SEO for Professional Services
Professional services buyers research before they enquire, often for weeks. So the job is less about being visible at the moment of need and more about being the firm that answered their question properly three searches ago. Do that and they arrive at your enquiry form already decided.
A £1,000 deposit, then 11 monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. That buys up to five target keywords, a named consultant, and a monthly roadmap you can read in ten minutes.
See all three packagesHow your customers search in this sector
Long consideration, high value. One client can pay for a year of the campaign, which changes what a sensible cost per lead looks like and means you need far less traffic than you think.
Answer the question, win the client
The firm that explains R&D tax credits clearly gets the enquiry. Content is the sales process here, not a traffic tactic, so we write it to close rather than to attract.
Regulated language matters
Compliance limits the claims you can make. We work inside those limits rather than writing copy your regulator will make you take down.
Long consideration changes the whole calculation
Nobody appoints an accountant on impulse. The road from first search to signed engagement letter runs for weeks or months, involves several visits to your website, and usually ends with a recommendation being checked rather than a search being won.
That has one liberating consequence: you do not need much traffic. A firm winning four new clients a year at £6,000 each has a campaign paying for itself several times over on a few hundred visits a month. Cost per enquiry benchmarks borrowed from e-commerce mean nothing here, and comparing a professional services campaign to a trade’s on volume is comparing the wrong number.
It also means the content has to do more than attract. It has to persuade across several visits, which is a different writing job and one most agencies do not do.
Question content is the acquisition channel
In professional services, the question someone searches is usually the problem they are about to pay to solve. "Do I need to register for VAT", "how much does probate cost", "can I make someone redundant while on maternity leave", "what happens if I miss the self assessment deadline".
Answering those properly is not blogging. It is the sales process. The person who reads a genuinely useful answer to their exact problem, written by a named professional, reaches the enquiry form having already decided. It is also the content most likely to be quoted by an AI assistant, for exactly the same reason.
The discipline is to answer the question fully rather than teasing it. A page that explains the first two steps and then says "contact us to find out more" does worse than one that answers completely, because the completeness is the proof of competence.
E-E-A-T and why anonymous content fails here
Professional services sits close to the "Your Money or Your Life" category (advice about money, law, employment and tax can do real harm if wrong) and content is judged accordingly. Generic, unattributed articles rank badly here in a way they might not in other sectors.
The fixes are concrete, and most firms skip all of them:
- 01
Name the author on every page,
with their qualification: ACA, ACCA, CTA, solicitor with SRA number, CIPD. Link to a real bio, so the reader and the machine can both check.
- 02
Show the firm’s regulation
ICAEW, SRA, FCA number, professional indemnity. These are trust signals a machine can verify and a client can look up.
- 03
Date everything and review it
Tax and employment content goes out of date on a schedule. A page citing last year’s thresholds is actively harmful, and everyone can see the date.
- 04
Be specific about who you act for
"We work with owner-managed businesses turning over £500k to £5m" is worth more than "we work with businesses of all sizes", because it lets the right person recognise themselves and the wrong person stop wasting your time.
Sector specialism beats geography
This is the biggest strategic difference between professional services and every other sector on this site. A plumber competes within a twenty-minute drive. An accountant does not, and the firms doing best online have stopped fighting for "accountant Sheffield" and started winning "accountant for contractors", "accountant for dentists", "solicitor for construction disputes".
The volume is lower and the competition is far lower, but the real gain is conversion: a dentist looking for an accountant who understands dental practices will choose the specialist over the local generalist almost every time, and will travel or work remotely to do it.
It also solves the content problem. It is very hard to write anything distinctive about being an accountant in general, and quite easy to write distinctively about the specific tax problems of one trade you know well.
Local still matters, just less
Do not drop it. "Accountant near me" and "solicitor Doncaster" still carry real intent, particularly for older clients and for anything where people want to sit across a desk. The Google Business Profile still deserves the standard work: categories, hours, reviews, and details that match everywhere.
The right balance for most firms is local for the transactional services and specialism for the high-value ones. A page for "accountant Sheffield" and a page for "accountant for e-commerce businesses" are written for different people and should read differently.
What a professional services campaign costs
Campaigns start at £497 a month plus VAT after a £1,000 deposit. A professional services firm often outgrows five keywords faster than other sectors, because the sensible strategy is several specialisms rather than one town, and we tell you when that point is coming.
Do the sum on lifetime value rather than first invoice. An accountancy client on a monthly retainer for six years, or a law firm client who comes back for three separate matters, changes what you can sensibly spend to win a client by a factor of ten. That is the number that should decide whether you buy a campaign, not the monthly fee on its own.
Four steps, then round again
SEO never finishes. The work runs on a loop, and you see the report every time round, good month or bad.
- Step 1Keyword research
We start with the terms that show buying intent, not the ones with the biggest numbers. Alongside those, lower-competition terms that rank sooner and bring early results.
- Step 2Competitor analysis
Then we look at who outranks you and why. Once we know what they are doing, we know what it takes to beat it.
- Step 3Implementation
The team does the work: on-page fixes, new content, links and local signals. Every item is listed in your monthly report, not buried in a dashboard.
- Step 4Reporting & revision
Each month you see what was done and what it moved. When something is not working, we change it rather than wait for it to come good.
Three packages. Prices included.
Pick the one that matches where your customers are. Pay for the year, or a deposit and eleven monthly payments. Either way, the number on this page is the number on the invoice.
- Up to 5 keywords per campaign
- Up to 5 URLs included
- GMB post every 14 days
- 1+ new landing page or article
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 10 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 7 days
- 2+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 20 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 4 days
- 5+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
Every package includes keyword analysis, heading tags and meta description optimisation, image alt tag analysis, duplicate content checks, sitemap creation, mobile responsiveness reporting, citations, load time testing and search engine reports. All prices are subject to change. Budgeting for the website too? Here iswhat a website should actually cost.
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Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.