FR Accounting: website organic growth SEO case study
Client location: Gregory Hills, Sydney NSW
- Organic search clicks up 103% year on year within two months of launch, becoming the only growing traffic channel
- 1,303 new search phrases recognised in a single quarter that hadn’t shown up the year before, including several top-5 positions
- Contact page visits up 361% and time-on-site up 730% for engaged visitors during the strongest stretch of the engagement
- A real client quote: “we have had 4 phone calls in the past week with Google as their referral source”
- A genuinely honest, multi-year ending: real growth during the engagement, followed by a slow, largely self-inflicted decline once it ended
“I don’t know how this is possible if I offer the same service as other accountants or bookkeepers.”
That was Rick’s genuine, blunt reaction when I first raised the idea of growing FR Accounting’s organic search visibility, before we’d built anything.
It’s a fair question and the honest answer is that it’s genuinely difficult if the content on your site could belong to any accounting practice in the country. What follows is a real, multi-year account of what happened when that got proven right and what happened later when the proof stopped being acted on.
The premise from day one
In March 2023, I migrated FR Accounting from Square to WordPress with Elementor. The foundation was straightforward: a clear, accurate picture of what the practice actually offered and who was behind it.
Beyond that, the real work was always going to be demonstrating genuine expertise, not just claiming it, through three things: real case studies and examples of how they’d helped businesses in specific situations, genuine industry opinion and knowledge through blog content, and real client reviews.
A pattern that I see happen a lot
Today there are thousands of service providers in any niche or industry all offering a similar service, just like coffee shops the world is saturated. So the only thing that differentiates one to the other is the experience or people behind it. For a service business the only way to show that is through either case studies of work done and/or sharing your views or opinions on current industry landscape.
In other words, prove you can deliver what you are promising and show people how you go about it. Humans ‘selling’ to humans in many respects through story telling that then differentiates one service provider over another while demonstrating experience.
For this engagement only one real case study was ever completed. I built a template specifically to make it easy to produce more and even offered to visit their office in person to help write additional ones directly. Those offers weren’t taken up.
None of the ongoing blog content updates came from the practice itself, I researched and wrote all of them myself with just a few inputs from the accounting team. Even many of the content ideas I suggested along the way weren’t really developed, with just a few going live as generic pieces of information that didn’t have proof examples from the practice.
Client reviews even remained at less than 50 for a genuinely large, successful practice with a large team, yet another way to help convince potential clients.
So here is an example of what it looked like in practice. I was trying to create content around the idea of “what type of accountant provides advice on audit and tax issues,” I wrote:
“What I need is any major gaps or additions to the intro sections to make it more ‘accountant’ specific, and examples of some real situations where you have intervened or helped businesses. We don’t have to mention the company name, but if we can show real scenarios the depth of the content will help with SEO and convince potential readers to choose you.”
None was forthcoming.
Later, working on a piece about workers’ compensation premium increases, I flagged directly why it wasn’t gaining traction:
“…most of it is very similar info to what is already online, we need more of the problem/solution angle to it to be useful.”
Both requests were genuine, specific and low-effort to answer but neither one got a real response from the business owners. What it meant was more generic content was being created which was similar to what was already available online.
It was an issue back in 2023 and even more so these days with Ai Overviews answering topics like that.
What the results actually showed, even with minimal input
This is the part worth paying attention to, because even a small amount of genuine improvement produced real, outsized results.
- Within weeks of the new site launching – Google recognised it for more than 500 new, non-branded search phrases.
- By May 2023, with only existing content refreshed and a couple of new, fairly generic pieces added, that had grown to 900 new phrases.
- Organic clicks had doubled year on year, from 86 to 158, and organic search had become the only growing traffic channel, now 56% of all traffic, with 51% of those visitors reaching the contact page.
- On 1 June, Bryn from the practice wrote directly:
“we have had 4 phone calls in the past week with Google as their referral source.”
- By mid-June, the site was earning 200 organic clicks in a rolling 28-day period.
By September, the fuller picture was genuinely strong:
- 1,106 organic visitors from May to September, up 49% year on year, consuming over 2,500 pages of content.
- Contact page visits were up 361% (687 versus 149 the year before).
- Visitors spending more than two minutes on the site were up 730% (532 versus 64), 37% of all visitors engaging that deeply.
- The most recent quarter after launch showed 1,303 new search phrases the site hadn’t been recognised for the year before, including several top-5 positions.
Then looking at September through November 2023, the data was just as encouraging:
- 599 organic visits, up 45% on the 412 the year prior.
- 128 of those reaching the contact page, 11 submitting a form, 33 clicking through to a free consultation and 14 calling directly.
The engagement ended, and growth kept going, for a while
The engagement ended on 3 October 2023.
When the practice got back in touch on 1 February 2024 asking for login access, the real data showed organic search traffic up 71% year on year for January alone, genuine, continued growth with no active work being done.
They didn’t seem too pleased, but by Bryn’s own account, “at least half have not responded at all” from their end.
I wrote directly at the time:
“hopefully the time gap between lead coming in and responding is within a few hours, this can improve responsiveness…
to get a broader, greater volume of leads you need unique content on your site that suits verticals, niches or scenarios people want help with, and you get found as an authority on the topic, hence my initial advice re case studies etc. It works extremely well for my other clients in various industries.”
What's happened since
After that, the practice made its own changes, adjusting menus and headings and tried other strategies.
The site today looks structurally similar to the one I built and as of 19 August 2026, there is still only the single case study from 2023 and their Google Business Profile has less than 50 reviews.
The real cost shows up clearly in the numbers.
- Year to date in 2026, the site has had 3,237 visitors, down 26% year on year.
- Around 60% of that is now “direct” traffic averaging just 15 seconds a visit, consistent with paid advertising or backlink bot traffic rather than genuine visitors.
- Organic search has fallen to under 40% of all traffic, down 37% year on year to 1,172 people. No surprise considering most of the content on the site is relatively generic.
- Though the organic visitors who do arrive are still spending close to a minute on site, a real, if smaller, engaged audience.
- Contact page visits are down 14% to 758.
Why this happened, in one sentence
It became a self-fulfilling version of Rick’s own original objection.
With very little genuine input or real expertise ever showcased on the site, most of the content stayed generic and a generic accounting practice’s website looks and reads like every other accounting practice’s website, exactly the outcome he’d worried about from the start.
Without deep, specific, genuinely differentiated content, the site was never able to dominate any particular topic or niche the way genuinely unique, non-commodity content can (read about how Ai searches for unique content), and without ongoing development, overlapping service pages were left to compete against each other rather than being resolved.
The proof that it could have worked differently is sitting right there in the 2023 data. It just never got built on.
This methodology is how I managed to get thousands of visitors and leads to Passion Built, Nu-Trend and RealServe. A genuine foundation works and it keeps working only as long as someone keeps feeding it something real or helpful to prospective clients.
If you’re in a genuinely competitive, commodity-feeling category and not sure how to actually stand out in search, get in touch and I’ll show you what real proof of expertise actually looks like. I’ll tell a client plainly when the content plan needs their genuine input to actually work, and I’ll keep asking for it even when it’s not coming. If your business feels like it looks the same as every competitor online, see how I could help.
