Ask Keyword Planner for searches related to "CPA" and it will happily oblige. It'll hand you "cpa near me," which is exactly what an accounting firm wants. It'll also hand you "cpa marketing," "cpa networks" and "cpa affiliate," which come from people who have never filed anyone's taxes and never will. To an internet marketer, CPA means cost per action, the price paid for each sale or sign-up an ad produces. To Google's tool, those are all just searches with your three letters in them.
That's keyword research for accountants in one example. Google's free tools will give you thousands of ideas in a few minutes. Most of the work is deciding which ones come from people who want to hire an accountant, and throwing out the rest before you pay for them.
Your Competitors Already Did Your Keyword Research. Google Will Hand It Over.
Nobody needs to guess what accounting clients type. The firms already buying ads in your market have spent real money finding out, and two free Google tools let you learn from them.
Start by seeing who's there. For that, skip the search bar and open Ad preview and diagnosis inside your account. Enter a search there and you get a mock-up of the results page, rivals' ads included, without touching the live auction. Type the searches you care about and note which firms appear. Never check by searching and clicking a competitor's ad yourself. Every click costs them money, it muddies their data, and it tells you nothing the preview tool doesn't.
Next, feed each competitor's site into Keyword Planner using the "Start with a website" option. Google reads the content on the site and suggests keywords that match it. Set the location to your market before you run it, so the volumes and bid ranges reflect the people you can actually serve. Do the same with your own site. It's the closest you'll get to seeing your firm the way Google reads it, and the gaps are often a surprise.
For this guide we ran the websites of 12 accounting firms advertising in our example market, Boston, plus a handful of seed lists. Keyword Planner returned 27,705 keyword ideas for that one market. A small firm needs perhaps a few dozen of them.
The size of each haul says something too. A two-office CPA practice's site gave Keyword Planner only 62 ideas; a national tax chain's gave 2,031, and an online accounting service's 1,500. Small sites describe fewer services in fewer words, so Google has less to read. That's why you seed from several competitors of different sizes, not just the one down the street, and why your own site's short list is a hint about what your pages never mention.
Some of Keyword Planner's "CPA" Ideas Belong to Affiliate Marketers, Not Accountants
Keyword Planner groups close variants together and gives them the same search volume. That habit gives the game away. "cpa marketing" shows 1,300 searches a month nationally, and Keyword Planner reports the same number for "cost per action marketing," because to Google they're the same search. Nearby you'll find "cpa networks," "cpa affiliate" and "advertising cpa," all from the world of online marketing, not tax returns.
Local quirks pile on. In our example market, a search for "cpa boston" also turns up a city land-conservation program that happens to share the initials. Every market will have its own version, which is why a firm reads its own list line by line rather than trusting a national one.
The fix is a short list of negatives from day one: "affiliate," "network" and "offers" are good candidates to test. Google won't show your ads for searches containing a negative keyword, so a firm stops paying to meet marketers who wanted a different kind of CPA.
Tax Software, Calculators and Exam Prep Ride Along in Every Accounting List
The "CPA" confusion is the funniest problem in an accounting keyword list. It isn't the biggest. Across the example-market files, we counted the ideas that match patterns no accounting firm wants to pay for:
- Software, QuickBooks and templates: 1,468 ideas. People shopping for the tool, not the accountant.
- Calculators and estimators: 644. People doing the math themselves.
- IRS form lookups and refund status: 312. People looking for a document, not a person.
- Courses and classes: 177. People who want to become the tax preparer.
- Exams, licensing and "how to become": 49.
- Salary: 27. Jobs and careers: 16.
Client reviews and Reddit threads add a few signals of their own. People name the software they use instead of a firm: TurboTax, FreeTaxUSA, TaxAct, Credit Karma. They point each other to free filing help: "Just go to VITA if you meet the threshold," one Reddit reply said, meaning the IRS's volunteer tax assistance program. Searches built on an IRS notice number often come from people trying to reach the IRS itself. And tax relief robocalls leave people searching company names to find out who just called them.
None of those people are going to sign an engagement letter this week. Every one of them is a negative keyword waiting to be written.
"Free" and "Cost" Aren't Junk. Blocking Them Is a Business Decision.
Two patterns deserve a pause before you block them. Our example-market files held 961 ideas about cost or price and 667 containing "free."
It's tempting to throw both out. Resist the reflex. Some cost searches come from people comparing firms before they hire one, and Keyword Planner shows advertisers paying real money to appear for them. Several of the example firms, including an online accounting service, a franchise and a bookkeeping service, offer a free consultation right on their booking buttons, so a search for "free tax consultation" may be exactly the person they want. On the other hand, a search for free tax filing usually comes from someone who wants the return done at no charge, and a firm that bills $300 a return isn't that.
So decide on purpose. Block "free filing" and "free tax preparation" if you don't offer them. Keep "free consultation" if you do. Watch the cost searches in your reports and let the results decide. The mistake isn't keeping them or blocking them. It's doing either one out of habit.
Every Name in the List Is Either Your Brand Campaign or a Negative
Keyword Planner returns a lot of names. Sort them into three piles.
Your own firm's name belongs in its own brand campaign, as Chapter 2 covered, never mixed in with the searches you're trying to win from strangers.
Software and chain brands are negatives. In our example market, "turbotax" draws 74,000 searches a month at a top-of-page bid range of 20 to 21 cents. That price is the market's verdict: people typing it want TurboTax. "h&r block" draws 33,100 at pennies.
Other firms' names are negatives too. They come back from competitor-seeded research, and in much larger numbers later from broad match. Someone searching another firm by name wants that firm. Could you run ads on competitors' names? Only in a campaign of their own, if you ever decide to, and that's a big if.
Keyword Planner's Bid Ranges Are Estimates for Broad Match. Read Them 30% Either Way.
Every idea comes with two price estimates, a low and a high bid for the top of the page. Treat them as weather forecasts. They're built from broad-match data, and a campaign that runs exact match will see different prices. Assume any figure could be 30% higher or lower in practice.
The ranges are still useful for comparisons. In our example market, "payroll services small business" showed $74.90 to $283.98 while "cpa near me" showed $4.50 to $23.89. You don't need the exact numbers to see that those are two very different fights. Use the ranges to decide which services to go after first. Use your own account's data to set the bids.
The Negative List Isn't Finished at Launch. It Starts Earning Its Keep When Broad Match Arrives.
What survives the sorting goes into tight ad groups of about five or six keywords each, one service per group, as Chapter 4 laid out. Those groups launch in Isolation, BrandRocket's name for the exact-match campaign with bids you set yourself. Exact match keeps the door narrow: your ad appears only for searches that mean what your keyword means, so software shoppers rarely slip in.
The negative list matters most a couple of months later, when Exploration launches. Exploration, as we call it, is broad match seeded with Isolation's proven keywords and held in check by a target cost per lead. Broad match goes looking for searches you never wrote down. That's the whole idea, and it's also how QuickBooks shoppers, would-be preparers and affiliate marketers get in the door.
So the list keeps growing. Plan on a daily read of the search terms report for Exploration's first month, adding a negative for every stranger who wandered in. After that, weekly. Put your blocked words in a single shared list and attach it to every campaign; one entry then covers the whole account. A negative keyword list is less a fence than a hedge: it needs trimming for as long as the account runs.
Next: Exact Match First, Then the Long Tail
With a clean list sorted into tight groups, Chapter 6 covers how to target it: exact match for the searches you can predict, and how broad match finds the crypto, rental property and estate questions nobody would think to list.
If you're starting here, Chapter 4 explains why tight ad groups matter, and the accounting guide's home page lists every chapter.
Clearing a keyword list of software shoppers and marketers is some of the first work in our Google Ads management for accounting firms.
