Say you run a one-woman dog grooming business in Nottingham. A letter from HMRC arrives about Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. You read it twice, put it in a drawer, and one evening you type “do I need an accountant for making tax digital” into your phone.
You look at six accountancy websites. Five have a homepage that says something like “Trusted advisers to businesses across the East Midlands since 1987” and a services menu with “Compliance”, “Advisory” and “Payroll”. None of them mention Making Tax Digital anywhere you can find. The sixth has a plain page titled “Making Tax Digital for sole traders: what you need to do and what we charge”. You ring them in the morning.
That’s the whole post. The rest is what to put on the page.
Where we are with MTD
Quick recap for anyone who’s been avoiding the letters. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is HMRC’s new way of doing Self Assessment for sole traders and landlords. Instead of one tax return a year, you keep digital records, send HMRC a quarterly update through software, and then a final declaration at the end.
The rollout is in three waves, based on qualifying income from self-employment and property:
- Over £50,000: in from 6 April 2026. This group is already live.
- Over £30,000: in from 6 April 2027. Five months away.
- Over £20,000: in from 6 April 2028.
Quarterly updates are due on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. So by the time you read this the very first deadline has been and gone, the second is days away, and a fair few people in that first wave have discovered they’re not quite as organised as they thought.
HMRC has said it won’t hand out penalty points for late quarterly updates in the first year, so nobody’s in trouble yet. But plenty are drifting. They know they’re behind, and they don’t know who to ask.
Who is searching, and what they type
Look at who this lands on. Established sole traders earning somewhere between £30,000 and £80,000. Tradespeople, consultants, landlords with a couple of flats. In other words, exactly the clients most small practices would love more of. A lot of them have never had an accountant. They’ve done their own return every January, badly, and got away with it.
Now they have a problem they can’t Google their way out of in an evening. They’re searching for phrases like:
- “making tax digital accountant near me”
- “do I need an accountant for MTD”
- “MTD quarterly update help sole trader”
- “making tax digital £30000 threshold what do I do”
- “MTD software for landlords”
Increasingly they’re asking ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode the same questions in full sentences. Semrush’s research from May 2026 found that when ChatGPT quotes a web page, that page is ranking at position 21 or worse in Google almost 90% of the time. The AI doesn’t care if you’re a big firm. It cares whether your page answers the question. A small practice with one excellent MTD page can be the one it quotes.
The page that wins: a template you can use today
One page, written for someone who has never heard the words “digital record” before. The headings are the questions people ask, in the words they use.
“Does Making Tax Digital apply to me?”
The three thresholds and dates, in a short list. Then one sentence that reassures: “If you’re not sure which year you fall into, send us your last tax return and we’ll tell you for free.”
“What do I have to do each quarter?”
Explain the quarterly update in three sentences. No acronyms. Say what software you use and whether you set it up for them.
“What happens if I’ve already missed a deadline?”
This is the heading that gets the phone call. Be honest: no penalty points in the first year, but you need to catch up, and this is how we do that.
“What does it cost?”
Give a number. “MTD sole trader package from £45 a month including software, quarterly updates and your year-end declaration.” If you can’t give a fixed price, give a range and say what moves it. In my experience vague pricing is the main reason people leave an accountant’s website without getting in touch. They assume the answer is “more than I can afford”.
“How do we get started?”
Three steps. Book a 20 minute call, send us your last return and your bank feed, we set everything up. Then a booking link or a short form: name, email, phone, “are you a sole trader, landlord or both?”, and roughly what you earn.
“Who are you?”
A photo of the person they’ll deal with, two sentences about them, and three recent Google reviews from sole traders. Not corporate clients. People like them.
Five details
- Put it in the main menu. Not three clicks deep under Services. A menu item that just says “Making Tax Digital” tells a nervous visitor, before they’ve read a word, that they’ve come to the right place.
- Write a separate short page for landlords. Their questions are different (property income, jointly owned property, one letting or four). Google and the AI tools can only match a page to a question if the page is about one thing.
- Add the dates to your Google Business Profile. Put “Making Tax Digital” in your services list and post a short profile update before 7 November and again before April 2027. Google reads these.
- Keep it current. Put the date it was last updated at the top. HMRC’s rules are still settling, and “updated November 2026” earns a kind of trust that a blog post from 2024 simply can’t.
- Make the page fast on a phone. Over half of UK web page views are on mobile. Your dog groomer was reading on a cracked Samsung on her sofa.
What this is worth
Work it through. If the £30,000 wave brings in just five new sole trader clients at £45 a month, that’s £2,700 a year of recurring fees from one web page. That’s before any referrals from those five. The page takes an afternoon to write.
If your website is so old you can’t add a page to it, that’s a different problem, and one we can fix. Our Business plan is ten pages for £69 a month with no setup fee. That leaves room for an MTD page, a landlord page and your pricing.
They’re searching now. Make sure it’s your page they find.
