Why “we work with all businesses” costs your practice clients

“We work with businesses of all shapes and sizes.” It is on an enormous number of accountancy websites, it is meant to sound welcoming, and it is one of the most expensive sentences a practice can write.

The logic behind it is sound enough: exclude nobody, and you can win anybody. What actually happens is the opposite. A message aimed at everyone is recognised by nobody, and niching an accountancy practice turns out to be the thing that makes the phone ring with the right people on the other end.

Why the general message fails

Put yourself in the chair of a contractor looking for an accountant. They have specific worries: IR35, what to do about a limited company, whether they are paying themselves the wrong way. They open two websites.

The first says it provides accountancy and tax services to businesses of all sizes across the South West. The second says it works with contractors and freelancers, and the homepage mentions IR35 in the first paragraph.

Both practices can do the work. Both are probably equally competent. Only one of them has demonstrated that they have seen this exact situation before, which is the only thing the contractor actually wants to know. The general message is not neutral, it is a signal of inexperience with their particular problem.

What it costs you, concretely

• Search.“Accountant Exeter” is brutally competitive and dominated by the big directories. “Accountant for contractors Devon” is winnable, and the person searching it has told you exactly what they need. Generic positioning locks you out of the terms you could actually rank for.
• Referrals. A solicitor cannot refer you if they do not know when to think of you. Specificity is what makes a practice memorable to the people best placed to send you work.
• Fees. Generalists get compared on price because there is nothing else to compare. Specialists get compared on fit, and fit supports a higher fee.
• Your time. A general site attracts general enquiries, which means calls with people who were never going to be a fit. You pay for that in hours you cannot bill.
• Efficiency. Twenty clients in one sector is a fundamentally more profitable practice than twenty clients in twenty sectors. You learn the patterns once and apply them repeatedly.

The objection, taken seriously

The fear is always the same: if we say we specialise in X, we will lose the clients who are not X.

You will not, and it is worth being precise about why. Nothing on your website prevents anyone from hiring you. A restaurant owner who lands on a site aimed at hospitality businesses does not leave because they noticed you also mention retail somewhere. The website is a magnet, not a gate. In practice, most specialised firms find that general work keeps arriving anyway through referrals, while the specialised work arrives through search and through being memorable.

The real risk runs the other way. Staying general does not keep options open, it keeps you invisible in all of them at once.

How to choose without gambling the practice

You do not need to reinvent anything. Look at what you already have.

Where is the money? List your top twenty clients by fee. Patterns usually appear immediately, and they are often not the ones you would have guessed.

What do you enjoy? The clients whose calls you do not mind taking. This matters more than it sounds, because a niche you resent is one you will abandon.

What can you say that others cannot?Specific knowledge of a sector's tax quirks, its software, its seasonality, its margins. If you can write three genuinely useful paragraphs about a sector's finances that a generalist could not, that is a niche.

Is there enough of it nearby? A niche of four businesses in Devon is a hobby. Check the size before committing.

What changes on the website

Less than people expect, and it is mostly the homepage. The headline names the client rather than the service. The services page speaks in their language, not in the language of statutory filings. You add a page or two for the specific searches that niche generates. And the case studies feature them.

You do not have to delete anything. A “we also work with” section handles the rest of your book perfectly well. The point is that the first thing a visitor sees is aimed at somebody in particular.

This is the same principle as building a site that filters rather than broadcasts, which we go into in your accountancy website is a brochure, it should be a filter.

Common questions

Can we have more than one niche? Two, at a push, with a clear route for each. Three is just being general with extra steps.

What if we choose wrong? You change it. This is website copy, not a rebrand or a legal restructure. Most practices that reposition do it again within a couple of years as they learn what works.

Does this mean turning away work now? No. It changes what arrives over the next year, not what you accept tomorrow. If you have spare capacity, take everything and let the positioning shift the mix gradually.

Part of our guide to website design for accountants. If you know who you want and your website does not say so, tell us who they are and we will build the site that speaks to them.