How a CPA Firm Captured 991 Top-3 Google Rankings and 175 AI Overview Citations

WCG CPAs & Advisors is one of Colorado Springs’ most established CPA firms. Decades of expertise in tax strategy, business formation, S-corp elections, and real estate investing. 80+ five-star Google reviews. A team of 19 CPAs and enrolled agents serving clients across 47 states.

They had the knowledge. They had the reputation. What they did not have was a website that turned that expertise into search visibility.

WCG’s Colorado Springs office, with Pikes Peak in the background

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The Challenge: 3,000 Pages of Expertise, Zero Content Architecture

The problem here is not a lack of content. WCG has over 3,000 pages covering everything from S-corp elections to rental property tax strategies to multi-entity business structures. That is an extraordinary volume of specialized knowledge, and most of it was buried under a flat site structure that gave search engines no way to make sense of it.

How do you organize 3,000 pages of tax and accounting expertise so that both humans and search engines can navigate them? A flat blog with random posts does not cut it. You need information architecture that mirrors how people actually search for help with their taxes, their business formation, and their real estate investments.

That is the work I care about. Not just making a site look professional (though it does), but building the underlying structure that makes thousands of pages findable, readable, and rankable.

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Design That Serves Both People and Algorithms

Every design decision on this project had two audiences: the business owner looking for tax help, and the search engine deciding who to show first.

The navigation needed to handle depth. WCG covers everything from basic tax prep to complex multi-entity structures and expat tax planning. I built a content taxonomy that groups topics the way clients actually think about them (not the way accountants organize their filing cabinets). Service portals for Business Advisory, Real Estate, Tax Center, and Knowledge Base, each with clear sub-navigation.

The Knowledge Base is the core of the SEO strategy. Hundreds of in-depth articles on specific tax topics, each structured with key takeaways at the top, table of contents for navigation, FAQ sections for search snippets, and internal links that create topic clusters. This is not blog content. It is a searchable reference library built to answer the exact questions people type into Google.

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The visual design reinforces authority without feeling corporate. An earthy gold palette (#AB9157) paired with warm browns and clean typography. Professional headshots and the stone office building with Pikes Peak in the background. Every element communicates: these people know what they are doing.

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The SEO Results: 991 Keywords in the Top 3

Here is where the architecture pays off.

As of February 2026, WCG ranks for 3,000 organic keywords in the US. That is not a typo. Three thousand.

Of those 3,000 keywords:

• 991 rank in positions 1-3 (33% of all tracked keywords)
• 2,063 rank on page 1 (69% of all tracked keywords)

The firm holds the #1 position for high-value terms including:

That last one, “lease versus buy auto,” gets 14,800 searches per month. WCG ranks #1 for it because the Knowledge Base article on capital leases versus operating leases is the most comprehensive, best-structured resource on the topic. Not because of tricks. Because the content is genuinely better and the architecture makes it easy for Google to understand.

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The AIO Edge: 175 AI Overview Citations

This is where it gets interesting, and where most businesses are not paying attention yet.

Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 72% of WCG’s tracked keywords (2,169 out of 3,000). Most businesses see AI Overviews as a threat: “If Google answers the question directly, why would anyone click through?”

WCG is the answer Google is pulling from.

• 175 keywords where WCG content is the AI Overview citation source
• 730 top-3 rankings on queries that also trigger AI Overviews
• 545 #1 positions on queries with AI Overviews present

The thesis is simple: businesses that build authoritative, well-structured content now become the default source for AI-powered search. Businesses that wait become invisible to it.

WCG got there first in their space. When someone asks Google’s AI about S-corp home office deductions, rental property tax strategies, or business formation structures, the AI references WCG’s content. That is not an accident. That is the result of content architecture designed to be both human-readable and machine-parseable.

Most businesses are still debating whether AI will replace search. WCG is already the source AI pulls from. That is the difference between reacting to change and getting ahead of it.

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The Partnership

This project was a collaboration with eSEO Space. I handled the design, UX, information architecture, and content strategy. eSEO Space handled the WordPress development, client communications, and we worked together on the SEO and AIO optimization.

This is how I prefer to work on larger projects. A designer who thinks strategically about content structure, paired with a developer who executes precisely. The result is better than what either of us could deliver alone.

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What This Means for Your Business

The principle applies whether you are a CPA firm, a law practice, a consulting company, or any established business with deep expertise: the content you publish today becomes the source AI references tomorrow.

The businesses investing in content authority right now are the ones that will own their search results for the next decade. The ones that wait will spend years trying to catch up to firms that moved first.

Your industry, competition, and timeline will be different. But if you have expertise worth sharing, the time to build your digital authority is now.

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