Why most practice websites produce no enquiries, what to publish instead, a 12-month plan, and how to get it done without the partner writing it.
Open your website. There is a home page that says you are a friendly, proactive firm. A services page listing accounts, tax, payroll and bookkeeping. A team page with photographs from the last rebrand. A contact form. And a blog whose most recent post is a Budget summary from a few years ago.
That is a brochure. It does the job a brochure does: it reassures someone who already knows your name and wants to check you are real. It does not do the job you want it to do, which is bring you people who have never heard of you.
Here is why. Nobody sits down and types "friendly proactive accountant" into a search engine. They type the question they actually have. "Do I need to register for VAT if I sell on Etsy." "Can I claim my home office as a director." "What does an accountant cost for a small limited company." "Landlord accountant Preston." If your site has nothing that answers those, you are not in the running, however good the firm is.
The blog that stopped in 2022 tells the same story. Somebody meant well. They wrote three posts, got no response in the first month, and stopped. Content does not work like that, and we will come back to why.
We are not going to give you traffic numbers, because we do not have sourced ones and we will not make them up. What follows is what we have seen work in running a practice, and the logic behind it.
Long, plain, specific answers to real questions. Not "Five tax tips for small businesses". Something like "Sole trader or limited company: how to decide, with the costs laid out". The test is whether a prospective client, having read it, knows more than they did and trusts you a little. Write for the reader, not for the search engine, but give each guide one clear question in the title so the search engine knows what it is about.
Do not put tax rates in them unless you are prepared to update them every time they change. Link to gov.uk for the numbers and say so. A guide with last year's rates in it is worse than no guide.
A simple calculator is the most shareable thing a practice can publish, because it gives the reader a number about their own situation. Take-home pay estimates, company car comparisons, what-does-an-accountant-cost ranges, a capacity planner if you sell to practices. Our own capacity calculator exists for this reason. It needs to be honest about being an estimate and it needs to be kept working.
If you act for dentists, or landlords, or tradespeople, or e-commerce sellers, you need a page for each that speaks to that reader and the problems only they have. "Accountants for dentists" is a different search, a different reader and a different page from "accountants". Most practices have niches by accident. Write them down and build a page for each.
The least glamorous and most reliable thing on this list. A short email, once a month, to every client and every prospect who has ever given you an address, with two or three things worth knowing and a link to your latest guide. It does not win new clients on its own. It keeps you in front of the people who will refer you, and it turns prospects who read one guide into prospects who see you every month.
One guide a fortnight. One newsletter a month. One niche page a quarter. For a year. Not as a campaign, as a routine. Search engines reward sites that keep publishing, readers trust firms that keep showing up, and you only find out what works after you have published enough to compare.
This is a template. Replace the topics with your own clients' questions. The structure is the part that matters.
| Month | Guides (two a month) | Tool or niche page | Newsletter | Site housekeeping |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sole trader vs limited company; what an accountant costs | Niche page 1 | Launch issue | Fix services pages, add FAQs |
| 2 | VAT registration explained; allowable expenses for directors | Take-home pay calculator | Issue 2 | Update old posts or delete them |
| 3 | Year-end checklist for small companies; paying yourself as a director | Niche page 2 | Issue 3 | Add calls to action to every guide |
| 4 | New tax year: what changed (link gov.uk); bookkeeping basics | Refresh calculator | Issue 4 | Check every page on mobile |
| 5 | Hiring your first employee; payroll explained | Niche page 3 | Issue 5 | Google Business Profile tidy-up |
| 6 | Making Tax Digital for your business (link gov.uk); cash flow basics | Accountant cost estimator | Issue 6 | Half-year review of what got read |
| 7 | Company cars and vans; working from home as a director | Niche page 4 | Issue 7 | Internal linking pass |
| 8 | Self assessment: what you need to gather; landlord basics | Refresh niche page 1 | Issue 8 | Update team and about pages |
| 9 | Dividends vs salary; buying equipment before year-end | Niche page 5 | Issue 9 | Prepare January content early |
| 10 | Common self assessment mistakes; pension contributions for owners | SA document checklist download | Issue 10 | Speed and broken-link check |
| 11 | Budget summary (when it happens); closing a company | Refresh niche pages 2-3 | Issue 11 | Review FAQ pages |
| 12 | Year in review for clients; planning the next year | Plan next year's tools | Issue 12 | Annual audit of every page |
That is twenty-four guides, five niche pages, three or four tools and twelve newsletters. It is not a heroic amount. It is more than almost any small practice actually does, because of what comes next.
Every practice has tried this. The partner decides content matters, blocks out Friday afternoon, and writes a guide. It is good, because the partner knows the subject. The second one takes three weeks because a client had a crisis. The third never happens. Six months later the blog has four posts and the plan is in a drawer.
This is not a discipline problem. It is an economics problem. The partner's hour is the most expensive hour in the firm and it has a queue of client work, reviews and sales in front of it. Content is the only thing in that queue with no deadline and no one chasing. It will always lose.
The same goes for asking the office manager to "do the social media" on top of everything else, or the trainee to write a blog when they are quiet. Quiet never comes, and when it does, nobody has told them what to write.
Content works when it is someone's hours. A fixed number of hours a month, with a plan, a deadline and a person whose job it is. The partner's role shrinks to what only the partner can do: pick the topics, spend twenty minutes on a call explaining the angle, and review the draft before it goes out. That is an hour or two a month, not a Friday afternoon every week.
This is where Muckin fits, and the bias is declared. A Production seat is a person, for a fixed number of hours a month, doing the practice's processing work: bookkeeping, VAT, payroll, onboarding admin. Content work is the same shape. It is steady, it can be planned, and it needs doing every month whether or not anyone feels like it.
So it goes into the same hours. The seat writes the guides from the partner's brief, drafts the newsletter, updates the site, prepares the social posts and keeps the calculators working. The partner reviews. There is no separate content price and no add-on. Content fills Production-seat hours, alongside whatever else the seat is doing. A practice using a half seat (80 hours, £1,100 a month) for bookkeeping can give ten or fifteen of those hours to content and run the whole plan above. Details are on the marketing page and the pricing page.
What we will not do is promise you traffic. We do not know what your market will search for, how crowded it is, or how long it will take. What we know is that a site with fifty honest guides and a monthly newsletter gets enquiries, and a brochure does not, and that the difference between the two is hours.
Write down the ten questions clients asked you most often last month. That is your first five guides and probably your first niche page. Then work out the hours with the capacity calculator, including a line for content, and contact us if you want someone to take the plan and run it inside a seat. We muck in on the writing; you keep the last word. See how it works.
Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.
Most practice sites are brochures that describe the firm and answer none of the questions prospective clients actually search for. Without guides, tools or niche pages, there is nothing for a stranger to find.
A steady routine beats a burst: roughly two guides a month, a monthly newsletter, and a niche page or tool each quarter, kept up for at least a year.
No. Content work such as guides, newsletters, site updates and social posts is done within Production-seat hours alongside bookkeeping and admin, with the practice reviewing everything before it goes out.
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