What clients ask an assistant before choosing a tax advisor

The questions a client types before choosing a tax advisor

The question carries the client's situation before it carries a name. "accountant in Sacramento for a first year sole proprietor who also needs bookkeeping", "cpa near Edmonton that works with restaurants and charges a flat monthly fee", "tax preparer who works fully remotely for a freelancer with 1099 income", "enrolled agent who can deal with back taxes and IRS letters". Then the fact questions about one firm: "do they do bookkeeping or only returns", "do they charge by the hour", "is anyone there a CPA".

Each of those is a fact about the firm, and an AI assistant answers by fetching pages and reading for it. Your site is one of the pages; the others are directories, review sites and the sites of every other firm in the metro. The firm named is the one whose page states the client's situation, the service, the fee model and the credential in sentences the assistant can quote.

The situation is the part most sites miss. "Full-service accounting for individuals and businesses" matches nobody's question. "We do the books, the quarterly estimates and the year-end return for sole proprietors in their first three years" matches a question a real person typed, and it names the client in the sentence.

The part of the answer a tax firm's pages control

Two things: whether the page states five things the client asked about, and whether the firm reads as one entity across its pages and listings. The five: the services by their plain names (bookkeeping, payroll, quarterly estimates, year-end returns, sales tax filings, notices and back taxes); who you serve, as situations and industries; how you charge (flat fee per return, monthly for the books, hourly, and for what); the credentials held, as facts; and where you work, including whether fully remote clients are taken and in which states or provinces you file.

The fee model matters more here than in most trades, because it is in the question. A client who typed "flat fee" is matched to a page that says "flat fee" and what it covers. A page that says "competitive rates, contact us" is matched to nothing. You do not have to publish a number; you have to publish the structure, and a number only if it is true and you will keep it current.

Credentials are facts and are matched as facts: CPA, EA, the state license where one applies, the year, and the people who hold them, named. "Experienced professionals" is not a credential. A client who asks for a CPA is matched to a page that names one.

What the firm's site has to state

Each row is a client's question, the fact about the firm that answers it, and where it belongs. Everything in the middle column is a statement about the firm, not tax advice. The service pages describe what you do and for whom; the advising happens in the engagement.

The markup is LocalBusiness schema in its accounting form: AccountingService, a subtype in schema.org's LocalBusiness tree, with the address, telephone, opening hours and price range that Google's local business documentation lists. Each service is a Service node with a serviceType in plain words and an audience naming who it is for. Each credentialed person is a Person node. All of it as JSON-LD, repeating what the visible page says.

Tax advisors' sites had one of the highest no-schema rates in our crawl

In our audit of 9,483 small business websites across 40 trades and 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, run between late August and early September 2026, 17.8% of all sites carried no schema.org markup at all. Among tax advisors the figure was 31.0%, one of the four worst trades alongside real estate agents, photographers and wedding planners. Nearly a third of tax firm sites give a machine no structured data of any kind to read.

The other two thirds are not much better placed. Across all trades, most of the markup we found described the website (WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList) rather than the business, and a further 13.7% of sites had business markup missing the fields that would make it usable. A tax firm whose only markup says "this is a web page" has told the assistant nothing about what it does, for whom, or how it charges.

61.5% of all sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages. For a firm that has merged, added a partner's name or moved offices, the old name and the old address can linger in footers and directory listings for years, and a machine reading them cannot be sure they describe one firm.

Stating what you do without giving tax advice

A services page states what the firm does, for whom, and how the work runs. It does not tell the reader what to elect or deduct. "We prepare returns for sole proprietors and handle the quarterly estimates through the year" is a fact about the firm. "You should elect S corporation status once your profit passes a threshold" is advice to a stranger whose facts you do not know.

What a firm can write at length, and what clients ask about, is how the engagement works: what the first meeting covers, which documents you need and when, how the books are kept current, what happens when a notice arrives, how the fee is set. Those are facts about the firm, they answer the questions clients type, and no one else can state them for you.

Do not promise outcomes. "Maximum refund" and "we will get your penalties removed" are claims about a result you do not control, and an assistant reading a page for facts about the firm has no use for them. State what you do; let the client's review say how it went.

What to fix first, in order

1. Settle the identity: one firm name, one address, one main number, identical on every page, in every directory and review listing you control, and in the markup. Retire the pre-merger name where it survives.
2. Rewrite the services page in plain names, each service with what it includes and who it is for, and each fee model stated in words. One client question per heading, the answer under it. This is the answer page for the firm.
3. Put the people on the page with their credentials as facts: name, CPA or EA, state license where one applies, year, what they handle.
4. Add AccountingService markup as JSON-LD with address, telephone, opening hours, areaServed and priceRange, a Service node per service and a Person node per credentialed person. Google's introduction to structured data asks that markup describe what a visitor can see, so every value in it is on the page too.
5. Put client reviews on the page as text, with permission and attribution, chosen for the facts they state (the fee was what was quoted, the books were current by the tenth, the notice was handled), and the platform each one came from.
6. Check what a crawler receives: open the services page with scripts off, confirm the text is in the HTML, take the fee schedule out of the PDF, and run the crawler access check. 2.1% of the sites in our audit kept their real content, a price list or a service menu, in a PDF.

What not to do

Do not write your own reviews or copy a platform's rating into your markup; Google's review snippet documentation excludes both, and a firm whose product is trust cannot afford to be caught.

Do not stuff pages with "tax preparation Sacramento, Sacramento CPA, accountant Sacramento". Google does not read the keywords meta tag, as its list of supported meta tags shows, and an assistant reading prose is looking for the sentence with the fee model in it.

Do not accept a promise of placement. Nobody outside the companies that build those assistants decides what they say, and that includes us. What can be measured is how often your firm is named on a fixed panel of client questions, before and after the fixes above; how we measure it is on the methodology page.