The Average Business Has 179 Google Reviews. The Average Accountant Has 24.
Only 72.1% of accountants hold even one Google review, against 88% of businesses overall. The stars are fine at 4.5, and tax season already hands you the fix.
My accountant has saved me more money than anyone else I pay, and in nine years of him quietly cleaning up my paperwork I’ve never once left him a Google review.
Not a single one. I only noticed last week, while digging around in my own data, and it stung a bit, because I hound my customers for reviews all the time.
So I went and pulled the numbers on his entire industry. 3,913 accountants across 24 cities, and 2,113 of their websites audited.
The average small business in my data has 179 Google reviews.
The average accountant has 24.
Same trade, same happy customers, and nothing like the same pile of proof. How does an entire industry end up there?
The stars aren’t the problem
Before you decide accountants must be worse at their jobs than everybody else in the neighborhood, look at what your customers actually wrote on the rare occasions they turned up to write anything.
The ones who did leave a review gave accountants 4.5 stars. Every business I counted averages 4.6. Call that a tie and move on.
So the customers who bothered to say something publicly are happy with you. They pay the invoice, they feel relieved, they drive home, and then absolutely nothing happens on the internet.
My bet is nobody ever asked them to say a word about it. I can’t prove that from the data, but I’ve watched it happen in my own inbox for years.
How many of your happy customers made it onto your profile last year?
I think it’s the most fixable gap in the whole report. You don’t have to get better at your job. You have to ask a question you’re already qualified to ask.
Trust is the whole product
A pizza place survives a bare profile, because you can see the pizza in the photos and smell it from the sidewalk, and a bad decision costs you a few bucks and a disappointing lunch.
What does a stranger risk with you?
Their income, their spouse’s income, and the receipts they’d rather nobody in town ever laid eyes on. A signature on a document that follows them around for years if the whole thing goes sideways.
None of that can be judged up front by someone who doesn’t know the first thing about tax law, so they do what all of us do now, and go hunting for other people who survived the experience first.
Would you hand your bank statements to a business with an empty profile?
In the data, 72.1% of accountants hold at least one review, against 88% of businesses overall. The rest of them turn up on Google with a name, a map pin, a phone number and no stars at all. There’s nothing else on the profile for a worried stranger to read.
Empty doesn’t read as new to a nervous customer. Empty reads as dangerous.
Your reputation is about the only thing a stranger can inspect before they hand over their paperwork, and your Google profile is where they go to inspect it.
You never hear from the ones who quietly called the accountant three blocks over, which is why your profile feels perfectly normal to you and reads thin to everybody else.
What my numbers can’t tell you
Let me be straight about the limits here, because a gap this wide usually has a reason attached to it somewhere.
My data counts what’s sitting on the profile today. It can’t tell me why the profile is bare.
Maybe your customers don’t love the idea of their name appearing in public beside their accountant’s. Maybe you’ve handled the same families for a decade and asking them for a favor feels strange. Maybe your best year of referrals happened over the phone and never touched Google at all.
None of that shows up from the outside, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
One psychologist I worked with had the first of those worries and she was right to have it, so we found other people to ask instead of her clients.
So treat the 24 as a question instead of a verdict. When was the last time you actually asked?
Tax season does the hard part for you
Most trades have to manufacture a reason to ask, and mine is one of the worst for it. I wait around for a website to launch and hope the client is still excited about it by the time I work up the nerve.
You don’t have that problem, and honestly, I’m a little jealous of it.
Once a year, on a date that’s already circled on your calendar, a whole pile of your customers feel enormous relief because of something you personally did for them. The return is filed, the refund is on its way, and the letter that made them sick to open has finally been handled.
Your customers will never be happier with you than they are in that particular week.
I give that feeling about two days.
Ask on the first one and you’ll get a warm paragraph written from the parking lot. Ask in July and you’ll get “sure, remind me later”, which is exactly how a business with delighted customers ends up sitting at 24.
The mechanics are dull, and I published them years ago: one link that drops your customer straight into the review box, so they click once, pick their stars, and they’re finished. The same trick has been working since 2018.
Attach it to the email that delivers the finished return. Same email, every single year. There’s no new habit to build, no reminder to set, and nothing for you to remember in November when you’re buried alive.
What 24 looks like to a stranger
Picture two accountants sitting side by side on a phone screen, both of them a reasonable drive from your house.
One shows 24 reviews. The other shows 179, which is what the average business across every industry I counted sits on, and a few of those mention someone on the team by name for catching a mistake.
Same stars, same qualifications, near enough. Which one gets the call?
You already know the answer, because you behave exactly the same way when you’re choosing a dentist for your kid, and so do I.
So how many do you need? Owners ask me that in the first ten minutes of a call and I rush the answer more than I should. Enough to beat the accountant sitting beside you is the honest version.
Reviews aren’t a scoreboard for your ego. They’re a shortcut for an anxious person who has no other way of separating a good accountant from a disastrous one until the consequences show up in the mail.
The rest of the report is rough too
Reviews aren’t the only place this industry finishes near the bottom of my rankings.
Accountants score 65 out of 100 in my index, last of all 47 industries.
Just 68.0% of them even have a website, second worst of any industry in the report.
Lazy, though? My numbers say something a lot more complicated than lazy.
The accountants who do have a website run 63 out of 100 for mobile speed, against a national average of 58. Fourth fastest of any industry I counted.
Fast and last at the same time took me long enough to believe that I went back and checked that pair on its own.
31.8% put a contact form on the homepage too, and that beats the 28% everyone else manages.
Then the rest of the checks turn on them, and the comparison isn’t kind.
Only 44.7% of accountant sites run analytics, against 58% of the sites I audited. 50.1% link a social profile, against 66% everywhere else.
One embarrassing check didn’t put your trade in last position. Most of the list did.
Six dull fixes came out of that list when I sorted through it, and not one of them is a design job.
Ten weighted checks add up to that score, and Google reviews are one of them.
They’re worth 15 of those 100 points, the same weight as the speed they’re so good at.
Sound familiar?
Don’t take my word for any of it
Every number above is sitting on the report page, and you can slice it yourself however you like.
Pick a single industry in the market explorer and it prints each rate alongside its own sample size, so you can see how much data is behind a claim before you decide whether it’s worth your attention.
Go argue with the raw numbers first. Then come argue with me.
Your homework
Open your Google profile right now, on your phone, and read the number sitting beside your stars. What did it say?
Under 24? You’re losing to the industry that finished dead last in my whole report.
Now pick three customers whose returns you filed this season, the relieved ones who thanked you twice, and send each of them that link in a separate email with their own name at the top. Not a newsletter, and not a form.
If the website those reviews point at turns out to be the weak link, that’s the part I handle.
Otherwise, do it this week and tell me how many came back. You’ll be surprised, and I’d love nothing more than to hear I was dead wrong about your trade.
