Look at the websites of ten accountancy firms and you’ll probably find a familiar collection of services. Accounts, tax, VAT, payroll, bookkeeping and business advice will appear in various combinations, perhaps alongside audit, corporate finance or more specialist work.
That’s hardly surprising. Accountancy firms often do provide many of the same services.
The problem starts when the websites sound the same too.
Friendly. Proactive. Approachable. Jargon-free. More than just number crunchers. A trusted partner. Tailored advice for businesses of all sizes.
None of those things are bad qualities. The difficulty is that they’re so widely claimed that they do very little to help a prospective client choose one firm over another.
A good accountancy website doesn’t need to make accountancy exciting. It needs to make choosing an accountant easier.
That means going beyond proving that you’re an accountancy firm and helping the right prospective client understand whether you’re the right accountancy firm for them.
Start with the clients you actually want
One of the hardest jobs you can give a website is asking it to appeal equally to everyone.
A firm may genuinely be capable of helping a sole trader, a £5m owner-managed business, a property investor and a medical professional. That doesn’t necessarily mean all four need equal prominence on the website.
Think about the clients the firm wants more of. Perhaps that’s established owner-managed businesses with employees. Maybe the firm has developed particularly strong expertise in construction, healthcare or ecommerce. Perhaps it wants to move away from predominantly compliance work and develop more valuable advisory relationships.
Those decisions should influence what the website talks about.
That doesn’t mean inventing a niche because somebody said niche websites rank better on Google. A good general practice is still a perfectly valid proposition. But even a general practice usually has types of client it works particularly well with, problems it solves particularly often and work it would happily do more of.
Making that clearer helps the right prospective client recognise themselves.
A website designed to appeal to everybody often gives nobody a particularly strong reason to choose you.
Stop making the service list do all the work
Most accountancy websites need a clear explanation of their services. If somebody wants help with payroll, it shouldn’t take detective work to discover whether you provide it.
The problem is expecting the names of those services to do more work than they can.
Accounts. Tax. Payroll. VAT. Bookkeeping. Advisory.
Your competitors can write exactly the same list.
The useful information sits underneath those headings.
Take business advisory as an example. What does that actually mean at your firm? Does it involve regular management accounts and conversations about performance? Cash-flow forecasting? Budgeting? Help understanding margins? Support when making investment decisions? Exit planning?
Two firms can both offer “business advisory” while delivering very different relationships.
The same applies to more traditional compliance services. What sort of businesses do you typically handle? What problems tend to bring them to you? What does your process look like? What can the client expect from the service beyond the fact that the necessary work gets completed?
Service names tell people what you sell. The explanation underneath them helps people understand what they’re actually buying.
Show people what working with you is actually like
This is where many accountancy websites become surprisingly quiet.
They’ll explain corporation tax in considerable detail but say very little about the experience of becoming a client.
Yet if you’re choosing an accountant, the relationship matters. Who will you actually deal with? Will you have a named contact? How often will you speak? Are meetings scheduled regularly or only when something needs attention? What happens if you have a question during the year? What happens when something changes in the business?
If you’re changing accountants, there’s another set of questions. How does the handover work? Will the new firm contact the old accountant? What information is needed? How disruptive is the process likely to be?
These aren’t administrative details to hide until somebody has signed an engagement letter. They’re part of what someone is choosing.
They’re also an opportunity for smaller independent firms.
A practice may not be able to compete with a national firm on scale, office count or breadth of specialist departments. It might be considerably better at giving a client continuity, access to senior people and a relationship where somebody genuinely knows their business.
If that’s true, explain it.
The way you work may be more distinctive than the services you offer.
Put the people somewhere people can actually see them
Accountancy is a people business with a peculiar habit of sometimes hiding the people.
You can visit a firm’s website, read about its combined decades of experience and commitment to personal service, then struggle to work out who actually works there.
Real people are useful evidence.
If I’m considering trusting a firm with an important part of my business, seeing the people behind it helps turn an abstract company into something more tangible. Names, photographs, roles and useful biographies can all contribute to that.
The word useful matters.
A biography doesn’t have to read like a CV, but it should tell me something relevant. What is this person particularly good at? What sort of clients do they tend to work with? What areas do they specialise in? What role will they play in the relationship?
There’s nothing wrong with mentioning that somebody enjoys cycling, travelling or walking the dog. It can make a person feel like a person. It just shouldn’t be the most informative thing the website tells me about them.
If your proposition includes personal service, the people providing that service shouldn’t feel anonymous.
Credentials should reassure, not become the personality
Professional qualifications and memberships matter.
If your firm or people are appropriately regulated, qualified or members of professional bodies such as ICAEW, ACCA or AAT, making that information visible can provide useful reassurance.
But credentials have limits.
They can demonstrate that somebody is suitably qualified. They can’t explain why a prospective client should choose one qualified accountant over another.
That’s where firms can end up relying too heavily on badges and years of experience. “Established in 1987” is evidence of longevity. It doesn’t automatically tell me what the firm is like today.
The same applies to statements such as “over 100 years of combined experience”. That may be impressive, but the useful question for the client is what that experience enables the firm to do for them.
Credentials are evidence. They’re not positioning.
A strong accountancy website uses them to support the argument rather than expecting them to be the argument.
Write about situations your clients recognise
Accountancy copy often describes the capability of the firm rather than the situation of the client.
You see sentences such as:
“We provide a comprehensive range of accountancy, taxation and business advisory services tailored to the individual requirements of our clients.”
It’s perfectly understandable. It just doesn’t give the reader much to recognise.
Compare that with the situations businesses actually find themselves in.
A company has grown quickly and the owner no longer has a clear view of cash flow. The bookkeeping is being done, but the management information isn’t useful enough to make decisions. A business is employing more people and payroll is becoming an unwanted distraction. The company has reached a size where the annual conversation with the accountant no longer feels like enough.
Those situations give context to the services.
They also help a prospective client recognise that the firm understands the problem behind the thing they’re searching for.
That doesn’t mean filling every service page with manufactured pain points or trying to frighten people into making an enquiry. It means writing about the service from the client’s side of the desk occasionally.
Good website copy should demonstrate that you understand more than the technical definition of what you sell.
Give people enough information to rule themselves in — or out
More enquiries isn’t automatically the same as a better website.
If a website generates 50 enquiries and 40 of them are completely unsuitable, somebody at the firm has acquired a new administrative job.
A useful accountancy website should help with qualification.
That might mean explaining the type of businesses you usually work with, the size or complexity of clients you’re best suited to, which services you do and don’t provide, or whether you tend to work with businesses on an ongoing basis rather than carrying out isolated pieces of work.
Not every firm needs to publish strict qualifying criteria. In many cases there aren’t any.
But if you know a particular type of enquiry is never going to be right for the firm, there is little benefit in deliberately making the website vague enough to generate more of them.
A good accountancy website should make some people more likely to contact you and help others realise that another firm may suit them better.
That’s not losing a lead. It’s avoiding the wrong one.
You don’t necessarily need to publish your prices
There’s a growing tendency for service businesses to be told that they must display prices online.
For some accountancy firms, that makes perfect sense.
If you have clearly defined monthly packages with relatively predictable scope, publishing them can make the buying process easier. A prospective client can understand roughly where they fit before speaking to you.
Other firms deal with work where the scope genuinely varies enough that a fixed price on the website would be misleading.
In that situation, you can still explain how pricing works.
Are services normally charged as a fixed monthly fee? What affects the price? What happens before a proposal is produced? Are there separate charges for additional work? Does a typical relationship include particular services as standard?
The frustrating part for a prospective client isn’t always the absence of a precise number. It’s having absolutely no idea what commercial arrangement they’re walking into.
Transparency doesn’t have to mean publishing a price list. It means removing unnecessary uncertainty.
Make the next step fit the page
“Contact us today” works.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it, and we don’t need to invent increasingly clever button copy to make a website effective.
But the next step can often be more useful when it relates to what somebody has just been reading.
A business owner looking at a page about changing accountants might respond better to Talk to us about changing accountant because it confirms that the conversation they’re about to start is the right one.
Someone reading about management accounts may be more interested in Discuss management accounts for your business.
The principle isn’t about conversion tricks. It’s simply continuity.
If somebody has spent five minutes reading about a specific problem, don’t suddenly make the next step feel like they’re contacting a generic reception desk with no idea what happens afterwards.
And when they do make contact, tell them what to expect. Will somebody call? Who? Roughly when? Is the first conversation exploratory? Do they need anything ready?
Reducing uncertainty makes contacting a professional firm easier.
Search visibility starts with having something useful to find
Accountancy SEO can quickly become an exercise in chasing phrases.
“Accountants Leeds.”
“Tax accountants Leeds.”
“Business accountants Leeds.”
Those searches can obviously matter. But the underlying website still needs useful pages for Google to return.
If management accounts are an important part of your firm’s work but they’re mentioned in one sentence halfway down a generic services page, the website isn’t giving search engines much to understand. More importantly, it isn’t giving prospective clients much either.
The same applies to sectors.
If you genuinely have strong experience working with construction companies, for example, a useful page explaining the work, common issues and relevant services can help both search visibility and the prospective client assessing whether you understand their business.
That page shouldn’t exist simply so the phrase “accountants for construction companies” can appear twelve times.
It should exist because there is something useful to say.
Good SEO and good positioning often meet in exactly the same place: being specific about what you do, who you do it for and what you know about their situation.
If an area of work is strategically important but the website barely mentions it, Google isn’t the only one struggling to understand that it’s important. Your prospective clients are too.
It still has to work properly
None of the above excuses a website that takes forever to load, falls apart on a phone or makes it difficult to find basic information.
An accountancy website should be responsive, reasonably fast, secure and accessible. Navigation should make sense. Forms should work. Pages should have sensible titles and search foundations. Important information shouldn’t be hidden behind unnecessary effects or difficult interfaces.
These things matter.
They’re just not particularly distinctive.
A website being fast, secure and usable is a little like an accountant filing things correctly. It’s important, and you’d certainly notice if it wasn’t happening, but you probably don’t want it to be the entire proposition.
Treat technical quality as the standard the website needs to meet. Then concentrate on the things that actually help somebody choose the firm.
Five questions your accountancy website should answer
You can spend a long time discussing website features, layouts and content. A simpler test is to look at the website from the perspective of somebody considering the firm for the first time.
By the time they leave, they should have a reasonable answer to five questions.
Are you for businesses like mine?
The website doesn’t need to describe every possible client, but I should be able to recognise whether businesses like mine are comfortably within your world.
Can you help with the things I actually need?
A list of services is useful, but the content underneath should give me enough information to understand the kind of help you provide.
Why might I choose you rather than another competent accountant?
Not why you’re better than every accountant in Britain. Just what is meaningfully different about your expertise, approach, people, clients or way of working.
What will it be like working with you?
Who will I deal with? How does the relationship work? What happens when I have a question? What happens if I decide to switch?
What should I do next?
Give me an obvious next step and enough information to feel comfortable taking it.
If an accountancy website answers those five questions clearly, it’s doing a large part of its job.
If it only answers “what services does this firm offer?”, it probably isn’t doing enough.
Most accountancy firms don’t have a services problem
The challenge for an established accountancy firm isn’t usually finding enough things to put on the website.
It’s deciding what deserves to be said.
The services will inevitably overlap with other firms. So will the qualifications, software and many of the claims about being friendly, proactive and approachable.
The opportunity lies in the things that are genuinely yours: the people in the firm, the clients you’re particularly good at helping, the expertise you’ve developed, the way you work and the experience somebody can expect when they become a client.
A good accountancy website makes those things easier to understand.
It doesn’t need to make accountancy exciting.
It needs to make choosing an accountant easier.
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