Marketing for professional services firms
The pattern in professional services is consistent: the practice is genuinely good, referrals do most of the work, and the website makes it look like everybody else. The fix is rarely more content — it is deciding what the firm is known for and building the evidence to support it.
How do you market a professional services or advisory firm?
Pick the claim the firm can evidence better than anyone nearby, then build the proof around it: published results, a named methodology, and answers to the questions clients ask before instructing. Referrals still close the work; the site's job is to make the referral safe to act on.
At a glance
- Sector
- Professional services
- Featured work
- McGarrigle, Part 1 Claims, The 1954 Act
- Services used
- Proposition and positioning, SEO and content architecture, AI search visibility, Enquiry funnel and qualification
- Based
- Cheshire, working with clients across the UK
What keeps blocking growth in professional services
Three problems recur in almost every engagement in this sector. None of them are solved by spending more.
Reputation outrunning the website
Referred prospects arrive, find a generic services page, and lose the confidence the referral gave them. The site is the weakest link in a strong chain.
No owned claim
Everything on the page is a category description — 'commercial expertise', 'trusted advice' — rather than a claim only this firm can make and evidence.
Partner time spent on unqualified enquiries
Without any filter, the most expensive people in the business triage enquiries that were never going to instruct.
The services this sector actually needs
Each link goes to the service page that explains the scope, the deliverables and how it is priced.
Proposition and positioning
Decide what the business claims and who it claims it for, before a penny goes into a channel.
SEO and content architecture
Structure the site around how people actually search, not how the business is organised.
AI search visibility
Write and structure pages so ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Perplexity quote them by name.
Enquiry funnel and qualification
Replace the contact form with checks and calculators that qualify before anyone speaks.
Featured professional services engagements
What I was asked to do, what I decided, and what shipped. Every link goes to the client's live site.
- The situation
- Forty years of tenant-side retail lease expertise, largely invisible online. Work arrived by reputation and referral, which is excellent until a quiet quarter, and the site said the same things every commercial surveyor's site says.
- What I did
- Committed to a narrow position — tenant representation only — and made it the first thing you read. Built a guide for each service the way an occupier searches for it (rent review, lease renewal, dilapidations, expert witness, 1954 Act, Part 1) and put the evidence of experience above the fold instead of in an About page.
- What shipped
- A site that states the specialism, the credentials and the saving in the first screen, with a guide library that answers the questions occupiers search for before they are ready to instruct anyone.
“I have been doing this since 1989 and my website did not say so. Sam narrowed what we claim, put the numbers where people see them, and wrote the guides in the language tenants use rather than the language surveyors use.”
Part 1 Claims
<1 mineligibility check replaces the contact form
part1claims.com- The situation
- Part 1 compensation under the Land Compensation Act 1973 is a real entitlement almost nobody knows exists. There was no demand to capture — it had to be created from people searching about noise, new roads and falling property values.
- What I did
- Built the proposition around the two objections that stop people enquiring: cost and disruption. 'No win, no fee' and 'you keep your home' lead the page. Then a one-minute eligibility check and a valuation estimator replace the contact form, so a visitor self-qualifies before anyone speaks to them.
- What shipped
- A launch site that converts unaware, high-intent search traffic into qualified claim enquiries, with the technical detail — Ryde's Scale, physical factors, the claim window — carried by supporting pages instead of the homepage.
“Nobody wakes up looking for Part 1 compensation, so the whole thing hinged on explaining it in plain English and proving there was no risk. The eligibility check does the qualifying for us — the enquiries that reach me are worth having.”
The 1954 Act
17statutory provisions built for citation
1954act.com- The situation
- Lease renewal questions are increasingly answered inside ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews rather than on a law firm's site. The opportunity was to be the source those answers quote, not another blog competing for clicks.
- What I did
- Structured the whole of Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 as a searchable reference — one page per provision, each with a plain-English explanation tied back to the section it comes from — plus an assistant that answers lease-specific questions. Every page is written to be quotable in a single passage.
- What shipped
- A reference asset covering the provisions that decide a renewal, built for citation by answer engines and used as the credibility anchor for the surveying practice behind it.
“The brief was unusual: build something the AI tools would rather quote than paraphrase. It now gets referenced in answers about section 25 notices and renewal deadlines, which brings us the enquiries a normal blog never would.”
Professional services: common questions
Other sectors I work in
The sequence is the same everywhere, but the pattern that blocks growth is not. Each hub sets out the recurring problem in that sector, what I do about it, and which engagements prove it.
Working in professional services? Start with the diagnosis.
Book a one-hour discovery call. I will tell you which of these problems yours actually is — proposition, pricing, demand or visibility — before you spend anything.