April 21, 2026 · 6 min · Accountant SEO Company editorial team

The Post-April Review: What Tax Season Told You About Your Marketing

A May exercise for firms: where new clients came from, which inquiries you turned away, what demand went unmarketed, and what to fix over the summer.

Free firm review Accounting firm marketing

A small conference room with a round table, two chairs and a stack of documents

The evidence on whether your marketing worked this season is sitting in your intake notes, your calendar and your inbox, and it gets harder to read every week you wait. Block one afternoon before the end of May to answer four questions: where this season's new clients came from, which inquiries you turned away and why, which services people asked for that the firm doesn't market, and which three things to fix over the summer. You need the season's intake records, a spreadsheet and whoever answered the phone in March.

Why May and not September

By September nobody remembers which caller wanted payroll help or which referral came from the new estate attorney. In May the people who handled intake still do. The fixes this review produces (a new page, a changed intake form, corrected profile hours) take a few weeks each, and May to August is when the firm has the capacity to make them before extension season and the next January.

Step 1: Count where new clients came from

Start with the intake form. If it asks "How did you hear about us?", export the answers. If it doesn't, adding that question is your first fix, and for this season you'll have to ask. A one-line question in the email that delivers the finished return gets most of the answers; staff can fill in the rest from memory, marked as a guess.

Split the "Google" answers into two rows. A client who heard your name from a neighbor and then searched for it is a referral who used a search engine. A client who typed "tax preparer near me" or "bookkeeper for restaurants" and found you is a search client. The first row measures your reputation. The second measures whether people who have never heard of the firm can find it. Mixing them hides both.

Then fill in a table like this one with your own numbers:

Source	Inquiries	Became clients	Turned away
Referral from a client
Referral from an attorney, banker or other adviser
Search for the firm's name
Search for a service or a "near me" phrase
Directory, association or software listing
Former client returning
Unknown

Here is how to read it, with made-up numbers. Say the firm logged 120 inquiries and signed 45 new clients. Thirty of the 45 came from client referrals, out of 40 referral inquiries. Six came from service searches, out of 35 search inquiries. Referrals carried the season, and search sent a fair number of people who didn't sign. That second figure is the one to dig into: 29 search inquiries that went nowhere could mean price shoppers, requests for services the firm doesn't offer, a slow reply, or people outside your area. The intake notes should tell you which.

Step 2: List what you turned away, and why

Turned-away inquiries are the most useful rows in the table, because each reason points to a different fix. Give every one a reason:

Capacity: the calendar was full. The fix is pricing, an earlier intake cutoff or another preparer, not more marketing.
Fit: they wanted a service you don't offer. If the same service comes up five times, it may be worth adding, or worth finding a referral partner who sends work back.
Price: they expected to pay less. Check whether your site set that expectation, or set none at all.
Timing: they arrived after your cutoff. Publish next season's cutoff on the site and the profile so late filers sort themselves out.
Scope: another state, an entity type you don't prepare, a language nobody at the firm speaks.

If capacity accounts for more than a handful, run next season through the tax-season capacity planner before deciding to market harder. Attracting more inquiries to a full calendar only grows the turned-away column.

Step 3: Find the demand you didn't market

Read through the season's emails, intake notes and voicemail summaries for questions about services that aren't on your website. Questions like "Do you do monthly bookkeeping?", "Can you help with a letter from the IRS?", "Do you handle payroll?" or "Can you do my mother's return in another state?" Count each one. If eight people asked about bookkeeping and the site has no bookkeeping page, that demand exists, and search has nowhere to send the people who never thought to call.

Do the same with current clients. The questions they raised mid-engagement, about payroll, cash flow, entity choices or planning for next year, point to advisory and recurring-revenue work that a returns-only website never mentions.

One caution before you act on any of it. If the idea is to offer bookkeeping to return clients whose records arrived in a shoebox, you'd be using tax return information to generate a solicitation. Under the Section 7216 rules, that takes the client's written, knowing and voluntary consent first, and the consent has to identify each type of product or service you'll offer. The details are in our post on Section 7216 and client return data in marketing. State rules may apply as well, so check the IRS guidance and your own counsel before sending anything.

Step 4: Check the channels in an hour

With the intake picture in hand, look at the places search clients found you.

Google Business Profile: are the hours right for summer and for the weeks before the October deadline? Do the listed services match the work you want? How many reviews came in this season, and did each one get a reply?

Website: does each service you want more of have its own page? Send a test inquiry through the contact form and time the reply. Then pull the timestamps on March's web inquiries and see how long they waited. If a web inquiry sat for three days in March, more visibility would have produced more inquiries that sat for three days.

Search: from the office, type the phrases your search clients used, plus the services from Step 3, and note where the firm appears, if it appears at all.

Step 5: Pick three fixes for the summer

Not twelve. Three, each with an owner and a date. Candidates, depending on what your table shows:

Add "How did you hear about us?" to intake, with the two Google rows as separate choices.
Write one page for the most-requested service you don't market.
Publish next season's intake cutoff on the site and the profile.
Shorten the reply time on web inquiries, even if that only means a same-day acknowledgment.
Correct profile hours for summer and for extension season.

Anything bigger, such as a search plan for a new service line, belongs in the wider marketing plan for accounting firms, which also has to answer whether the firm has room for the work. Keep the spreadsheet. Next April's review takes half the time when this year's numbers are there to compare.

The website and profile half of this review is the part an outside reader can speed up. If you'd like one, request a free firm review and include the top three unanswered questions from Step 3.