A Google Business Profile - the panel of details, map pin and reviews that appears when someone searches your firm - is free, and the web industry treats it as compulsory. For a financial firm it is not compulsory, but it is often worth the half hour it takes. The real question is whether yours is one of the firms where it actually does something.
Most accounting and advisory firms get the bulk of their clients the way they always have: someone they trust passed on a name. That makes it tempting to dismiss anything labelled local search as irrelevant - you are not a cafe hoping to catch passing trade, and a Business Profile will not turn a referral practice into a lead machine. But the referral is only the first step. What the referred person does next - and it is almost always to look you up - is exactly where a Profile earns or loses you the moment.
Picture someone handed your firm's name over dinner. They search it on the way home. If you have a Profile, they get your hours, your location, a photo, a link and a row of reviews - a tidy, reassuring snapshot that says you exist and you are open for business. If you do not, they get a thin set of blue links and a faint sense that something is missing. The Profile also catches the genuinely new - someone who has just moved to the area and is searching cold - and it is where your Google reviews live, which for a trust-based purchase is no small thing.
If you do set one up, the details matter more than the effort suggests. Choose the most specific primary category - accountant, financial planner, mortgage broker - rather than a vague one, because it shapes which searches you turn up in. Most firms work by appointment, so you can run it as a service-area business and keep your exact address private if you would rather. Fill in the hours, add a real photo or two of the office or team, and write a description that says plainly what you do and who for. Half-finished profiles are the norm, which means a complete one stands out.
A Business Profile puts your reviews front and centre, which is genuinely useful - but for financial advisers it comes with strings. Testimonials and reviews on anything connected to a financial advice business sit under fair-dealing and advertising expectations, and there are right and wrong ways to gather and display them. Before you start asking clients for Google reviews, read how the rules around testimonials and reviews apply to your situation. For an accounting firm the constraints are lighter, but the principle holds: a handful of genuine, recent reviews beats a sudden suspicious flood every time.
There are firms for which a Profile genuinely is not worth the bother. A purely B2B practice whose clients are all long-standing institutional relationships, with nobody ever searching for them cold, will get little from it. So will a firm that sets one up and then never touches it - a Profile with three-year-old hours and an unanswered one-star review does more harm than no Profile at all. The honest position is the one the local SEO article takes more broadly: do it properly or do not do it. A complete, maintained Profile is a quiet asset. A neglected one is just another thing on the internet making you look inattentive.
For most small firms the answer is yes: set one up, spend half an hour doing it properly, and check it twice a year. It will not fill your diary. But it will make sure the person who was just handed your name finds a firm that looks every bit as competent online as it is across the desk.
