to catch.
True SEO Consultants Ltd is a Cardiff consultancy, at Startup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN, working with accountancy practices across the UK and onboarding clients worldwide through a fully remote digital onboarding and delivery process. Both directors came from inside finance, which is the reason question one on this list is the one we run on ourselves before every call.
Book your 30 minute strategy call and bring the twelve questions with you.
