How a boutique financial & tax firm out-shared Intuit and H&R Block on Google Search.

Objective

Win qualified, conversion-ready traffic for Herbert Financial from Google Search across competitive financial and tax keywords — and do it efficiently against far larger national brands, keeping cost-per-conversion controlled while maximising visibility in the paid results.

Challenge

Paid search for financial and tax terms is one of the most expensive, most competitive auctions on Google. The campaign was up against national heavyweights:

▸  Herbert Financial was bidding directly against brands like Intuit (TurboTax) and H&R Block — companies with vastly larger budgets and nationwide name recognition.

▸  Financial and tax keywords carry high costs per click, so every dollar had to work hard: the goal was real impression share and top-of-page presence without cost-per-conversion running away.

Approach

We built and actively managed the Google Search campaigns end to end:

▸  High-intent keyword strategy — concentrated budget on the financial and tax queries most likely to convert, rather than broad, wasteful terms.

▸  Trust-focused ad copy & assets — messaging and extensions tuned for a trust-sensitive audience, lifting click-through and Quality Score to bring the effective CPC down.

▸  Bid & budget management — managed bids to hold meaningful top-of-page and absolute-top presence in the same auctions as the national brands.

▸  Landing-page & conversion alignment — pointed clicks at pages built to turn enquiries into booked conversions, improving cost per conversion.

▸  Auction-insights monitoring — continuously tracked impression share against Intuit and H&R Block and reallocated budget to grow and defend it.

Results

Over roughly nine and a half months (Oct 10, 2025 – Jul 29, 2026), the campaigns delivered 77.2K impressions at a $5.61 average CPC on $14.7K of managed spend, generating conversions at a $341 cost per conversion (about 43 conversions). The headline result came from Google’s own Auction Insights: Herbert Financial held the highest search impression share of the three advertisers — 14.63%, ahead of Intuit.com (10.81%) and H&R Block (under 10%) — while appearing at the top of the page 49.19% of the time and in the absolute-top position 22.99% of the time.

 

Performance summary

 

Search impression share vs. national competitors

Results at a Glance

Results Glossary