How Can A Custom GPT Help My CPA Firm With Content Marketing?
In 2025, accounting firms have access to AI resources that can help them develop a content marketing platform grounded in their high-level growth goals. Paid users of ChatGPT (ChatGPT Plus is $20/month) can create a customized GPT, a chatbot that can be trained to generate:
language that reflects the firm’s brand voice
blog drafts that support the firm’s industry and service line expertise
pillar content topics and supporting content
linking suggestions between posts to improve user experience and strengthen SEO
How Can My Accounting Firm Set Up A Custom GPT?
Creating a custom GPT is surprisingly easy. Once you have ChatGPT Plus, go to the home page and click “GPTs”, a menu option in the left column. That routes the user to a page that offers access to several GPT options already created by OpenAI, the nonprofit creator of ChatGPT.
Instead of focusing on those existing GPTs, click on the “Create” button in the top right corner to begin creating your own GPT. As you do so, you will be asked to provide:
A GPT name. The GPT name should reflect the purpose of the GPT (e.g. “outsourced accounting content GPT” – for a GPT used to create marketing content for your accounting practice)
A GPT description. This can be a slightly longer description of the GPT you’ve already defined, to some degree, in its name.
Instructions. In this section, you can tell the GPT to use your accounting firm’s website (provide the URL) as the source for your future GPT prompts. For example, when you prompt the GPT to recommend linking strategies between blogs, you won’t necessarily need to provide the site URL in the prompt because you’ve already provided it in the instructions. You should also tell the GPT to rely on your updated marketing materials as the basis for its output. (More on that in a moment).
Conversation starters. Adding conversation starters in this section will create pre-programmed prompts that appear on your custom GPT home page every time you visit it. For example, a good conversation starter you might add for an accounting firm’s custom GPT is “What topic should I cover in my next short-form video?” Or “What linking strategies between blog posts should I take advantage of?”
Knowledge. This is the section where you can upload your firm’s marketing materials to train your GPT’s generated outputs. Let me come back to this in a moment.
Recommended model. This is the version of ChatGPT you wish to use for the GPT. For purposes of this starter post on custom GPTs, I don’t have an opinion about this and suggest leaving the default. (“No Recommended Model”).
Capabilities. For purposes of this post, I would stick with the “Web Search” and “4o Image Generation” options to allow multimodal outputs (i.e. text and images). The “Canvas” option allows for collaborative content iterations and editing capabilities between you and the GPT that operate alongside a chat. I haven’t experimented with this yet.
Once you have filled in these sections, save your newly customized GPT.
How Does the Knowledge Section of the Custom GPT Generate Outputs Based On My Firm’s Branding?
As mentioned above, I recommend setting up your custom GPT with a clear, purpose-driven name, description and instructions, and saving the GPT before training it with your accounting firm’s marketing materials.
The Knowledge section is accompanied by an "Upload Files" button.
Here’s where you tell the GPT about your firm, your unique value and your competitive differentiators. While you can and should upload files detailing your services and industries, I also recommend training your custom GPT with knowledge about only ONE industry or service line.
(You can create multiple custom GPTs in ChatGPT, each of which can be dedicated to serving the content needs of separate industries or services).
Gather and upload five to 10 pieces of branded content including, for example:
Web page copy for the selected industry or service line
High-quality blog posts from your website that demonstrate your industry or service line’s expertise, capabilities and unique value
Sell sheets or flyers
Presentation or video transcripts
Keep in mind, the GPT can best understand your content when you use clear headlines, bullet points and other well-organized information.
How Can the Custom GPT Help Create Pillar and Supporting Content for My Website?
After uploading files to the Knowledge section of your custom GPT, you can now technically generate content for your blog based on your accounting firm’s brand.
Before doing that though, a better step would be to audit your existing blog content – i.e. content you have already published on your site – to determine how helpful it can be as you bring more intention to your content marketing strategy.
The branded content uploaded to the Knowledge section can help with the audit as well.
First, let’s look at two kinds of blog content: pillar content and supporting content.
Pillar content. Every industry and service page is pillar content, since it represents a single area of expertise. Blog posts can also be pillar content if they serve a unique, powerful purpose such as differentiating your firm’s expertise from that of other service providers or covering a broad topic at a high level (e.g. small business tax deductions) that is supported by other content, such as individual blogs, which are dedicated to individual business tax deductions.
Supporting content. As its name suggests, supporting content is a series of blogs that support the higher purpose of a pillar page or post. All supporting content should link to the pillar content with a long-term goal of having several links pointing in that direction. This makes the pillar content a content hub and helps with SEO since Google will recognize the importance of a page with several inbound links.
So now that we understand two important kinds of blog content, our goal is to create strong pillar content that maximizes lead generation opportunities. (In another post, I will cover how to create an effective industry or service line page as productive pillar content. Right now, let’s stay focused on blogging).
So let’s start auditing your website’s existing content with the following prompts:
Are any blog posts outdated? Should they be retired or rewritten to stay relevant?
Can any existing blog posts serve as pillar content for my <name the industry or service line your custom GPT is dedicated to>?
If so, does it need to be edited or updated? How?
What other existing blogs, if any, can serve as strong supporting content and how would you recommend the blog posts link to each other?
Each accounting firm will get a different response from these prompts and will need to consider different steps to forge a strong content marketing strategy from the GPT’s output. Some firms may have blogs the custom GPT believes are redeeming enough to serve as pillar or supporting content. Other firms – not so much.
One tip: When prompting your custom GPT to recommend edits to existing content or generate new blog copy, ask the GPT to rely on the uploaded training materials to shape its outputs. Although you have already done this in the Instructions section, it’s not a bad idea to emphasize this until you feel confident the GPT is doing this on its own.
Should I Use the GPT-generated Output As My Pillar Post?
Regardless of whether there is acceptable pillar content somewhere within your existing blog posts, eventually you will want to ask the GPT to generate new blog copy. Last fall, there was speculation that the copywriting game might be up for human writers who would not be able to compete with AI-generated content. In more recent months, Google has started beating its chest about penalizing AI-generated content in its rankings.
Presumably Google means raw, unedited AI content. Its proclamation could demonstrate that
companies are, in fact, posting such content on their websites
it’s creating a poor user experience.
It is possible we have gotten over the first heady days of seeing what GPTs can generate while simultaneously recognizing that branding and user experience remain, as they always have been, paramount to the value of good copywriting.
So, yes, of course use the timesaving GPT-generated draft outputs. But recognize the copy is ONLY a draft and be sure to edit the content sufficiently so it doesn’t follow a predictable AI-generated format to arouse Google’s suspicion. The training materials you uploaded to the GPT should help shape the output but, in any case, I also have yet to find a single piece of AI-generated content that is ready to publish in its raw form.
Your custom GPT can be thought of as most helpful in
identifying pillar and supporting content
suggesting topics
drafting copy based on your brand
But high-quality editing remains critical!
Can the GPT Suggest Linking Strategies on My Accounting Firm’s Website to Improve SEO?
Yes. I’ve asked my own custom GPT to recommend linking strategies between related blog posts to further enrich my readers’ experience.
Of course, whatever internal linking you develop must create a natural flow of understanding between posts. It’s not enough simply to connect posts with similar keywords or phrases. A reader should recognize the logic in clicking from one piece of content to another or risk creating a jarring experience that sends your reader elsewhere.
Asking the GPT to recommend links between blogs is especially helpful to improve user experience and create an SEO win if your blogs are not currently interlinked at all. Although Google doesn’t recommend any specific number of links from a single blog post to others on a site, there should be opportunities to create several links since presumably most of your body of blog content is related to the same industry or service line.
As part of this strategy, of course, build as many naturally flowing links as possible back to your pillar content from all supporting content.
Getting Started with Custom GPTs for Accounting Firms: A Wrap
This post represents a quick overview of how to create a custom GPT for your accounting firm that can help you build a well-organized content strategy that improves user experience and SEO. This post barely scratches the surface of all that is possible. But it does suggest time-saving opportunities for experimentation since each firm has its own existing content and goals for newly produced content.
I’ll return in a future post to further detail how to use pillar and supporting content to maximize lead generation.
In the meantime, go ahead and create your custom GPT and see what you can do.
Joe Kovacs, APR is founder and managing director of Kovacs Communications, a consultancy that serves small to mid-sized accounting firms with strategic lead generation and marketing solutions that drive growth. Joe has 15+ years of in-house marketing and business development leadership experience at two Top 225 firms in the Washington, DC metropolitan region. Connect with us on LinkedIn or via email. Or schedule a complimentary consultation.