SEO or Google Ads: which suits an accountancy practice?

It is October, and the managing partner of a 15-person practice has two proposals open. One agency wants £1,500 a month for twelve months of SEO. Another wants £600 a month to manage Google Ads, plus whatever the clicks cost. Each says its channel is where accountancy clients look.

Search the question and every page that ranks is published by an agency selling one channel or both. They do not even agree on the price of the thing being compared. Whitehat SEO cites £3.50 to £5.50 as the average UK click for accounting services. Search South puts London at £15 to £30 or more. Both can be right, because the price depends on the town and the search term. The question most comparisons skip is which service. A practice sells several, and each earns a different answer.

Why is this a service-line decision?

One accountancy practice can hold a service line that pays for every click and another that never will. The difference is fee shape. A limited company on monthly bookkeeping and year-end accounts pays every year. A one-off tax return pays once. Before comparing channels, the partners need to agree which accountancy work they want more of, because that choice sets every number that follows.

What can the practice afford to pay for a click?

The maximum click price is what the practice will spend to win a client, divided by the clicks it takes to win one. Every input comes from the practice, not the agency. The worked example below uses illustrative conversion rates. Replace them with your own before relying on the answer.

1. Annual fee for one limited company client

   Recurring fee income divided by the clients paying it. Your ledger holds this.

   £2,400

2. The share of first-year fee you will spend to win the client

   A partner decision, set before any proposal is read. Here, 20 per cent.

   £480

3. Clicks that become enquiries

   Illustrative. Use the rate your own service page has recorded.

   4 in 100

4. Enquiries the practice accepts

   Illustrative. Take it from the enquiry record, not the agency report.

   1 in 4

5. Maximum you can pay for a click

   £480 across the 100 clicks it takes to win one accepted client.

   £4.80

Run the same arithmetic on a £350 one-off return and the ceiling falls to 70 pence a click. Nothing about the practice changed. Only the fee shape did.

Then set the ceiling against the market. Google Ads Keyword Planner shows a top of page bid range for each search term: roughly the 20th and 80th percentile of what advertisers paid over the last 30 days, for the location you set. It needs a Google Ads account with billing details entered. If the low end of the range sits above your ceiling, the paid channel is closed for that service line, whatever a proposal says.

Which accountancy services does Google restrict in UK ads?

Google's government documents and services policy restricts ads for applying for a company registration number or registering with HM Revenue and Customs. The policy names the UK company registration number and HM Revenue and Customs registration as examples, and says only certified governments and authorised providers may promote direct acquisition of them. Unclaimed tax rebates sit in the same policy, including uniform and mileage rebate claims.

The rule tightens on 5 October 2026. Under Google's published update, an authorised provider's domain must be linked from an official government website that names it as authorised. Few practices will be able to show that.

Whether a given ad is caught depends on its wording and on Google's review, so this is a check rather than a ban. It still belongs in the proposal. An agency that puts formation or rebate ads at the centre of a paid plan should explain, in writing, how the campaign passes the policy. An organic page explaining how the practice handles incorporation is not subject to it.

When does demand arrive, and can SEO be ready?

Self Assessment demand is packed into weeks, and SEO works on a timetable of months. On 5 January 2026, HM Revenue and Customs said 5.65 million people still needed to file for the 2024 to 2025 tax year. By 31 January it had received 11,489,825 returns, 475,722 of them on deadline day.

Google's SEO starter guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months. A Self Assessment page written in December is a bet on the following January. Paid search can be switched on for the three weeks that matter, but the ceiling above shows why a one-off fee rarely carries the click. The exception is a UK practice that has measured how many return clients stay on for recurring work. That retention rate, not the return fee, is the number to price the click on.

How should the two channels work together?

Use paid search to find out which service page converts, then give the SEO budget to that page. A paid test returns evidence in weeks. Send a fixed budget to one service page and measure it on the same four-line chain from query to accepted client used for organic search. If the page does not convert paid visitors, it will not convert organic ones either, and the fix is the page.

Consider who runs each channel. A paid account needs weekly attention to search terms and bids, and SEO needs a steady content and technical programme. Whether that attention belongs inside a 20-person firm or with an agency is a separate decision. A bounded paid test on one service line is also the kind of job a freelancer can carry.

When should a practice not hire for either channel?

Do not buy demand the partners cannot take on. If onboarding is full until after the January peak, both channels spend money producing enquiries the practice will turn away. Fix capacity first, or aim the work at the service line that has room.

Hold off, too, where the click ceiling sits below the Keyword Planner range and no service page is worth ranking. Neither channel fixes a proposition. A page that cannot say who the practice is for and what it costs to start will waste paid clicks immediately and organic ones slowly.