Every firm I worked with had a blog. Most also had one page called Services, listing six things in a paragraph each, and that page was quietly doing the work of bringing in enquiries - badly. If your website earns you anything from search, it earns it on the pages that describe what you actually do for money.
There are two kinds of people searching, and only one of them becomes a client this quarter.
The first is reading about the bright-line changes. She is doing her homework, she will read three articles, and she will not remember which firm wrote any of them. The second types "rental property accountant tauranga" into her phone, opens four tabs and picks one before lunch. She is not researching. She has already decided she needs someone and is now choosing between firms.
Blog posts catch the first person. Service pages catch the second. The volumes on those second-type phrases are small - this is a country of five million, and nobody is fielding thousands of monthly searches for rental property accounting - but the handful of people typing them are the ones who ring.
That is the whole argument. The rest of this is what to do about it.
Two reasons, and neither of them is that the blog works better.
The first is that content is easier to sell. A content plan is twelve deliverables a year, a monthly invoice and a report showing what was published. Rewriting four service pages is one uncomfortable meeting about fees and positioning, delivered once. I know which one an agency would rather propose.
The second reason is the one firms do not say out loud. Writing about the Budget feels like expertise. Writing "this is what we charge, this is who we suit, and this is who should go elsewhere" feels like exposure. I have watched partners spend a Saturday on an 800-word commentary piece and put off the services page rewrite for another two years.
The blog is not useless. It has a specific job, and I will come back to it, because almost every firm gets that job wrong as well.
Picture the standard version. One page, six headings: business advisory, tax compliance, payroll, Xero setup, rental property, trusts. Each gets eighty words and a stock photo of a handshake.
Forget search for a moment and read it as the buyer. Someone with three rentals and a look-through company wants to know whether you handle LTCs, whether you will sort out the depreciation recovery when she sells, and roughly what a year of that costs. Eighty words answers none of it. The page is a menu, and menus do not sell anything - they confirm the restaurant exists.
The search problem follows from the reading problem. A page about six things has no subject, so it is nobody's best answer to anything, and it competes badly against the firm down the road that wrote a proper page about the one thing.
The obvious next question is how far to split this, and the answer is not thirty pages.
Two tests get most firms to the right number. First: would a client say the phrase out loud? "Rental property accounting" passes. "Cloud-based ledger reconciliation solutions" does not, and never did. Second: can you write seven hundred honest words about it that are not equally true of everything else you do? If you cannot, it is a feature of a service rather than a service.
Firms of three to eight staff usually land between five and eight pages. That covers what people actually search for without producing a set you will never maintain. If a service brings in one engagement a year and you do not want more of them, it does not need a page. It needs a sentence somewhere else.
Two failure modes, and I have seen both more than once.
The first is the swapped noun. The firm builds one page, copies it five times, and changes the service name in the heading and the opening line. The structure, the reassurances and the closing paragraph are identical. A reader with two of them open in tabs spots it immediately, and the set is no more useful than the combined page it replaced.
The second is the town swap - the same page rebuilt for Hamilton, Cambridge and Te Awamutu with nothing altered but the place name. Google has been explicit about this pattern for years, and its published spam policies name doorway pages directly. A location page needs a real reason to exist: an office, staff who work there, clients you can describe.
If the only difference between two pages is a find-and-replace, do not publish the second one.
A service page has four jobs, in this order: say what the thing is, say who it is for, say what engaging costs, and say what happens next. Most pages attempt the first and the fourth and skip the middle two, which is precisely where the enquiries are lost.
Start with plain description. "We prepare and file annual accounts and tax returns for companies and trusts, and we handle IRD correspondence on your behalf." Then a short paragraph on what is included, and one on what is not.
The common mistake is opening with credentials - years in practice, professional memberships, the partners' qualifications. Those matter, but not yet. A reader arriving from a search is still checking whether she is in the right place at all. Give her thirty seconds of certainty before you ask her to be impressed.
This is the section almost nobody writes, and the one that does the most work.
It reads something like this: "This suits owner-operators with one to five staff who want compliance handled properly and a conversation once a quarter. If you are running a group with multiple entities and an in-house finance function, our advisory team is the better starting point."
Two things happen. The right reader recognises herself and relaxes, because the page was clearly written for someone in her situation rather than for everybody. The wrong reader leaves, which saves you a meeting.
Every partner I have raised this with has hesitated at it. Ruling out work in writing feels like turning away money. In practice it is the strongest trust signal on the page, because a page that admits it is not for everyone is visibly not trying to catch everyone, and the enquiries that follow it are better qualified.
Then the fees question, which most firms decline on the grounds that scope varies. Scope does vary. That is not a reason to publish nothing.
"Contact us for a quote" is not an answer, and readers treat it as a signal that the number will be uncomfortable. You do not need a price list to give the shape of one. A range, a typical annual figure for a described client, or simply the basis - fixed monthly fee agreed before the work starts, no surprise time-based billing - all move the reader forward.
Then the next step, concretely. Who replies to the form, how quickly, whether the first meeting costs anything, and what she should have with her. A vague ending wastes everything the page earned above it, and I have seen well-written service pages leak enquiries in their final two hundred words more often than anywhere else.
There is no target word count, and anyone handing you one is selling by the word.
The honest answer is that a service page should be long enough to answer the questions a serious enquirer will have and short enough that nothing on it is filler. For a New Zealand firm that usually lands between six hundred and a thousand words. Some sit at four hundred and work perfectly well because the service is simple.
What does not work is padding to reach a number. A two-thousand-word page built out of a seven-hundred-word answer buries the fee basis and the next step below the point anyone is still reading, and every spare paragraph is another chance for the reader to decide the page is generic. I have never seen a firm gain anything from length it did not need.
Write the answers. Stop when they are answered.
Here is the habit, and it takes about a minute per post.
A firm publishes a piece on the trust tax rate change. It sits in the blog, gets shared once on LinkedIn, and links to nothing. The firm has a trust accounting service page two clicks away on the same site, and the two have never been introduced. Every post is an orphan.
The blog's job is to feed the service pages. In practice that means:
- every post that touches a service links to that service's page, in the body text rather than the sidebar
- the anchor text describes the destination - "trust accounting" rather than "click here" or "our services"
- service pages link to each other where the relationship is genuine, and only where it is genuine
None of this costs anything. It is the cheapest habit in this article, and the one I have almost never found already done.
The last problem is that nobody reads their own service pages after launch.
They age badly. Fee bases change, the staff member named in the copy leaves, IRD thresholds move, and the service you quietly stopped offering two years ago is still there collecting the wrong enquiries. None of it announces itself. The page keeps loading, so it keeps looking fine.
Put a review in the diary once a year - after the Budget, if you want a date that sticks. Read each service page as a stranger and check three things: is this still what we do, is this still what it costs, and is this still who we want. Fix or delete accordingly. It is an hour of work, and it is the difference between pages that stay useful for a decade and pages that slowly stop describing the practice at all.
The blog is not the problem. It is just not the front door, and it has been treated as one for the better part of a decade. Open your own services page, count how many distinct things it is trying to sell, and ask whether any of them is described well enough that a stranger could decide. Most firms already have the answers - they just keep them in meetings and phone calls rather than on the pages that need them.
