A website for accounting firms and tax consultants: how to attract companies, not one-off filings

In Bulgaria the average accounting firm's website reads like a page from a statutory handbook. Services listed in the language of the law, a phone number, an address and a promise of an "individual approach". A site like that mostly attracts one-off clients hunting for the lowest price on a tax return or a company registration. A business looking for a permanent accountant, tax or financial consultant looks at different things. It wants to see who you already work for and which person will be answering its questions. It also wants to know how the handover from the previous accountant goes without anything getting lost on the way. A website that answers those questions brings monthly contracts instead of one-off filings.

Why does your website fill the inbox with one-off requests?

Open your site and read the first screen as a stranger would. If it says "accounting services, payroll, annual closing, tax consultations", you are telling the visitor you do everything for everyone. And whoever does everything for everyone gets inquiries from everyone.

"Hello, how much do you charge for an annual tax return for an individual? I also have two freelance contracts."

Let's be blunt, there is nothing wrong with that inquiry. One-off work is still work and still gets paid. The problem is the proportion. One monthly contract with a company is worth dozens of tax returns, and the hours eaten by small requests never come back. When the site doesn't say who you are for, it reads as "for whoever pays least", because price is the only criterion you have left the visitor.

How does a company choose a new accounting firm?

Changing accountants is one of those decisions that gets postponed for years. The manager who has finally reached that point has usually been mulling it over for months (the fear of losing a document or a deadline during the handover weighs more than the irritation), so when he at last sits down to search, he verifies more than he browses. He googles the firm and the person behind it, and looks at what businesses you work with and whether any resemble his. He also tries to judge something else, whether half a year in you will still pick up the phone the way you did at the first meeting.

This is where the website does a job that a Facebook profile and a Google Maps listing cannot. It is the only place where you have two full minutes of a stranger's attention before he has spoken to you. In those two minutes he needs to learn who is behind the firm and what companies you serve. The same two minutes should also show the first steps of the handover, from the initial conversation to the transferred files.

How do you show expertise without a catalogue of services?

Specialization sells better than listing everything. "We work with online merchants and courier companies" lands harder than a list of twenty services, because a company recognizes itself in it. If you have several strong sectors, give them their own rows or their own pages, with the problems you solve there. The OSS regime and EU sales for the shops, construction sites and VAT for the builders, per-diems and social security for the transport firms. That alone changes the tone of the inquiries.

"We run an online store, around 900 orders a month, selling into Romania too. How do you handle the OSS regime and what would we pay monthly?"

The second thing is the person. Companies sign a contract with a human, so an "About" page with a real name, a photo and two sentences of biography does more work than the clichéd calculator photos. The manager will google you anyway, and it helps when the person he finds there and the person on the site are one and the same.

The third thing is the content. Tax news is not material for a firm's website. The change in the thresholds is published by the revenue agency and retold by every outlet the same day. What a company needs is a translation into its own numbers. Write what the change means for a business with five insured employees and what its owner should do in December. A text like that gets searched and cited for months.

How many accounting prices should you show?

Accounting prices depend on document volume, staff count, VAT status and whether the company trades in the EU. An exact figure therefore cannot sit on the site. A range, however, can and should. A package for micro companies, a package for VAT-registered merchants, a monthly guide figure for each and a list of what is included. Nothing more is needed: a company sees itself in one of them.

If there are no prices at all, a large share of managers simply never write. They assume it will be expensive, or they compare you with the firm whose site does show numbers, and you are not part of that comparison.

What drives companies away from the first screen?

• Clichéd photos — a calculator, a stack of binders, a woman with glasses at a monitor. A manager has seen them a thousand times and his brain skips them together with the text around them.
• "Free consultation" as the only call to action — for companies it is a signal that your time costs nothing.
• A missing team and address — an accounting firm asks for access to a company's entire financial life, and anonymity does not pass here.
• Legal-code language — the place of "art. 50 of PITA" is in the return itself. On the site it means nothing to the person paying.

"We are looking for a firm to take over a company of eight from January. Our current accountant is retiring."

An inquiry like this one only has somewhere to come from when the site shows a person, sectors, packages and a handover. None of those four takes a redesign. It takes deciding what you want to say.

How much does an accounting firm website cost?

A firm's website is small by volume, usually five to seven pages. The market for it in Bulgaria is wide, from a few hundred euros for a template build to well past 3,000 € at an agency. With me such a site runs between 800 and 2,500 € depending on scope, and I have broken down what the price depends on in a separate article on cost. The build itself is two to three weeks. The slow part with a firm is different: the packages and sector pages take longer to formulate than the design takes to make.

One caveat before you write. If your firm is full and you take clients by referral only, a new website is an expense without a return, and the more sensible move is simply to tidy up the contact page.

Where does a site like this start?

I build websites in Sofia, each one from scratch, no templates. With a firm the work starts from the content, the packages and sectors first, then the handover page, the visuals last. What that looks like in practice you can see in my projects, and what a build includes on the services page.

Send me the address of your current site through the contact page. I will send back a short list of what is blocking the monthly contracts and what is already doing its job.