Accountant Websites Came Last of 47 Industries (I Audited 2,113 of Them)

I had accountants pegged for mid-table.

Not out of kindness, it honestly just seemed obvious. Accountants are careful people, professionally suspicious people, the ones who find the thing you got wrong on page four of your return and call you about it on a Sunday afternoon, so I assumed a little of that instinct would show up in their websites.

They came 47th. Out of 47.

I pulled 3,913 accounting firms across 24 cities out of my own data, then ran a full audit on 2,113 of their websites. Accountants scored 65 out of 100, last of all 47 industries I track.

They didn’t have much company down there, either. Hair salons and hospitality tied at 68, financial services and travel both finished on 67, and then came accountants, entirely on their own, at 65.

So I went back through every check I run and put accountants beside the national average, one line at a time. I also pulled up sixteen accounting sites I think get it right, just to see what a good one looks like. Where is your profession losing all those points?

Six numbers explain most of that last-place finish, and almost none of it has anything to do with how the website looks.

32% have no site at all

Before I get to any of the six, I have to deal with the missing ones.

Only 68.0% of the accountants I counted list a website, which leaves 32% with nothing. Not a dated site, not an ugly one, not a one-pager someone’s nephew put together in 2011. Nothing at all.

Accountants come second worst of any industry I track on that one, and the only profession with fewer businesses online is hair salons at 62.6%.

I understand exactly how it happens, because accounting has always run on referrals and referrals absolutely work. Your best client’s brother needs a bookkeeper, you get a phone call, done.

But think about what that brother does in between those two steps, because he types your business name into his phone while he’s still standing in his kitchen.

If nothing comes back, your referral doesn’t die on the spot. It just gets a lot shakier, and now it has to carry the entire job on its own. How many of those quiet little collapses have already happened to your firm without you hearing a word about it?

Fast, and saying nothing

The next number confused me for most of an afternoon.

Accountant websites are quick. They average 63 out of 100 on a phone, against a national average of 58 across every small business I tested.

Rank all 47 industries by that one and only electricians, lawyers and plumbers sit above them, all three on 64. A single point separates the lot.

That sounds like excellent news right up until you start asking how a trade this quick still finished 47th.

A website loads fast when there isn’t very much on it to begin with. I can’t prove that’s the reason here, because my crawler grades the page and never asks why it’s so light, but the pattern fits: 34.0% of accountant sites publish a blog, against 37% of small businesses nationally.

If I’m right about that, it isn’t speed you earned, it’s speed you inherited by having less to say.

Fast and full is a win. Fast and empty just means you skipped the second half of the job.

The line under your name

Google your own firm right now, on your phone, and look at the gray sentence sitting underneath the blue link with your business name on it.

You get to write that sentence. Most accountants never do.

Only 65.6% of accountant sites have one, out of the 2,004 I could check, against 77.9% of small businesses nationally, and yet 98.1% of accountant sites do have a page title sitting right above that empty line.

So your name is there and your pitch isn’t.

Leave it empty and Google grabs a sentence off your page to fill the gap. Once in a while it chooses beautifully, though more often it grabs your cookie notice, or half a menu, or the single word “Home”.

You get one line to tell a stranger why you and not the firm three doors down, and it’s the closest thing to a permanently free ad you’ll ever run. Why hand it to a robot?

A form on the front page

Accountants beat the national average on two things in my entire audit. Speed was one of them, and a homepage form is the other.

Everywhere else they trail, and some of it isn’t close. Only 89.6% of accountant sites load over a secure connection against 94% nationally, which means a stranger researching your firm can still meet a browser warning before they meet your homepage, and a padlock is one of the cheapest repairs on any website. When did you last look at your own address bar?

So take the credit where it’s earned, because 31.8% of accountant websites have a contact form right there on the homepage, against 28% of small businesses nationally.

Still under a third, mind you, and the other two thirds are asking a complete stranger to hunt down the contact page, find a phone number, and then call a person they’ve never met about their money.

A form is a much lower step to climb. Your name, your email, one box asking what you need help with, and suddenly the next move belongs to you instead of to them.

That matters more in your profession than in almost any other, because calling an accountant feels like admitting something has already gone wrong. Typing into a box doesn’t feel like anything at all.

Fewer than half check the numbers

I laughed at this one, and then I felt bad about it.

Only 44.7% of accountant websites have analytics installed, the free snippet of code that tells you how many people visited and what they clicked on, against 58% of small businesses nationally.

The professionals who reconcile your books to the penny are running their own marketing on a hunch.

Therapists sit barely above you on that one, and word of mouth is the alibi they reach for.

You’d never let a client guess at their revenue. You’d demand the statements and the receipts and the bank feed before you wrote down a single figure, so why is your own website the one department you’re happy to fly blind on?

The two boxes in the code

One job, two boxes, both of them invisible to a visitor and neither one ticked often enough.

Labels in the code. 56.7% of accountant sites use schema markup, the tags I add to a page to mark which line is the phone number, which is the address and which are the opening hours, against 70.5% of small businesses nationally.
Links to your profiles. Only 50.1% link out to a single social profile, where the national figure is 66%.

Neither one is glamorous and neither takes longer than a single afternoon. Both belong to the running repairs a site needs after launch rather than to a redesign, and half your profession leaves that second box empty. Which one is empty on yours?

24 reviews

One number bothered me more than the last-place finish did.

The average accounting firm in my data has 24 Google reviews at 4.5 stars, while the average small business carries 179 of them at 4.6.

Identical stars, near enough. The pile of proof underneath them is nowhere close.

It gets worse from there, because only 72.1% of accountants hold so much as a single review, where 88% of small businesses nationally manage at least one. Plenty of the firms I counted have an empty space where their star rating belongs.

You’ve had some of these clients for a decade, and they trust you with numbers they wouldn’t show their own spouse, so how has not a single one of them ever been asked to write three sentences about it?

I don’t believe accountants are bad at collecting reviews. I believe most of them have simply never asked.

What my data can’t tell you

I should be straight about the limits here, because a statistic with no caveat attached is a sales pitch wearing a lab coat.

I audited pages. I didn’t audit phones.

I’ve got no idea how many of those 2,113 firms are booked to the ceiling and actively turning work away, and an accounting practice can sit near the bottom of my audit and still keep a six month waiting list. My crawler will never know the difference.

So a terrible score isn’t evidence that a business is struggling, only evidence that the business isn’t winning anybody new online.

For plenty of accountants that’s a deliberate decision, and fair enough, but for everybody else it’s a leak nobody has ever thought to look at.

Go pull the numbers yourself

Don’t take my word for any of this.

The report has an explorer where you can pick accountants and read every rate with its own sample size, so you can check the figures I’ve quoted and dig up the ones I skipped entirely. Choose a single industry, or a single city, and it prints the whole rollup.

I built it that way deliberately, because numbers you can’t check for yourself are just opinions in a nicer font.

Three checks, ten minutes

Three of the six are things you can check on your own website before bed tonight.

Google your firm name and read the gray line underneath. Did you write that, or did Google invent it for you?
Open your homepage on your phone. Can a customer message you without leaving that screen?
Look at your review count. Are you nearer 24, or nearer 179?

If even one of those came back ugly, you’re in the same boat as most of your profession, and I’d call that encouraging rather than depressing. Everything on my list is a boring afternoon of work, not a rebuild.

Don’t want to run them yourself? I’ll do the whole check on your site for free.

And if you’d rather hand the entire project off than spend that afternoon, accounting firms are a big chunk of what I build.

Either way, run those three tonight. I want to know which one you already knew about and were hoping I wouldn’t bring up.