Accountants & bookkeepers
Every firm in town says the same six things on its website.
Proactive. Friendly. More than just numbers. If the copy would still be true with a competitor's logo on it, it is not doing any work.
Werehouse Media works with UK accountancy practices and bookkeepers on search visibility, website design and the client-facing systems behind the practice. The demand in this sector sits firmly on the search side: UK volume for seo for accountants runs several times that for web design for accountants, and both terms carry low difficulty, which makes accountancy one of the more winnable professional verticals measured. Most engagements start with a £495 audit rather than a rebuild. The website's job in this sector is differentiation and qualification rather than credibility, because every firm already looks credible and every firm says the same things; published fees, named specialisms and a clear statement of who the practice is not for do more than any redesign. Behind it, the systems work concentrates on client onboarding, anti-money-laundering checks, engagement letters, records chasing and bookkeeping automation, with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax having sharply increased the volume of routine client contact a practice has to handle. Websites from £995 and £1,495 upwards, redesigns from £1,495, search from £695 a month, process audit £495, bespoke builds from £4,500.
The search problem
One of the softest professional verticals measured, and it is not close.
Accountancy produced some of the lowest difficulty scores of any professional sector in this research, on both the search term and the web term, with meaningful volume behind them. For a practice willing to do fairly ordinary things properly, this is an open goal that has been open for years.
The reason it stays open is that accountancy marketing is dominated by two things that do not work: template websites sold by sector-specialist suppliers, which produce a hundred near-identical sites in a hundred towns, and content syndication, where the same tax-update article appears on four hundred firms' sites the same week. Google is extremely good at recognising both.
What works instead
- A page for each service, and each client type. Limited company accounts, self assessment, VAT, payroll, bookkeeping, R&D claims and business advisory are distinct searches. So are "accountant for contractors", "accountant for landlords", "accountant for e-commerce" and "accountant for restaurants", and the client-type pages usually convert better than the service pages, because the visitor recognises themselves.
- Fees published, or at least anchored. The commonest objection in this sector and the highest-return change available. A monthly figure for a limited company with a stated turnover band and a list of what is included beats "contact us for a bespoke quote" every time, because the visitor is comparing three firms and will pick the one that respected their time.
- Original content, not syndicated updates. One properly written answer to a question your actual clients ask is worth more than a year of the tax-update feed every other firm publishes. It is also the only kind of content AI search will cite.
- Local terms and specialism terms together. "accountant in [town]" is winnable and low volume; "accountant for [sector]" is national and frequently softer than it looks.
- The Google Business Profile, which for local accountancy searches carries more weight than the website and is neglected by most practices.
The website
The website's job is qualification, not credibility.
Unusually for a professional sector, credibility is not the problem. A prospective client assumes a qualified accountant is competent. What they cannot tell is whether this particular firm is right for them, and almost no accountancy website helps them work it out.
Say who you are not for
The single most effective change available. A practice that says plainly it works with owner-managed limited companies turning over £250,000 to £3 million, and does not take personal tax returns as standalone work, will get fewer enquiries and convert far more of them. Every hour spent quoting for work you were never going to take is an hour off the fee-earning day, and a website is the cheapest possible filter.
Say what it costs
Not to the penny, and not for complex work. A band, what is in it, what pushes it up, and what happens at the first meeting. Practices resist this and then spend three hours a week on introductory calls that end at the price.
Say who does the work
Named people with real backgrounds, and honesty about who a client will actually deal with day to day. "You will be looked after by our team" is what every site says and tells nobody anything.
And make the practical things work
- Onboarding that starts on the website rather than with a phone call in three days' time.
- A client login route that is obvious, because existing clients are a large share of site traffic and they are looking for the portal, not the blog.
- Deadline content that is genuinely useful and genuinely yours.
- Fast, accessible pages. Accountancy sites are frequently bloated by a portal widget, a chat tool and three trackers, none of which earn their weight.
The systems behind it
Onboarding, records chasing and the compliance treadmill.
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has changed the shape of the workload in this sector. A practice that previously spoke to a self assessment client once a year now has a quarterly cadence with them, and the volume of routine, low-value client contact has risen sharply. That is an automation problem before it is a staffing one.
Client onboarding, end to end
Enquiry, proposal, engagement letter, anti-money-laundering identity checks, authorisation with HMRC, software setup, records requested, and the client told what happens next. In most practices this is a sequence of manual steps across four systems that takes a fortnight of calendar time and about two hours of somebody's attention. Built properly, it is a form and a series of triggers, and the two hours go back to fee earning. Client onboarding automation is consistently the highest-value single project in an accountancy practice.
Records chasing
The most-hated recurring job in the profession, and the most obviously automatable. Chased on a schedule, escalating politely, stopping the moment records arrive, with a dashboard showing who is outstanding rather than a partner asking in a meeting. Quarterly filing has made this materially more valuable than it was two years ago.
Bookkeeping automation and the rest
- Invoice and receipt capture read and coded rather than typed, feeding straight into the ledger.
- Deadline and filing reminders driven by the practice's own data rather than a manual diary.
- A client portal for documents and approvals, which removes a large share of inbound email and is often cheaper than the per-seat cost of the product being used for it.
- Proposal and fee quoting generated from a short form rather than assembled in Word.
- Practice reporting covering work in progress, recovery and deadlines at risk, assembled automatically instead of on the last Sunday of the month.
Process audit £495, single automations from £650, connected systems from £1,950, bespoke builds from £4,500. Where a mainstream practice management product already does it, the audit will say so and you will have spent £495 to avoid spending far more. See business automation and bespoke software.
Pricing
Published, like everything else.
The same published prices as everywhere else on this site. Quoted in writing before anything starts, fixed, and never adjusted because of the sector on the invoice.
| What | Price | Usually right when |
|---|---|---|
| SEO audit and fix list | £495 | You already have a site and nobody finds it. Credited against a build if a rebuild turns out to be the answer. |
| Local SEO | From £695/month | You need to be found in your own town and the map pack matters. |
| Full search programme | From £995/month | Content, technical work, earned links and AI search visibility together. |
| Website build | From £995, multi-page £1,495 upwards | No site, or one that cannot be extended. |
| Website redesign | From £1,495 | A site with rankings worth protecting that has run out of road. |
| Process audit | £495 | Before any system is quoted. Credited in full against builds over £2,000. |
| Bespoke build | From £4,500 | A system with its own data model: CRM, portal, internal tool. |
| Care | From £49/month | Anything live that needs watching. Never a condition of the build. |
The incumbent specialists in most sectors publish no prices at all and put a book-a-call form where the number should be. That is the gap this practice works in, and it is the same gap on every one of these pages.
Straight answers
Common questions.
A £495 audit and fix list first, in almost every case, because the usual finding for an established practice is that the website is fine and nothing on it targets anything anyone searches. Ongoing local search work runs from £695 a month, and the full programme covering content, technical work, earned links and AI search visibility is from £995 a month. No minimum term and 30 days' notice. If the practice is booked out and turning work away, the honest answer is to spend nothing here and look at the systems instead.
Yes, with bands rather than a single number. The objection is always that clients differ, which is true and does not matter: the visitor is not looking for their exact fee, they are looking for evidence that they are in roughly the right place. A monthly figure for a limited company in a stated turnover band, what is included, and what pushes it up, will lose you the enquiries that were only ever going to end at the price and win you the ones that were comparing you against a firm that would not say.
It is a reasonable starting point and a poor destination. The specialist suppliers in this sector produce competent, compliant sites quickly, and for a new practice that is genuinely good value. The problem arrives later: several hundred near-identical sites carrying syndicated content compete with each other for the same terms, and none of them can win because there is nothing distinguishing them. If the site was built from a template and the practice now wants to be found, the first job is original content and specific positioning, not necessarily a rebuild.
It has changed the systems side considerably. A quarterly cadence with clients who were previously annual means far more routine contact, more records chasing, and more low-value administrative work per client at the same fee. Practices are absorbing that with overtime or with hires, and a good deal of it is automatable: records chasing, deadline reminders, document capture and client communication in particular. That is where the £495 process audit tends to pay for itself fastest in this sector.
Yes, and frequently the honest answer is that the practice management software already includes one and it should be turned on properly instead. Where a bespoke portal earns its cost is when per-seat licensing is disproportionate, when the existing portal cannot be connected to something the practice depends on, or when clients genuinely will not use the one that exists. Bespoke builds start from £4,500 after the audit.
Yes, and the sensible order is usually the reverse of what people expect: the Google Business Profile and two or three properly written pages first, which costs very little, and the systems second. A £995 site done properly plus a correctly configured profile will do more for a sole practitioner than a £4,000 build, and I would rather say that than sell the bigger thing.
Worth reading next
Written for owners, not for marketers.
Next step
What is the most-hated job in the practice?
It is usually records chasing, and it is usually the cheapest thing on this page to fix. Tell me what it is and I will tell you whether it is worth automating, including when it is not.