Two firms in the same county can be handed proposals with nothing in common, partly because a vendor who hears CPA is often pricing the margin rather than the work. Three taps produce an honest band to hold those proposals against. Nothing you tap is submitted or stored.
Run the free tool ↓Pick what you are actually buying, how contested the search is where you want the calls, and whether you are one practitioner, a firm with staff, or offices in more than one town. The band updates as you tap, with no signup and no email wall.
Prefer a full page? Open the What Should You Pay? tool here.
Question one sets what you are pricing, and a firm can be shopping for any of the four: a new site, ongoing SEO and local SEO, AI search work, or all of it together. A build is a scope you can count. Ongoing work is the opposite, a standing monthly cost against firms that keep publishing in the months you are buried.
Market competitiveness is where accounting behaves oddly. In one result you stand next to independent CPAs, enrolled agents working from home offices, seasonal storefronts gone by June, and national filing platforms no local firm can outspend. Population tells you none of that, so answer by looking at who ranks today for the engagement you want more of.
Size is the third answer, and a second office is a multiplier rather than an upgrade: it carries a page of its own, a separate Google Business Profile, and a review stream nobody else feeds. Staff accountants and a bookkeeping department add credentials to publish and service lines to keep current.
Ad spend sits outside the band entirely, crowded into the few months every competitor is bidding too, so Google Ads is priced separately. None of it is a quote either, and the general What Should You Pay tool is where the arithmetic behind these ranges is laid out.
Nothing here grades your firm, and there is no accounting average to be above or below. The output is a band plus the same red-flag list every visitor sees. So the test is not proximity to the middle of the band. It is whether the proposal in your hand can account for itself line by line.
A strong read. The number lands inside the band and the scope is countable rather than adjectival: named pages, named practitioners, a capacity line the office can update. Terms are month-to-month, the domain and the profile are in the firm name, and reporting counts consultations rather than impressions.
A weak read comes in two shapes. Far under the band is nearly always automated work sold by volume, which produces a monthly report and no pages. Far over the band is not automatically wrong, but the extra has to correspond to work somebody can name, and the padded accounting quote usually cannot name any.
Then the version peculiar to this trade: the proposal with no website line at all, because the site came bundled with the tax software or the practice management suite. The band cannot judge an offer nobody has priced, so ask for the site as its own number.
The calendar changes what the terms are worth, too. A twelve-month lock-in signed in February is signed in the one stretch of the year when you have no room to evaluate anything.
Illustrative only. Say a sole practitioner in a mid-size city files individual returns and keeps a dozen small-business clients, and wants something other than referrals feeding next January. He taps SEO / Local SEO, Mid-size city, and Solo / small local, and the tool displays $2,100 to $4,900 per month. The offer already on his desk sits in the $99 to $299 range the red-flag list warns about and promises the top spot for CPA near me, so two flags land at once. What he should settle before signing is what actually gets published between May and December.
Illustrative only. Now imagine a two-partner firm in the same city with staff accountants and a site nobody has touched since the last rebrand. They tap The whole package, Mid-size city, and Growing, multiple staff, and the tool displays $5,500 to $14,500 to build, then $4,000 to $9,600 per month, broken out underneath as a one-time custom website line and a single monthly line covering SEO and AI search together. That monthly is two services added, so if their proposal covers search work only, they should run it again on SEO / Local SEO alone and compare that line instead. The build figure is a page count in disguise: a site that answers the S corp question, the rental basis question, and the books nobody reconciled since spring is not a five-page brochure.
A build quote is a page count with a story attached, and the pages that earn their cost are not the ones the budget usually goes to. The accounting websites and SEO page makes the full argument; this is what the build line pays for.
Add that list up and the page count stops looking small, which is most of what separates a serious build quote from a cheap one. Websites for accountants and SEO for accountants cover how we build it, and the website report card for accountants grades what you have now.
Our published numbers, so you have something to hold a proposal against. Custom website builds run $3,500 to $12,000+ one-time. Ongoing SEO or local SEO runs $1,500 to $3,500 per month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 per month in competitive metros or multi-location work. Everything is month-to-month, and the firm owns the site, the content, and the accounts. Google Ads management has no published fee here: the industry charges a flat monthly fee or a percentage of ad spend, and we quote flat after a free consult.
Why a firm can sit high inside its band: the writing is the expensive part and a partner has to read it. State board rules and the profession's conduct standards bar advertising that is false or misleading, and no page should imply a tax outcome, so situation pages get drafted, reviewed, and signed off. Content marketing runs slower here for that reason.
Deadlines are fixed and public, which makes a monthly figure a year-long decision rather than a two-month test, and how long SEO takes covers the lead time. We run first-party lead dashboards on more than 20 of the sites we manage, so a partner can see which page produced a consultation, which is the analytics and conversion side of the work.
For cost detail past the band, read what SEO costs for an accounting firm and what a website costs for an accounting firm. Call or text (407) 694-2055, or ask for a free mockup or audit.
No. Three broad taps cannot know your firm, and plenty of firms land outside the band for defensible reasons. Turning it into a quote takes a count: how many client situations get their own page, how many practitioners need bios and credential lines, how many offices, and how much of the current site survives.
Answer for the market where you want the phone to ring. Meeting clients over video does not change who you stand next to when somebody in your city searches for a CPA. If you are chasing a national niche instead, the band understates the work, because the competition there is the filing platforms rather than the firm across town.
It looks cheaper because it has no separate price, which also means there is nothing to compare it with. Make the vendor quote the site as its own line. Find out whose name sits on the domain registration and which login controls the Google Business Profile. Then read the bundled article library: if other firms on the platform publish those same paragraphs, you are renting a subscription rather than owning a website.
Google now sells ads in and around AI answers, so budget does reach that screen. What money cannot buy is the organic answer itself. When an owner asks an assistant who handles an S corp election nearby, no spend decides which firm gets named. That is settled by facts written plainly on your pages: credentials, the states you are licensed in, the entity types you work with, and how you bill.
Late spring through summer. Work that starts in November has no runway before January, and the months after the extensions clear are the only ones when partners can read draft pages and sit on a call with a vendor. It is also when owners who had a rough filing season go looking.
Ad spend, which in this trade is crowded into the months every competitor is bidding too. Subscriptions you keep either way: the client portal, e-signature, payment processing, tax software. Real photographs of the people, since this category is bought from a person. And partner review time on anything technical.
What Should You Pay?: full tool page and methodology · Marketing for accountants and CPA firms · SEO cost for accountants and CPA firms · AI Visibility Checker for Accountants · Website Report Card for Accountants · All free tools
Send us the proposal on your desk and we will mark up what it does not cover, with a free concept mockup of the firm's homepage either way. Orlando based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.