Almost every accounting firm we work with already has a Google Business Profile. Very few have one that produces enquiries. The gap is rarely about whether the profile exists or whether the address is correct. It is about whether anyone is operating it after the initial setup.

Our position is straightforward. Google Business Profile for accountants is one of the few channels where a firm with two staff can outrank a firm with twenty, because the ranking factors are proximity, relevance, and prominence rather than domain authority. That makes it winnable. It also makes it easy to lose, because your competitors can catch up with a fortnight of consistent effort.

What follows is how we set these up and, more importantly, how we keep them running once the setup work is finished.

Before anything else, two fields do the heavy lifting: your primary category and your services list.

The primary category is the single biggest lever on which queries you show up for. Options relevant to UK practices include Accountant, Tax Preparation Service, Bookkeeping Service, Chartered Accountant, and Payroll Service. Choose the one that matches the work you actually want more of, not the one that describes everything you do. If most of your margin sits in limited company accounts and tax, Accountant is the sensible primary. You can add secondary categories after that, and Google allows several, so use them for the adjacent services rather than diluting the primary.

The services section is the underused half. Google reads those entries when matching your profile to queries, so listing Corporation Tax, VAT Returns, Self Assessment, Payroll, R&D Tax Credits, and Company Formation individually gives the algorithm far more surface area than a single generic listing does. Write a short description under each one in plain English.

The business description itself carries less ranking weight. It earns its place at the moment someone is comparing three profiles in the map pack and deciding who to call. Front-load who you work with and where, and keep it current.

Firms overthink posts. They imagine they need a content calendar, then post nothing for eleven months.

The purpose of a post is narrower than that. It signals to Google that the profile is active, and it gives a prospect who lands on your listing something recent to look at. Two posts a month is enough. Anything more is fine, but the marginal return drops quickly.

What to post, in rough order of usefulness:

• Deadline reminders tied to the calendar. Self Assessment in December and January, corporation tax payment dates, payroll year end in March and April.
• A short answer to a question you have been asked three times that month by clients.
• Changes announced by HMRC or in the Budget that affect the businesses you serve.
• Availability notes, such as onboarding capacity for the new tax year or amended hours over bank holidays.

One thing we would avoid: recycled generic finance tips. They read as filler, and the people checking your profile are usually within days of making a decision. Give them something specific enough that it demonstrates you understand their situation.

Reviews do two jobs at once. They influence local ranking, and they influence the click. That combination makes them the highest-value thing on the profile, and the hardest to fake.

The reason most firms have four reviews after eight years is not that clients are unwilling. It is that nobody asks, and when they do ask it happens ad hoc, usually during a busy week when it gets forgotten.

Fix it by making the request a step in a workflow rather than a decision someone makes. The trigger points that work are predictable: the week after a first year end is filed, the day a tax refund lands, the point where a client tells you something went well. At each of those moments an automated message goes out with a direct link to the review form. No chasing, no awkward conversation.

Then respond to every review, positive or negative. A reply on a negative review is read by prospects far more carefully than the review itself, because it shows how you behave when something goes wrong. Keep it factual, take the detail offline, and never argue.

Ten genuine reviews accumulated over a year will outperform a burst of thirty collected in a fortnight, which tends to look artificial to both Google and to humans.

Here is where we part company with most guides on this topic. A well-run profile produces phone calls and website clicks. It does not produce clients. What happens in the ninety seconds after that click determines whether the work was worth doing.

The common failure pattern looks like this. The map pack listing is strong, the enquiry arrives at four in the afternoon during a filing week, nobody replies until the following morning, and by then the prospect has spoken to two other firms. The profile did its job. The system behind it did not exist.

What we put in place alongside the profile is unglamorous: a landing page that matches the service the person searched for, an enquiry form that captures enough to qualify, an automated acknowledgement that goes out immediately, and a booking link so the prospect can put time in the diary without waiting for a human. Calls that come through the profile get tracked so you can tell which categories and services are actually generating enquiries rather than guessing.

Treat the profile as the top of a defined route. Every step after the click should be designed, not improvised.

The performance data inside the profile is more useful than most firms realise, provided you look at the right numbers.

Ignore raw impressions. They move with seasonality and tell you almost nothing about demand quality. The figures worth tracking monthly are calls, direction requests, website clicks, and booking or message actions. Those are intent signals. If impressions rise while actions stay flat, you are appearing for searches that do not match what you sell, which usually points back to category selection.

Also look at the search terms report. It shows the queries that surfaced your profile, split between branded searches, where someone typed your firm name, and discovery searches, where someone was looking for an accountant generally. Growth in discovery terms is the number that matters, because those are people who did not already know you exist.

Give it ninety days before drawing conclusions. Local rankings move slowly and are heavily influenced by proximity, which you cannot change. What you can change is relevance and prominence, and both respond to consistent input rather than a single afternoon of optimisation work.