What belongs on an accountancy services page, and what to cut

The services page is where most accountancy websites go quietly wrong. It is usually a list: annual accounts, corporation tax, self assessment, VAT, payroll, bookkeeping, company secretarial. Accurate, complete, and almost entirely useless to the person reading it.

The problem is that the list is organised around your compliance obligations rather than the client's situation, and nobody wakes up wanting company secretarial services. Getting accountancy website content right is mostly a matter of reorganising what you already have around what people actually came to find out.

What people are really asking

Behind every visit to a services page is one of four questions:

• Do you do the specific thing I need?
• Have you done it for someone like me?
• What will it cost, roughly?
• What happens if I get in touch?

A list of service names answers the first, badly, and ignores the other three entirely. Everything below is about fixing that.

Give the services that matter their own pages

One page listing eight services will rank for none of them. Eight pages, one per service, each properly written, can each rank for their own search. That is the mechanical argument.

The practical argument is stronger: somebody searching “VAT registration help Exeter” wants a page about VAT registration, not a page where VAT is the fourth bullet. Sending them to a hub page and making them hunt is how you lose someone who was ready.

You do not need a page for everything. Three or four properly built pages for the services you actually want more of will beat eight thin ones. If a service is not something you want to sell more of, a line on the hub page is enough.

What belongs on each service page

Who it is for, first.“For limited company directors who…” The visitor should know within a sentence whether they are in the right place.

The problem in their words.Not “statutory accounts preparation” but “you need accounts filed at Companies House and a corporation tax return, and you would rather not think about either.”

What you actually do. Specific, not a mission statement. What lands in their inbox, what you need from them, how often you speak.

What it costs, or what drives it. A starting figure or a range. This is the item most often left out and the one most often wanted, and the arguments both ways are set out in should accountants publish their fees online.

What happens next. The first step, described plainly, and small enough that clicking it does not feel like a commitment.

Two or three questions people actually ask. Real ones from real calls. These feed structured data and they are what AI assistants quote when someone asks a question in your area.

What to cut

• The adjective stack.Proactive, professional, experienced, friendly, reliable. Every competitor says these, so they carry no information. If a sentence would be equally true on any other practice's site, it is doing nothing.
• Explanations of what the tax is. Nobody arriving on your VAT page needs VAT explained. They need to know whether you will handle theirs.
• Software logos with no context. A row of badges tells people nothing. What matters is what using that software means for them, which is worth a page of its own.
• Services you do not want. Listing everything you are technically capable of invites the enquiries you least enjoy. The list is a filter whether you intend it to be or not.
• “Contact us for a bespoke quote” as the only answer. It is what everyone says, and it moves the visitor no closer to deciding.

A structure that works

A hub page at /services that frames who you serve and links to the individual pages, then a page per service that matters. The hub is for orientation, the service pages do the ranking and the converting.

Keep the hub short. Its job is to route people, not to be a second homepage. If someone lands there and can tell in ten seconds which page they want, it has worked.

Common questions

How long should a service page be? Long enough to answer the four questions and no longer. That is usually 600 to 900 words. Length for its own sake helps nothing.

Will splitting the page hurt our rankings? The opposite, provided each page covers genuinely different ground. What hurts is several near-identical pages competing with each other, which is why they need to be different services rather than reworded versions of one.

Do we need a page for every town we serve? No, and it is a common way to waste effort. Thin near-duplicate location pages have been discounted for years. One strong regional page is worth more, which is why we consolidated ours.

Part of our guide to website design for accountants. If you are not sure which of your services pages are pulling their weight, a free audit will tell you.