5 Focus Areas for Accounting Firm Growth in 2026

The strategies that have driven growth for accounting firms over the past five years are losing relevance. That is not a comfortable reality, but it is one that forward-thinking firm leaders are already grappling with.

The game has changed. AI is fundamentally reshaping how prospects discover and evaluate firms. The channels that build awareness are fragmenting. Traditional metrics like keyword rankings and website traffic tell an increasingly incomplete story. Firms that continue operating from the old playbook will find themselves optimizing for a world that no longer exists.

What follows are five focus areas that should shape how your firm thinks about growth in the year ahead. These are not tactics to add to a marketing plan. They are strategic priorities that reflect how the landscape has shifted and shine light on where firm leaders should be directing attention and resources.

1. Upskilling Your People for the AI Era

Technology is moving faster than most firms can absorb. Generative AI, automation tools, and intelligent agents are transforming how marketing and business development work gets done. But tools are only as valuable as the people using them.

The question is not whether to adopt AI tools. It is whether your people are prepared to use them well. This means creating space for experimentation, building comfort with new workflows, and developing judgment about what these tools can and cannot do.

A marketing coordinator who knows how to leverage AI tools effectively is far more productive than one who does not. A demand gen director who understands how AI search engines surface recommendations will make smarter decisions than one operating on outdated assumptions. These capability gaps do not show up in traditional metrics, but they directly impact your firm's ability to execute, and today define the productivity of your growth team. 

It goes without saying that the human element remains essential: judgment, relationship-building, and strategic thinking cannot be automated. But the toolkit is changing rapidly, and firms that invest in upskilling their people now will move faster than those who wait.

2. Content That Works Across Channels

Content still matters. But the purpose has shifted from "content for SEO" to "content for visibility."

Today, your content needs to work across multiple channels: traditional search, AI systems, social media, podcasts, webinars, and video. Success in one does not guarantee success in another: being in the top 10 search results in Google only gives you a 25% chance to appear in AI searches for equivalent queries. 

Both quality and volume matter, but volume may be more important than conventional wisdom suggests. Today, twenty interlinked articles addressing specific queries will likely outperform a single comprehensive guide in certain channels. AI systems pull from multiple sources and reward topical depth across a body of work, not just individual pieces. That said, volume for the sake of volume is not the answer. Each piece needs to add genuine value and connect to a larger content ecosystem.

3. Visibility in AI Search

Your prospects are increasingly getting answers from AI chatbots and AI-powered search engines without ever visiting your website. They ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for recommendations and receive synthesized responses that may or may not mention your firm. Organic traffic, while still the largest driver for the majority of firms, is decreasing. 

This changing consumer behavior matters more than many firm leaders realize. For one of our clients, traffic from AI search converts to new leads at double the rate of any other channel: organic, direct, email, or otherwise. The visitors who arrive via AI tend to be further along in their decision-making process and more qualified when they reach out.

Understanding your firm’s AI visibility is challenging. The data is opaque and the field is still maturing. Querying AI models yourself will not give you reliable insights since responses are personalized to each user. Instead, explore emerging AI visibility tools that attempt to track how and where your content appears in AI-generated responses. This is a difficult area to measure, but firms that start paying attention now will be better positioned than those who ignore it entirely.

4. Diversified Awareness Beyond SEO

Relying on SEO alone will not cut it anymore. Algorithmic shifts, AI summarization, and zero-click search are all reducing your visibility. Firms need to push awareness across multiple channels and focus on showing up on the digital venues their clients and prospects frequent.

Social media has become critical—but not just for the firm brand. Individual partners building personal visibility often matters more than the corporate presence. When a prospect sees a partner consistently sharing insights and engaging in industry conversations, that creates a different kind of trust than a polished website. LinkedIn remains key for this, but other platforms like TikTok are playing a role too. Don’t believe us? Check out this recent Digital Deep Dive webinar with Michael Liner, CEO and Founder of Liner Legal, a disability law firm that drove $2m in revenue in 2025 through Michael’s TikTok profile. 

Email campaigns work best when tied to events and targeted outreach. When a partner attends a conference, the marketing team should be pre-emailing attendees, following up afterward, and integrating online and offline activity. This coordination is where real opportunities emerge.

Your partners need to be visible where your prospects spend time: events, podcasts, webinars, industry associations. The marketing team's role is shifting from creating content to enabling these activities and amplifying their impact. The goal is not activity volume: it’s developing a consistent presence in the places where trust is formed.

5. Connecting Activity to Pipeline

The ultimate question for any growth effort is whether it translates to business results. Yet many firms struggle to connect marketing activity to their sales pipeline. They track impressions, rankings, and traffic, but struggle to tell you exactly where their best opportunities actually came from.

This disconnect limits leadership's ability to make informed decisions. When you can’t trace outcomes back to activities, every budget conversation becomes a debate about intuition rather than evidence. The solution is tracking metrics at multiple layers and connecting them together. Visibility and awareness at the top of the funnel. Engagement in the middle: who is interacting, which pages, how many contacts. Finally, conversion: qualified opportunities and closed clients.

Many firms lack the systems to track this full picture. Their CRM is disconnected from marketing. Partners are not logging activity. Opportunities appear but nobody can trace them to a source. If you want to become more strategic about growth, you need visibility into what is actually working at every stage of the strategy. That means investing in infrastructure, getting partners to use the CRM consistently, and building reports that show outcomes, not just activity.

Forge Your Growth Strategy with Winding River Consulting

The playbook that worked five years ago is no longer sufficient. The five focus areas outlined here, people readiness, multi-channel content, AI visibility, diversified awareness, and pipeline connectivity, reflect where the landscape has shifted and where firm leaders should be directing attention.

None of this happens overnight. It requires intention, investment, and a willingness to experiment while maintaining what already works. But firms that start now will be better positioned than those who wait until the shift becomes impossible to ignore.

At Winding River Consulting, we help firm leaders build growth strategies that reflect today's realities. If you are ready to rethink how your firm approaches growth in 2026, contact us to start the conversation.