The statutory calendar is the content plan
Most industries get a flat demand curve with a seasonal wobble. Accounting gets a sawtooth. ITR queries climb through June, peak in the last ten days of July and collapse on 1 August. GST queries spike twice a month, ahead of the 11th and the 20th. ROC queries cluster around AGM season.
So publishing cadence matters more here than anywhere else in professional services. A page published on 25 July for a 31 July deadline has barely been crawled, has no engagement history and will not rank. Work backwards from every date on the calendar.
| Obligation | Statutory date | Publish or refresh by | Queries that spike |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly GST returns | GSTR-1 by the 11th, GSTR-3B by the 20th (staggered under QRMP) | Evergreen pages, refreshed monthly | GSTR-3B late fee, ITC mismatch with 2B, how to amend GSTR-1 |
| Advance tax instalments | 15 June, 15 September, 15 December, 15 March | Four to six weeks before each | advance tax calculation, interest under 234B and 234C |
| ITR, non-audit cases | 31 July | Mid-May, refreshed through June | which ITR form, old vs new regime, capital gains reporting |
| Tax audit report | 30 September | Early August | 44AB turnover limit, presumptive taxation under 44AD and 44ADA |
| ROC annual filing | AOC-4 within 30 days of AGM, MGT-7 within 60 | Early September | AOC-4 due date, ₹100 per day additional fee, AGM extension |
| Director KYC | 30 September | Mid-August | DIR-3 KYC late fee, DIN deactivated |
| Annual GST return | GSTR-9 and 9C, 31 December | Late October | GSTR-9 applicability turnover, reconciliation differences |
What ICAI actually lets a firm publish
The underlying prohibition sits in the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949: a member in practice commits misconduct by soliciting clients or professional work, or by advertising their professional attainments. The Council's advertisement guidance softens that for websites, but the model it permits is a pull model — information available to someone who comes looking, not material pushed at people who didn't ask.
That rules out a lot of standard marketing, and leaves exactly the thing that ranks anyway: accurate technical writing about tax and corporate law, published under the firm's name.
- Write about the law, not about the firm. "How section 43B(h) affects payments to MSME suppliers" is compliant and rankable. "India's most trusted CA firm" is neither.
- Name authors with credentials. Membership number, qualification, area of work. A credibility signal for Google, and a factual particular rather than a claim of attainment.
- Keep client work anonymous. "A manufacturer with ₹40 crore turnover" carries the technical point without naming anyone.
- No fee advertising. If you want to talk about cost, talk about what drives it — turnover, entity type, number of returns — without a number.
- Skip lead-generation marketplaces. Buying enquiries from a portal is the sort of arrangement the guidelines are aimed at, whatever the portal's salesperson tells you.
Three clusters, three completely different readers
A CA firm's traffic looks like one audience and behaves like three. Splitting the site accordingly is most of the architecture work.
| Cluster | Who's searching | What ranks |
|---|---|---|
| GST | In-house accounts staff mid-filing, plus business owners who got a mismatch alert | Step-by-step portal walkthroughs with current screen names, reconciliation logic, and the exact error codes |
| Income tax and ITR | Salaried individuals in June–July, business owners in September–October | Form selection, regime comparison with worked numbers, capital gains and foreign asset reporting |
| ROC and MCA | Company secretaries, founders and their ops leads | Form-by-form filing guides, event-based compliance, additional-fee consequences |
| Notices and disputes | Anyone who just opened a scary email. Highest intent in the category | What the notice means, the reply window, the drafting steps, escalation path |
Notices are the most underserved search in accounting
Someone receives an intimation under section 143(1) showing a demand they don't understand, or a GST ASMT-10 scrutiny notice with a fifteen-day clock. They search the form number that night. They are not comparing firms. They want to know what it means and what happens if they ignore it.
This is the strongest commercial content a CA firm can publish and it's mostly left to generic filing portals that cover it in four hundred words. A firm that handles these weekly can write the version nobody else can: what the department is actually looking at, which reply usually closes it, and when it escalates.
- GST: ASMT-10 scrutiny, DRC-01A intimation and DRC-01 show cause, DRC-07 order, registration cancellation and revocation, e-way bill detention under section 129.
- Income tax: 143(1) intimation, 139(9) defective return, 245 adjustment against refund, 133(6) information request, 148 reassessment, 154 rectification.
- TDS: short deduction and late fee defaults on TRACES, 26AS and AIS mismatches — the AIS feedback loop alone is a page most firms haven't written.
- MCA: STK-1 strike-off, DIN deactivation, adjudication notices for late filing.
- Each page needs the reply window in days, in bold, near the top. That's the fact the reader came for, and it's what earns the call.
Startups and established SMEs need different service pages
Most firm websites have one "Our Services" page listing fourteen services. Two very different buyers read it and neither finds themselves.
The founder searching at 11pm wants incorporation, DPIIT recognition, ESOP structuring and someone to say whether they need a virtual CFO. The forty-year-old manufacturing business wants GST litigation support, an audit that doesn't drag, and help with the 45-day MSME payment rule under section 43B(h) that quietly changed their working capital. Two entirely separate content paths.
Startup and early-stage
- Incorporation comparison — private limited versus LLP versus OPC, with the compliance cost of each stated as a count of filings rather than a fee.
- DPIIT recognition and the section 80-IAC exemption, including what the application actually asks for.
- ESOP taxation at exercise and at sale, the point every founder gets wrong.
- FEMA reporting for foreign investment — FC-GPR timelines and what happens when they're missed.
- Virtual CFO and bookkeeping stack pages, which is where a lot of the recurring revenue sits.
Established SME
- GST department correspondence, audits and appeals, written from the department's angle.
- Section 43B(h) and payment timelines to MSME-registered suppliers, with the disallowance mechanics worked through.
- Statutory audit readiness — the document list, the timeline, what delays it.
- Related-party and transfer pricing obligations for anyone with a cross-border group entity.
- Succession, family settlement and business restructuring, which are searched privately and converted slowly.
"CA near me" is a real query with a real map pack
Accounting is one of the few professional services where the map pack still drives serious enquiry volume. "CA near me", "chartered accountant in [locality]" and "GST consultant near me" all return a local pack above the organic results, and the businesses in it get the calls.
The compliant version is a factual Google Business Profile: firm name exactly as registered, office address, hours, phone. No superlatives in the description, and no review campaign — soliciting reviews sits far too close to the solicitation ICAI restricts, which is the specific thing to raise with your ethics contact first. The same caution applies to your law firm neighbours.
What you can build safely is depth: a page per office with real detail, and locality pages only where you operate. Mechanics in our local SEO work.
- One page per office, with the address, the partners who sit there, the languages spoken and the courts or department offices that jurisdiction covers.
- Name the local tax office and jurisdictional range on the office page. It's factual, it's useful, and it's the sort of detail no template farm has.
- Consistent name, address and phone across every listing. Mismatches are the most common reason a firm doesn't appear in the pack.
- Skip city pages for cities you don't have an office in. Twelve fictional locations is scaled content, and Google's policy on it applies to accountants too.
What we'd do first, and what we commit to
For a firm starting from a five-page brochure site, month one is the calendar and the notice cluster — publish the fifteen highest-intent notice pages and the ITR and GST pillars, then let them season before the next spike. Everything else waits.
Our SEO runs from ₹75,000/mo, and from ₹40,000/mo for smaller sites. Ex-GST, month-to-month after the first quarter, 30 days' notice, and every asset stays yours. Full numbers on our pricing page.
The commitment is not a ranking position — nobody controls Google's index and any agency promising a spot is telling you a story. We freeze your trailing-90-day qualified enquiries from organic search on day one. If we haven't beaten that number in 90 days, we keep working free until we do.
The accounting-specific caveat: if we start in September, your 90 days ends in December, which is a genuinely quiet stretch for this category. We'd rather set the baseline window honestly against your own seasonality than pretend the calendar doesn't exist.