Accounting firms
Which digital problem is costing your accounting firm, and what fixes it
The short answer
Accounting firms usually have one of three digital problems, and each needs a different fix. Strangers don't enquire, which is a positioning and structure problem on the marketing site. Clients find working with you harder than it should be, which is an interface problem. Or the work itself is still manual, the slowest of the three to fix.
Traffic's fine, the phone doesn't ring, and nobody can tell you why. That's where most firms start, and it's also where the money usually goes to the wrong thing. Three problems feel identical from inside a firm, and none of them shares a fix with the others. Sorting out which one you have is what this page is for.
What we do for accounting firms
Product strategy
For firms productising a service, building a portal or automating a manual process: what to build first, what to leave out, what it must prove.
Website design & development
Accounting firm websites built around how clients actually choose a firm, not around a layout the product decided before anyone met you.
Three problems that all look like a website problem
The first is acquisition. People find you, and then nothing happens. No enquiry, no call, and no way of knowing which part of the page lost them. That's a framing and structure problem, and it lives on the marketing site.
The second is what happens after the sale. The clients are signed, and working with you costs them more effort than it should. You can hear it in season, when a large share of what your staff do is administering clients rather than doing their accounts. That's an interface problem, and the marketing site has nothing to do with it.
The third is delivery. However the work gets done was designed for a firm smaller than the one you now run, and nobody has revisited it since. That one is a strategy question before it's a build, and it's the most expensive of the three to answer wrongly.
Most firms have two of these at once. The order you take them in should come from which one is costing you this year, not from which one is the more interesting conversation.
How to tell which one you have
Look at where people stop, not where they arrive. If enquiry volume is low against the traffic you get, it's acquisition. If enquiries are steady but too many of them are poor fits, it's still acquisition, except the problem is qualification rather than volume, and more traffic makes it worse.
If enquiries and fit are both fine and your team is drowning in season, it's one of the other two. Ask whether the effort goes into chasing clients or into doing the work. Chasing points at the interface. The work itself being the constraint is a delivery question, and it's the one that justifies building software.
Two things make that reading honest. Count enquiries rather than sessions, and count them across a full year, because accounting demand is seasonal enough that a single quarter tells you whatever you already believed. Then pull your last twelve months of new clients and write down where each one actually came from. If most of them arrived by referral, more traffic isn't your constraint, and that changes which of the three is worth money this year.
This sounds obvious written down. It gets skipped constantly, because a redesign is a satisfying thing to buy and a diagnosis isn't.
Where each one gets answered
If it's acquisition, the work is the marketing site, and our page on website design for accounting firms is the one to read next. It goes through what a project like that involves, which of the decisions are structural rather than visual, and the conduct-code constraint on what a firm can put in writing about itself. It starts from whether you need custom work at all.
If it's delivery, that's our product strategy page for accounting firms. It's the work that happens before a build rather than inside one: which process to point at, how small the first thing you ship should be, and what to do if the honest answer turns out to be building nothing.
The middle one is everything a client touches once they've signed. The way you ask for documents, the forms, whatever portal you already run. That's our UX and interface design page for accounting firms. It's a different piece of work from the marketing site with a different budget, and the two are worth deciding between rather than assuming the site is where the money goes.
What we'd talk you out of
A page per town. Near-identical pages that differ only by place name get treated as doorway pages, they rarely rank, and they convert no better than one honest page about where you work.
A rebrand when the problem is content, because new colours don't make a service page specific. A chatbot standing in for information that belongs on the page, because a visitor who has to interrogate a machine to find out whether you handle their situation has already been failed by the page. And more ad spend pointed at a page that doesn't convert, which is the most expensive way there is to find out the page doesn't convert.
Related work
Further reading
Common questions
The one costing you this year, which is usually the one your staff raise rather than the one that came up in a partner meeting. Acquisition work pays back slowly and keeps paying. Interface work pays back inside a single season and is smaller than most firms expect. Delivery work is the biggest commitment of the three, and it's the one to take last unless it's plainly what's capping the firm.
Sometimes, if they need different people from your side. The marketing site and the client-facing surfaces can run in parallel, because the person who can settle questions about one isn't usually the person who can settle questions about the other. What doesn't work is running anything alongside a delivery change, since that one needs the same people from start to finish and it's the one that stalls.
Well clear of your deadlines. Work that needs decisions from the firm doesn't slow down in season, it stops, and it comes back months later with half of those decisions to make again. In practice that means scoping and content decisions in the quiet months, build through the following quarter, and live before the run-up starts.
We quote a fixed cost against a scope we agree first, so the number is known before work starts rather than moving as it goes. What changes it: how much content has to be created rather than restructured, whether branding is in scope, how many client-facing surfaces are involved, and whether anything has to connect to systems you already run. A scoping conversation gets you a real number rather than a range.
Usually underneath them. Marketing owns demand and messaging. This work is the structure that demand lands on: how services are organised, what a visitor can self-qualify against, and what the first step actually asks for. The two need to agree, and it works best when your marketing person is in the room for the content decisions.
The first thing to move is usually the quality of the enquiries rather than the count. Fewer people asking whether you do something you don't, more who've already worked out that they fit. Volume moves slower, and it has to be read against the same period last year rather than against last month.
Related
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