Turning a brochure site into a lead engine for an accountancy firm

An accountancy firm outside Dublin came to us with a site that was quietly costing them work. It looked fine from a distance — a tidy brochure built years ago — but it did three things badly, and all three mattered.

It was slow. Nine seconds to load on a phone, because the homepage carried a full-screen background video nobody had asked for. It was invisible to search: the whole site was a handful of pages with no service detail, so it ranked for almost nothing. And it gave a visitor no obvious next step — no clear way to actually get in touch beyond an email address in the footer.

The partners knew referrals were strong but new enquiries from the web were "basically zero." They were not wrong. The site was a business card that happened to be online, not something that brought work in.

We did not start with a redesign. We started with the questions people were actually typing into Google, and built the site around answering them.

Structure first. Instead of one thin "Services" page, we built a proper page for each service — company accounts, tax returns, payroll, business advisory — each written to answer the real questions a small-business owner asks before picking an accountant. That gave search engines something to rank and visitors a reason to trust the firm before ever making contact.

Rebuilt lean. We moved them onto a lightweight WordPress build with a clean theme, properly sized images, page caching, and a CDN. The background video went. The firm's team kept full control — they can edit any page, add a team member, or publish an article without calling us.

One clear next step. Every page ends the same way: a short "book a free 20-minute call" form that drops straight into their inbox and their calendar. No maze, no ten-field form — name, email, and what you need help with.

Made it measurable. We wired up analytics and call tracking so, for the first time, the firm could see exactly where enquiries came from and which services people actually wanted.

The rebuilt site went live in seven weeks. Within three months the picture had completely changed.

Organic traffic more than tripled as the new service pages started ranking for the terms local business owners search. The site went from effectively zero web enquiries to a steady stream — enough that the firm brought on an extra staff member to keep up. Load time dropped from nine seconds to just over one, and the bounce rate on mobile fell by more than half.

None of it required magic. It required treating the website as a tool that has a job — bring in qualified enquiries — and building every decision around that job instead of around how the homepage looked.