A replacement market behaves differently
Think about who is actually reading your website at eleven at night.
It is very rarely somebody with no accountant. It is a director whose accounts were late again, a landlord whose questions went unanswered for three weeks, a contractor who has grown past the firm that set them up, or somebody who has just discovered Making Tax Digital applies to them and their current accountant has not mentioned it.
Every one of them already has an incumbent. That changes what the website has to do in a way most accountancy marketing ignores entirely.
A first-time buyer needs to be convinced you are competent. A switcher has usually already decided you look competent — your website is a credibility document and there is a separate guide here about making it one. What stops them is the next thought: what is involved, how long will it take, and will my current accountant make it difficult.
Nothing on a typical practice website speaks to that thought. The Services page lists services. The About page lists people. The contact form asks for a message. The actual question the reader is sitting with — "how hard is this going to be?" — goes unanswered, and the tab gets closed.
The page almost nobody has
It is one page. It is not difficult to write, because you do this every month and know exactly how it goes. Here is what it needs to cover, in the order the reader worries about it.
- What you need from them to start. Usually very little: their details, their current accountant's details, and authorisation. Say the actual list, because the reader is imagining a box of paperwork.
- Professional clearance, explained in plain words. You write to the outgoing firm, ask whether there is any professional reason you should not act, and request the records and information you need. Say that you do this, not them. This is the single most reassuring sentence on the page and most practices never write it down.
- What the client personally has to do. Realistically: sign an engagement letter, sign authorisations, and answer a handful of questions. If that is the whole list, say so.
- How long it takes, honestly, and what the slow part usually is. If the outgoing firm is typically the bottleneck, say that too — it manages the expectation and it is true.
- Whether they will end up paying twice, and how you handle an overlap. This is the unspoken question underneath the whole decision.
- When in the year is sensible, and when it is not. Immediately after a year end is usually easier than three weeks before a filing deadline, and a reader who learns that from you trusts you more than one who is told any time is fine.
- What happens if the outgoing firm is unresponsive or refuses to release records, which does happen. Saying you have dealt with it before is worth more than pretending it never occurs.
A caution worth stating: write this about your own process, from what you actually do. Professional clearance practice and your obligations around it are matters for your professional body's rules, and the page should describe your process rather than make claims about the outgoing firm's duties.
Do not slag off the incumbent
The temptation on a switching page is to describe everything the current accountant is doing wrong. It backfires for a reason worth understanding.
The reader chose that firm. Attacking them is attacking the reader's judgement, and it makes the decision feel like an admission rather than an upgrade. It also reads as the behaviour of somebody who will one day talk about you the same way.
What works instead is describing the outcome rather than the villain. "You should hear from us within two working days, every time" says more than any complaint about responsiveness. "Your accounts will be done in the autumn, not the week before the deadline" lands harder than a paragraph about firms that leave things late.
Specific, checkable service promises are the differentiator in a market where every firm claims to be proactive and friendly. Pick two or three you will genuinely keep, publish them, and let the contrast do its own work.
The switcher is usually searching for themselves, not for you
The search behaviour of a switcher is different too, and it is what makes the client-type pages worth building.
They rarely type "accountant" alone. They type the thing that is going wrong: the tax situation they do not understand, the deadline they have just discovered, the structure they are not sure about. Landlords with several properties, contractors working out IR35, somebody selling a business, a restaurant with tronc, a practice with a partnership to unwind.
A page written for exactly that person does three jobs at once. It is what they searched for. It demonstrates you have met their situation before, which is the whole of the competence question for a switcher. And it filters — the people who arrive are the people you want.
Pair each of those pages with a link to the switching page, because that is the sequence the reader actually follows: recognise themselves, decide you understand the problem, then ask how hard changing would be.
What the data says about this sector
Our own accountancy figures are published in full on the accountancy industry page and they are among the most open we measured.
That is 98.8 per cent, the second highest proportion of the twenty sectors we measured, behind only trades and construction.
Those are terms a studio selling to accountants competes for, not terms your clients search, and they are published so our own market is checkable rather than asserted. The pattern that transfers is the familiar one: expensive clicks and near-zero difficulty means everybody bought ads and nobody wrote pages. Client-side accountancy search is very often the same, which is the argument for the pages described above rather than for a bigger ad budget.
What to check on your own site
- Is there a page explaining how switching works?
- Does it say that you handle professional clearance, rather than leaving the reader to imagine they do?
- Does it list what the client personally has to do, as an actual short list?
- Does it say how long it takes, and what the slow part usually is?
- Does it address paying twice?
- Does it say when in the year is sensible — and when it is not?
- Does it avoid criticising the incumbent, and give two or three checkable service promises instead?
- Is there a page for each of your two or three best client types?
- Does each of those link to the switching page?
- Does the site prove qualification and supervision? Separate guide, and it is the other half of this.
The first one does not exist on most accountancy websites in the country, and it answers the question that is actually stopping the enquiry.
