Website content checklist for professional firms

1. The first screen says for whom, which problems, and what makes the firm the one to call — “accounting and advisory for owner-run manufacturers with fifty to five hundred people” — with the consultation offer beside it. 2. A page per service, titled in the buyer’s words — “our accounts do not tell us which product makes money” — with the problem, what the firm does about it, what the client gets, roughly how long, what decides the fee, who does it, and a case. 3. A page per sector served, saying what the firm does for that sector, to which rules and standards, with the clients named where permitted. 4. A defined first step on every service page — the diagnostic, the review, the first meeting — described with what the buyer gets from it and how to book it.

Check 2 is where most firm sites fail: a list of disciplines in the profession’s vocabulary tells the buyer nothing about whether the firm understands their problem.

5. The partners and senior people by name, with a photograph taken this decade, their background, what they specialise in, the clients and problems they have handled, and a line in their own voice on what they believe about their work. 6. Credentials and memberships: the qualifications, the professional body registrations, the empanelments and accreditations, dated and verifiable. 7. Client proof: logos where permitted, three to five case studies written as situation, decision and outcome, with names where possible and precise descriptions where not, and reviews on the Google profile linked from the site. 8. The firm’s story in a paragraph: when founded, by whom, why, and what it has become — because buyers of professional services hire a history as much as a capability.

Buyers of professional services are hiring people. A site without names and faces asks them to trust a logo, and they will not.

9. The questions clients ask before engaging, answered on the site by a named partner, one per page, with the answer first: what does this cost, how long does it take, do we need it, what goes wrong. 10. A point of view from each partner on their field — a belief a competitor could disagree with — published under their name with a reviewed-on date and updated when the rules change. 11. Resources buyers keep: a checklist, a calculator, a guide to a process, a template — downloadable without a form, because the buyer who gets it remembers who gave it.

Insight is the firm’s judgement made visible before the buyer pays for it. It is also what search engines and AI assistants cite, and what a referrer forwards.

12. The consultation offer on every page — “book a thirty-minute conversation with a partner about your problem” — with a form of three fields, a date picker where possible, a tappable number and an email that reaches a person. 13. The promise under it: who will respond, within how long, and what the conversation covers, kept by a partner or a senior person within the working day, with a written note after. 14. The basics: the site fast on a phone, titled by problem and service in the buyer’s words, indexed, the Google Business Profile complete with the same identity, schema for the organisation and the people, call tracking and form sources into the CRM so enquiries by source are counted.

A professional firm’s site converts when a partner answers. Check 13 is not a web decision; it is a decision about how the firm treats an enquiry.

The mistakes: services in the profession’s vocabulary; no partner names; stock photographs of handshakes; “we are a leading firm”; no case studies because clients are confidential — when situations can be described; no insight, or insight written by a marketer; a “contact us” form where a defined consultation should be; and enquiries answered by an assistant three days later. A safeguard: read the site as a business owner with the problem you serve, and ask whether you can tell who you would be working with and what they think.

A good professional-firm site names the problems it solves in the buyer’s words, shows the people who solve them and what they believe, proves it with cases and credentials, and gets the buyer a partner within the day. This is the website content work we do with professional firms — the niche and the service pages from your engagements, the partner profiles and points of view drawn out in interviews, the case studies with permissions, the question pages, the consultation path into your CRM, and the search setup — within your profession’s rules, and the free audit starts with two clients and what they looked for.