What should an accountant's or law firm's website have on it?

What a prospective client is actually doing

Somebody needs an accountant. They have two or three names — a recommendation, a search result, someone they saw mentioned. They are not evaluating your expertise, because they cannot. They have no way to judge whether your tax knowledge is better than the firm down the road.

So they check the things they can judge:

• Do you handle situations like mine, said plainly?
• Roughly what does this cost?
• Who would I actually be dealing with?
• Do you seem like you would reply?

Every one of those is answerable on a website, and most professional firms answer none of them.

Say what you do, not what you are

The most common failure is describing services in professional language rather than in the client's situation.

"Corporate restructuring advisory" is what you call it. "I want to bring my brother into the business" is what the client is thinking. "Statutory compliance services" is a category. "I have had a letter I do not understand" is a person.

You do not have to abandon precision — the client will hear the technical term at the first meeting and that is fine. But the page has to be findable and readable by somebody using their own words, because those are the words being typed into a search box. A services list written entirely in professional vocabulary is invisible to exactly the people looking for it.

This is also the whole of local SEO for a firm: pages that answer specific situations rather than one page listing practice areas. See what is local SEO.

The pricing question

Professional firms resist publishing prices harder than any other sector, and the objections are real: work varies, scope is unclear, an anchor number could undercut a complex matter.

All true, and the refusal still costs more than it saves.

Somebody comparing three firms and finding no indication of price from any of them will pick on some other basis. Somebody finding a range from one of them has just been given a reason to start there — not because it was cheapest, but because it was the only firm that treated them like an adult.

You do not have to publish a fee schedule. You have to remove the fear. "Straightforward company accounts typically start from X." "A first consultation is free and lasts half an hour." "Most matters of this type fall between X and Y, and we tell you before we start." Each of those is honest, none commits you, and all of them beat silence. The full argument is in should I put prices on my website.

Name the people

Professional services are bought on trust in individuals. The firm is a wrapper; the relationship is with a person.

So the team page is not a formality — it is frequently the most-read page on a professional firm's site. It should have real photographs of real people, a sentence about what each one actually handles, and enough character that a client can imagine the conversation.

The version that fails is a page of identical grey headshots with job titles and nothing else. That communicates an institution, and almost nobody chooses an accountant because they wanted to deal with an institution.

The two operational details

Enquiries have to arrive somewhere reliable. A silently broken contact form costs a professional firm more than most businesses, because a single missed enquiry can be a multi-year client. Test yours monthly — see my contact form stopped working.

Respond fast, and say you will. Professional enquiries are often made in a state of mild anxiety — a deadline, a letter, a dispute. The firm that replies within the hour wins a disproportionate share of that work, and simply stating your response time on the page does some of that work for you.

What this looks like in Helm

Two things matter for a firm specifically.

Forms are part of every subscription rather than an upsell. Enquiries land in a proper inbox in your dashboard with read and spam handling, not only in an email that might be filtered — so "did anything come in this week" is a page rather than a hope. The person enquiring gets an automatic reply carrying your firm's branding: your logo, your colours, your name as the sender. For a client who has just described a problem they are worried about, an immediate acknowledgement that looks like it came from you rather than from a form tool is worth more than it sounds.

Everything on the page is yours to change. Fees move, people join and leave, and services get added. On a firm's website those changes are almost always the ones deferred longest, because they mean asking somebody — which is how a partner who left in 2023 is still on the team page. Making them a two-minute edit is unglamorous and is most of what keeps a professional site credible.

The short version

Write in your clients' words, not your profession's. Publish something about price, even a range. Put real people on the page. Then make sure enquiries actually reach you and that you can keep the whole thing current — because a firm's website is judged on how attended it looks, and attended is a maintenance property rather than a design one.