Your website might be talking to the wrong people

You might think this is a marketing article, and that marketing is somebody else's department. Give me a minute before you decide, because I think it's squarely your problem, more so than for most businesses.

You're aiming at a narrow target

When you sell to consumers, you can afford a wide aim. Miss one person and you'll catch the next, because the market is large and forgiving. As accountants, we don't have that luxury. We are selling something particular to a specific kind of person. An accounting firm in Basingstoke isn't trying to reach anyone and everyone, it's after the handful of local businesses that need exactly what it does. When your target is that narrow, missing your aim doesn't mean you hit someone slightly less ideal. It means you miss completely.

So whether the people you're aiming at can actually find you matters more to us than most. Which brings me to an uncomfortable conversation I had about our own website.

What a stranger saw in thirty seconds

We recently sent our sales team on a course, the kind that teaches you to handle rejection and get past the gatekeeper. It was a small group, and the trainer opened by telling us what he'd worked out about us beforehand. “I looked at your website,” he said, “and you're clearly pitching to fifty- to sixty-year-old accountants.” Nobody had deliberately designed it to do that. We thought the site was fine. It answered every question a prospect could have, and gave people a good sense of who we are. But a stranger had glanced at it and formed a firm view of exactly who we spoke to, and it was a fraction of the market we wanted. He'd taken it from the imagery, the word choice, the way it was put together.

Fortunately, the sting was reduced because we were in the process of updating our brand and redesigning our website.

But the lesson stuck. You can be invisible to most of your target audience without knowing it. Our site had quietly aged into the image of the people who made it.

The researcher isn't the decision-maker

Here's the part finance people miss. The person forming a view of you often isn't the one who signs the contract. The fifty-something decision-maker rarely does the initial digging, they rely on their team for that. It's the younger members of the team who research the options and build the shortlist, then carry a recommendation up for approval. Aim everything at the decision-maker and you sail straight past the person who decides whether you're even in the running. We weren't just isolating a slice of the market, we were ignoring the exact people doing the initial research. So we deliberately hired a younger team to look at our brand and website, to tell us where it missed the mark, and then rebuild it around these recommendations.

They may never reach your site

While all that was going on, the ground underneath us was shifting. Because it's no longer safe to assume the person you want will visit your website at all.

For twenty years the deal was simple. Someone searched, clicked, landed on your site. That has changed. A lot. An increasing share of Google searches now end without a single click, because the answer sits right there in the AI summary on the results page and nobody needs to go further. And a growing number of people aren't using a search engine at all, they're asking an AI assistant. And an AI assistant keeps people in the conversation, reading your material and answering on your behalf, with your website nowhere in the frame.

This is gradual, not an overnight collapse, and not every search works this way. When someone is ready to act, “I need an accountant near me,” they still click, still land somewhere, still pick up the phone or fill out a contact form. Your website still needs to catch that visit. But the other kind of visitor, the person searching “how do I file a VAT return” who then stumbles onto a helpful firm along the way, is quietly vanishing. The useful article you wrote to draw strangers in now gets read by a machine and the information served to them without the visit.

Which means your website now has two distinct readers. The human who skims, and the machine that reads all of it and decides whether to quote you. They pull in different directions and your website has to somehow accommodate both. Busy humans want quick, scannable snippets of information while AI wants all the detail clearly laid out.

For instance, the old instinct to open your website with a warm introduction or brand story now works against you, because the machine wants the answer up front or it moves on. Journalists learned this in the 1880s, when the telegraph charged by the word and editors cut stories from the bottom up. They moved the essential facts to the top. That rule is quietly back for websites.

Neither freeze nor lurch

None of this is a reason to panic, or to tear up what works. This is where a bit of mileage helps. Those of us who've been around have watched a few of these waves come in, and we know a genuine shift from a fashion. One mistake is to freeze, to call it all hype and carry on while the ground moves. The other is to lurch, to let someone rebuild your regulated, client-facing presence on whatever's newest because it'll be fine. It won't. Maturity isn't refusing to change, and it isn't chasing every change. It's watching the trend, taking what you need, and building it in without drama.

Because amidst the change, the job of your website is the same. Reach a specific person, be findable when they come looking, be trusted once they find you. What's changed is the route they take and who they meet on the way.