Accounting firms spend a lot of time on what their websites say and very little on how they work. Yet the technical layer decides whether Google can find, load and trust a page before anyone reads a word of it. For practices investing in SEO for accountants, a slow, badly structured or partly hidden website can quietly cancel out everything else. This guide covers the technical problems that most often hold accountancy websites back and how to fix them.
Why Technical SEO Matters More in Finance
Search engines hold financial content to a higher standard. Google’s own guidance treats topics that affect people’s money as areas where accuracy and trust matter most. A site that loads slowly, throws security warnings or serves broken pages sends exactly the wrong signal.
The way people search has also changed. Pew Research Center found that when Google shows an AI summary, users click a traditional search result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there is no summary. AI tools build those summaries from pages they can crawl and understand easily, so technical problems now cost visibility in two places at once.
Problem One: Pages That Are Not Indexed
A page that is not indexed cannot rank. It sounds obvious, but it is one of the most common issues on accountancy websites, especially after a redesign or a move to a new platform.
Common Causes
Typical causes include a noindex tag left over from a staging site, pages blocked in the robots.txt file, duplicate pages pointing to each other with conflicting canonical tags, and service pages with no internal links pointing to them.
How to Fix It
Google Search Console shows which pages are indexed and why others are excluded. Check that every service, sector and location page appears, submit an XML sitemap and remove any accidental noindex or robots.txt blocks. After a redesign, map every old URL to its new equivalent with a permanent redirect.
Problem Two: Slow, Unstable Pages
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure how a page feels to use. They look for the main content to load within 2.5 seconds, the page to respond to input within 200 milliseconds and the layout to stay stable as it loads.
Accountancy websites often fail on all three because of large uncompressed images, heavy page builders, third-party chat widgets, cookie banners and booking scripts that load before anything else.
How to Fix It
Compress and resize images, serve them in modern formats, delay non-essential scripts until after the page loads and remove plugins that are not used. Test key pages on mobile, since most local searches happen on a phone, and check the field data in Search Console rather than relying on a single lab test.
Problem Three: A Flat or Confusing Site Structure
Many practice websites have a single “Services” page and a handful of others. Search engines struggle to understand what a firm offers, and visitors struggle to find it.
A clear structure groups pages logically: a page for each core service, such as tax returns, payroll, VAT and year-end accounts, a page for each sector the firm serves and, where relevant, pages for the locations it covers. Every important page should be reachable within a few clicks of the home page.
Internal Linking
Internal links tell search engines which pages matter and how they relate. Link from guides and articles to the relevant service page, link related services to each other and use descriptive link text rather than “click here”.
Problem Four: Missing Structured Data
Structured data, often called schema markup, is code that describes a page in a format machines can read. For an accounting firm, the most useful types describe the organisation, its services, its location, its reviews and its FAQs.
Schema does not guarantee better rankings, but it helps search engines and AI tools understand the firm accurately. That matters when an AI summary is deciding which local firms to mention. Test markup with Google’s Rich Results Test and keep it consistent with what the page actually shows.
Problem Five: Inconsistent Business Data
Technical SEO is not only about the website. Search engines cross-check a firm’s name, address and phone number across the web, including its Google Business Profile, Companies House, professional body directories such as ICAEW or ACCA, and listing sites.
Inconsistent details, often left behind after an office move or a rebrand, make it harder for any system to trust which version is right. Audit every listing once a year and update the website footer, contact page and schema at the same time.
Problem Six: Security and Trust Signals
A firm that asks clients to share financial data needs a website that looks and behaves securely. The whole site should run on HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings. Contact forms should be protected from spam, client portals should sit on a secure subdomain, and privacy and cookie policies should be easy to find.
Visible trust signals help too: named, qualified staff, professional memberships, regulatory details and real reviews. These are not strictly technical, but they are part of how both people and search engines judge whether a financial website can be trusted.
Problem Seven: Thin and Duplicate Pages
Location pages are a common trap. Some firms create dozens of near-identical pages that swap only the town name. Search engines tend to treat these as low value and may ignore them altogether.
Each page should have a reason to exist: different services, different local details, different client examples. Fewer, stronger pages almost always outperform a large set of copies.
A Simple Technical Audit Checklist
For firms that want a starting point, a basic quarterly check covers most of the risk:
- Confirm all important pages are indexed in Google Search Console and fix any errors.
- Review Core Web Vitals for mobile and address the slowest templates first.
- Check for broken links, redirect chains and missing pages.
- Validate structured data and keep it in line with page content.
- Audit business details across major directories.
- Confirm HTTPS across the whole site and renew certificates on time.
HandL Agency, which works only with finance firms, finds that technical fixes are often the quickest wins on an accountancy website, because the content and reputation are already there and simply are not being seen.
Getting the Foundations Right
Accountancy is a crowded market. Analysis by Rapport Digital found the number of UK accountancy firms fell from 43,720 to 39,975 between 2019 and 2025, which still leaves tens of thousands competing for the same searches. When two firms offer similar services with similar reviews, the one whose website loads quickly, is easy to understand and is fully indexed has a clear advantage.
Technical SEO is rarely the most visible part of marketing, but it is the part that lets everything else work.