Building an Orlando CPA Firm's Search Presence: From Invisible to 766 Leads
CASE STUDY SUMMARY
- Industry: Accounting & Financial Services
- Business type: Boutique CPA and virtual accounting firm
- Project type: Local search marketing campaign, later shifted to recruitment marketing
- Market: Orlando, Florida
- Platforms: WordPress + Divi, AdWords, Google Business Profile
- Services: Website SEO Audit, Link Building, Blog Writing, Google My Business Management, Google Ads
In November 2024, an Orlando CPA firm partnered with Pronto Marketing via Great Big Circle to build search visibility for its new website (Domain Rating 0.6, no first-page rankings). Pronto executed an SEO audit, added six service pages, built backlinks each month, published monthly blogs, managed its Google Business Profile, and ran Google Ads. Over thirteen months, the firm generated 766 tracked leads worth an estimated $114,000, ranked #1 for “virtual accounting services orlando”, and grew its Domain Rating to 9. By December 2025, reaching full capacity, the firm paused Google Ads and shifted marketing efforts to accountant recruiting.
Company Background
The client is a CPA practice in Orlando, Florida, founded in 2009 and run by a team of six. It handles bookkeeping, tax, payroll and virtual CFO work, and leans deliberately toward higher-value niches: small businesses, general contractors and high-net-worth individuals. Orlando is crowded with accountants, and they all compete for the same short list of local searches.
Pronto delivered the campaign, working alongside Great Big Circle, the creative agency that had just rebuilt the website and has been a Pronto partner since November 2024.
A New Website Google Had Never Heard Of
The firm had the practice, the niches and a brand-new site. What it did not have was any way for an Orlando business to find it.
Starting From Zero Authority
The site opened with a Domain Rating of 0.6 and roughly ten referring domains. Google had no reason to trust it over any other accountant in Orlando. It held no top-ten rankings at all for the searches that bring in accounting work.
A Website That Did Not Match the Searches
The site talked about the practice in general terms. The people worth reaching were searching in specifics: bookkeeping services, payroll, virtual accounting, an accountant who understands general contractors. With no page for any of those services, Google had nothing to rank.
Invisible Where Orlando Businesses Actually Search
For local professional services the Google Business Profile is the front door, and this one was underworked. A geo-grid audit in February 2025 showed the problem in one picture. The profile ranked well on the west side, close to the office, but fell outside the top 20 across the north and east of the metro for “certified public accountant”. Whole stretches of Orlando were going to someone else.
The earliest grid scan on record: “certified public accountant”, 3 February 2025, from the campaign’s monthly reporting.
Five Services Aimed at One Local Market
From November 2024, Pronto ran five services at once, all pointed at the same job: make an Orlando business searching for an accountant find this firm first.
“We needed a team that could make the site actually perform in search. Pronto took the whole search side, the audit, the service pages, the profile, the links, the ads, and reported back every month in a form we could take straight to the client.”
SEO Foundation: Six Pages for Six Real Services
A website SEO audit set the technical baseline and produced a twelve-month content calendar. From it, we built six new service pages matched to the practice the firm actually runs: bookkeeping, tax, payroll, virtual accounting, accounting for general contractors, and tax consulting for high-net-worth individuals. Each page targeted a search like “payroll services orlando”, and each gave the link building somewhere to point.
Google My Business: Rebuilding the Local Lead Engine
The profile is where Orlando businesses choose an accountant, so it got the deepest ongoing work. We rebuilt it around the searches that actually sign clients, then kept it active: a client-approved post calendar, quarterly refreshes of categories, services and description, and monthly reporting through the agency.
A profile is only worth what you can prove it produced. Every inbound call ran through a tracking number tied back to the profile, which turned the firm’s busiest lead source into its most measurable one.
Monthly grid scan reports consistently illustrated this trend on the map: midway through the campaign, the profile secured a top-five ranking across nearly the entire metropolitan area for “cpa orlando,” expanding its reach even further through November.
Local grid scans of “cpa orlando” from the campaign’s monthly reports, 2 May 2025 and 3 November 2025.
Monthly Link Building
A recurring link building campaign ran at four placements a month, two from DR 30 domains and two from DR 40. Placements rotated across the new service pages, then concentrated on the homepage in late 2025. That push moved Domain Rating from 4 to 8 in November 2025 alone. Every live link was reported back with its target page and keyword.
Blog Writing That Answers What Clients Search
One SEO blog article a month, drawn from the content calendar, targeted the questions Orlando business owners actually type: overlooked tax write-offs, short-term rental income, forecasting, tax compliance. Those articles became the highest-traffic pages on the site.
Google Ads: Proving Demand Fast
Paid search launched in June 2025 to put the firm in front of high-intent searches while the organic work compounded. Over six months it served 46,036 impressions and 1,015 clicks on $8,709 of spend, with cost per click optimized from $12.36 down to roughly $8.
The Pivot: When Demand Outgrew the Practice
By December 2025 the firm was full for both client capacity and sales pipeline, and Google Ads was paused at the client’s request. Rather than wind the engagement down, we changed the target. Pronto built a Work With Us page and pointed the entire link building program at recruiting searches like “accounting jobs orlando”. Same playbook, now aimed at hiring the accountants needed to serve demand the firm already had.
Every Channel Pulling, One Phone Ringing
Across the thirteen months before that pivot, all five services fed the one number a professional services firm actually counts: the phone ringing.
766 Tracked Leads
Leads grew from 19 in the first month to a steady 59 to 89 a month once every service was live. September 2025 peaked at 89, December hit 88, and January 2026, the start of tax season, hit 82. In all, 766 leads were tracked in the thirteen months before the campaign changed targets.
Monthly tracked leads, January 2025 to April 2026. Shaded months fall inside the recruiting phase and are counted separately.
Authority and Links
Domain Rating climbed from 0.6 to 9, and referring domains grew from roughly 10 to a peak of 123 in December 2025. The sharpest gain came in November 2025, once link building concentrated on the homepage.
Off-site authority growth across the engagement, as measured in Ahrefs.
Rankings From Zero
The firm started with no top-ten rankings. Thirteen months later it held the number one spot for “virtual accounting services orlando”, and kept it through Google’s core update the following spring. Five more terms landed on page one or two: “small business accountant orlando” at 10, “accountant for contractors” at 11, “orlando cpa” at 13, “orlando payroll services” at 15 and “bookkeeping services orlando” at 16.
US organic keywords ranking in Google’s top ten, as measured in Ahrefs.
The blog did the same job. As of August 2026, two Pronto-written articles rank first for their target queries, and a third sits on page one for “tax compliance”, a search made 2,100 times a month.
What the Leads Were Worth
The firm’s own reporting tagged about one lead in six as worth quoting. Even if only three in ten of those became clients, at the low end of published Florida accounting fees, those 766 leads are worth roughly $114,000 in new business. That is five new clients for every hundred leads, well under what the industry expects.
Too Busy to Take New Clients
The clearest outcome of this campaign never appeared in a dashboard. By the end of 2025 the firm was turning away work, and the marketing had to change jobs.
“They were pretty happy with the quality of the leads. They were just getting so many that they couldn't handle it internally. Pointing the same campaign at hiring instead was the obvious next move.”
Google Ads went first, paused in November 2025 because a six-person team could not absorb the volume. Rather than treat that as the end of the engagement, the agency and Pronto redirected it. A Work With Us page went live, link building was aimed at recruiting searches, and the same machinery that had been finding clients went looking for accountants.
By April 2026 the firm’s own reporting had multiple qualified prospects wait-listed in a single month, with demand still arriving faster than the practice could staff it. Its homepage now carries a “Limited Availability” notice saying the practice is at capacity. Being asked to stop is an unusual result for a marketing program. It is also the most honest proof that it worked.
🔍 Data Context and Methodology:
To keep every figure in this case study auditable, the metrics below are drawn from the campaign’s own monthly reporting and platform data.
Tracking Platforms: Lead volume and source attribution from WhatConverts; keyword positions from the campaign rank tracker; authority and referring domains from Ahrefs; organic impressions and clicks from Google Search Console; paid search from Google Ads. Campaign window: November 2024 through May 2026.
Lead Counting: “Tracked leads” are unique WhatConverts leads, phone calls and web forms, recorded between January 2025 and January 2026, the thirteen months before the campaign was redirected toward recruiting. The 103 leads recorded from February to April 2026 fall inside the recruiting phase and are reported separately, never blended into the 766.
Attribution Boundary: Call tracking ran through the number published on the Google Business Profile, so the profile absorbs calls that other channels influenced. Google Ads’ contribution is therefore understated in the source mix and is reported on its own platform metrics instead. Channel figures start in May 2025, the first month the reports broke leads out by source. They are shown as shares because those tables count every tracked contact rather than unique leads, so they do not sum to the 766.
Pipeline Revenue Calculation: WhatConverts tagging marked about one lead in six as worth quoting. Applying a 30% close rate to those prospects, at $3,000 a year per client — the low end of published Florida small-business accounting fees — gives roughly $114,000. That is a 5% lead-to-client rate, well below the 15% to 30% benchmark published for accounting firms. It is a projection, not closed revenue: the firm has not shared its actual close rates or client values.
GMB Management & SEO Case Study
Rebuilding a Family Law Firm's Google Presence: From Thin Authority to 420 Phone Leads
