Schema Markup for CPA Firms: What Actually Matters

Search "schema markup" and you will drown in lists of forty types you could theoretically add to your site. For an accounting firm, almost all of that is noise. Two types do the real work, and getting those two right beats sprinkling a dozen half-configured ones across your pages.

First, what schema actually is

Schema markup is structured data: a small block of code, invisible to visitors, that states facts about your page in a format search engines and AI crawlers read directly. It does not change how your site looks. It changes how machines understand it. Think of it as a caption written for software, telling it exactly what it is looking at instead of making it guess.

For a firm whose value is expertise, that translation from "styled text a human reads" to "facts a machine can use" is the whole game.

The two that matter

Person schema. This is the one nearly every firm is missing and the one with the most upside. It marks up each named CPA as a real, credentialed person who works for your firm and knows specific topics. Done right, it connects a human expert to the subjects they handle, which is exactly what an AI assistant needs before it will ever recommend that person. If you do one thing, do this.

LocalBusiness schema. This marks up your firm, and critically each office, with an accurate name, address, phone, and hours. It is what feeds the map pack and the knowledge panel clean data instead of leaving Google to scrape it from wherever. If you have multiple offices, each one needs its own LocalBusiness entry, and every one of them has to agree with your Google Business Profile and every directory listing.

Get those two right, tied together so your people connect to your Organization and your Organization connects to your offices, and you have done more than the vast majority of firms in your market.

One type to be careful with

There is a strong temptation to add Review or AggregateRating schema so a star rating shows up in search. Be careful here. Google does not allow a business to mark up reviews about itself for star rich results, and self-serving review markup can get a page flagged rather than rewarded. This is a real policy, not a nuance you can ignore. Display your reviews for humans, link to your real Google profile, but do not mark up your own rating in structured data.

What to skip

You do not need Service schema on every page, FAQ schema stuffed onto pages that are not really FAQs, or the long tail of exotic types. Over-marking is its own problem: it dilutes focus, and badly configured schema that "validates" but has no stable identifiers connects nothing to anything. We see firms with schema on every page and not one node that actually references another. It looks done. It does nothing.

How to check yours

Run your pages through Google's Rich Results Test, or start with a free audit that flags missing and malformed structured data across your whole site. The bar is not "have some schema." It is "have Person and LocalBusiness, configured correctly, connected to each other." Almost no accounting firm clears it, which is precisely why it is worth doing.

The full accounting-firm version, including how the nodes connect and what to put in each, is what our SEO for CPAs work builds.