Liberty Financial

Liberty Financial are chartered accountants based at The Circle on Queen Elizabeth Street, a few minutes from Tower Bridge. They describe what they do as an outsourced finance function: company formation, day-to-day bookkeeping, and year-end accounts and corporation tax, for individuals, contractors and businesses of every size.

They are one of our longest-standing clients. Their first site was assembled on an off-the-shelf website platform, which the practice eventually outgrew. It has since been rebuilt from the ground up as a custom build, and we have looked after their search and their Google advertising ever since.

The brief

An accountant is a considered purchase. Somebody looking for one is usually comparing three or four firms, often after an existing arrangement has stopped working, and they are trying to answer two questions before they will pick up the phone: can these people handle a business like mine, and roughly what does this involve.

So the site had to do more than list services. It had to say plainly what each piece of work covers, make the practice feel like a team of named people rather than a logo, and then make starting the conversation easy enough that nobody puts it off.

Rebuilding it properly

Moving off the template was the part that made everything after it possible. On a custom build, a new page can be written for a specific thing people search for and shaped around that one job, rather than squeezed into whatever layout the platform allows. The practice is no longer paying for a platform to sit between it and its own website, and nothing on the site is limited to what a template was willing to do.

A page for the service people actually search for

Most of the demand is for one thing: bookkeeping. It has its own page, headed “Outsourced Bookkeeping for London Businesses”, which opens with what a business owner gets rather than with the firm’s history — a dedicated team, from one day a week, keeping the books current in Xero.

The enquiry form on that page asks how much support the business thinks it needs, with honest options down to “not sure yet”. That one question tells the practice the size of the job before the first call, and it gives the person filling it in permission not to know the answer. Underneath sit the three things that settle the question of credibility quickly: chartered accountants, Xero specialists, a named account manager.

Three ways to start a conversation

Some people fill in a form. Some want to speak to somebody now. The site offers a free consultation, the office line, and a WhatsApp message that goes straight to a mobile, and it treats all three as equal rather than burying two of them on a contact page.

Search and paid advertising

We have handled both since the rebuild. The point of running them together is that a paid click lands on the page written for the thing that was searched for, not on a homepage the visitor then has to navigate, and the same enquiry form is waiting wherever they arrive.

The look

Deep green, a serif for the headlines and a lot of white space, which reads as established rather than as a start-up. The team page carries the practice’s own nicknames for each other, which does more for trust than another stock photograph of a handshake.

The outcome

A site that is built to be added to. When the practice wants to go after a new kind of work, it gets a page written for that work and advertising pointed at it, instead of another line on a services list.