A professional firm is chosen on trust, and trust is judged in the first fifteen seconds by people who cannot assess your work.
Your client cannot judge the thing they are buying
Somebody choosing an accountant cannot evaluate accountancy. Somebody choosing a lawyer cannot read a judgement and tell you whether it was well argued. So they judge everything else: whether the site looks current, whether the people are real, whether the qualifications are stated, whether somebody answered the phone. For a firm practising before the Odisha High Court at Cuttack or the tribunals in Bhubaneswar, the client is often choosing between three names somebody gave them.
That is not shallow, it is all they have. And it means the website is doing more work for a professional firm than for almost any other kind of business.
Say what you will not take
The most valuable page on a professional firm’s website is often the one that turns work away. A CA who says plainly that they do not do individual returns, or a lawyer who says they do not take criminal matters, stops a stream of calls that waste an hour each.
It also reads as confidence. A firm that takes everything looks like a firm with nothing to do.
Names and faces
Anonymous professional firms do not get enquiries. Partners with names, photographs, qualifications and the year they qualified, on a page a client can read before ringing, is the difference between an enquiry and a bounce.
What a first enquiry needs
- What you do, in the client’s words rather than the statute’s
- Who will actually handle it
- How you charge, at least in shape
- What happens after they get in touch
- A way to ask something small without committing
Confidentiality
Do not publish client names without written permission, and be careful with case studies in law and tax. The safer version describes the situation and the outcome without identifying anybody, and it is nearly as persuasive.
What it costs
A firm site with service pages, partner profiles and an enquiry form is a Starter plan at ₹12,000 to build, or Business at ₹30,000 if you want a page for each service area. Most firms we work with start at Starter and move up once they see which pages bring the enquiries.
Prices do not include GST.
Referrals check you too
Most professional work arrives by referral, which makes it tempting to skip the website entirely. It is the wrong conclusion. A referral is a name and a phone number, and the first thing the person does is search that name. What they find either confirms the recommendation or quietly undermines it.
A firm with no website, or one last touched in 2019, makes the person who referred you look careless. That is the cost, and it is invisible because nobody ever tells you.
The enquiry you want, and the one you do not
A form asking only for a name, a number and a sentence produces plenty of enquiries, most of them useless. Adding two questions, what the matter concerns and roughly when it needs resolving, cuts the volume and raises the quality. For a firm billing by the hour, fewer better enquiries is the entire objective.