Managed websites for accounting and professional services firmsManaged websites for accounting firms

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Answers on the FirmWebStudio offer: what is included, revisions, articles, the AI Engine, hosting, domains, moving your current site and billing.

The offer

01What exactly do we get for the monthly fee?

A custom-coded website built for the firm's practice areas, partners and offices, managed by us for as long as the plan is active. That includes hosting, a domain, weekly updates, the revisions included in the plan, and researched articles published on a fixed schedule. Nothing is itemised separately; the monthly figure is the whole running cost of the site.

02How long until the site is live?

7 days on Practice, 10 on Partnership while the AI Engine is trained on the firm's own content, and 15 on Multi-Partner with the Content Engine set up alongside it. The clock starts at the onboarding call, not at purchase, so the sooner the onboarding form is in, the sooner the site is live.

03Is this an accounting service or a website service?

A website service only. We build and manage the firm's website; we are not a CPA firm, accounting firm, or provider of accounting, tax, audit or assurance services, and nothing on the site or written by us is professional advice. The firm's practice stays entirely with the firm.

04What happens to the three plans as the firm grows?

Moving from Practice to Partnership or Multi-Partner is a plan change, not a rebuild. The site, pages and history carry over; the new tier's features (the AI Engine, or the AI Engine plus the Content Engine) are added on top of what already exists.

Getting started

01What happens right after we sign up?

The onboarding form is filled in and submitted. It asks for the firm's practice areas, partners, offices, brand and where inquiries should land, and takes about 15 minutes. If something is missing, submit anyway: the rest can follow by email or as a ticket in the client portal, and it will not hold up the build. One onboarding call then fills any gaps and confirms the launch date.

02What is the client portal?

It is the firm's account with us, created the day the site goes live. Revisions, support tickets, files the firm still owes us, and messages to our team all go through it, so nothing runs through a scattered email thread. Nobody at the firm logs in to the website itself; we handle that side entirely.

03Who at the firm should fill in the onboarding form?

Whoever knows the firm's practice areas, partner list and current inquiry process best, often an office manager or a managing partner. One person can complete it alone; the follow-up onboarding call is where any partner-specific detail can be added by whoever is available.

Revisions and the client portal

01What counts as a revision?

Any change request submitted through the client portal, with no limit on how much goes into one. A new partner bio, an updated practice area description, a new office page, a colour change: each is one revision. So is something larger. "Add pages for two new partners, here is their information" is one revision, not two. 5 are included every month.

02What happens after the included revisions are used?

Each additional revision is a flat $20, with no cap on how many can be purchased and no hourly billing anywhere. Every revision, whatever its size, is completed within 2 to 5 working days. Unused revisions do not roll over to the next month.

03How does a firm actually request a change?

Through the client portal: describe the change, attach anything needed, and it lands with the team as a tracked request. A firm can also email us or reply to any thread with our team, and we log it as a revision for tracking.

Articles

01What do the researched articles actually cover?

Topics relevant to the firm's practice areas, written to answer questions a prospective client would search, at 2,500 to 3,200 words. Tiers Practice and Partnership include 2 a week; Multi-Partner includes 3 a week.

02Are the articles attributed to a specific partner?

Only if the firm wants that. By default articles publish under the site's own editorial byline. If a firm wants an article attributed to a named partner, the firm reviews and approves the piece first, since we are not accountants and will not publish content as professional advice attributed to a named individual without their review.

03Can the firm request specific article topics?

Yes. Topic requests are handled the same way as any other revision request, submitted through the client portal, and worked into the publishing schedule.

The AI Engine

01What does the AI Engine actually do?

It adds an AI receptionist and site chat that answer routine questions (office hours, what a service covers, how to book a call) at any hour, along with SMS, Messenger and Instagram AI, a call-analysis PDF after each answered call, and A2P 10DLC registration filed on the firm's behalf so text messaging is compliant from day one. It is included from Partnership up.

02Can the AI Engine answer accounting or tax questions?

No. It is built to answer routine questions about the firm and the site, and to route anything that reads as a request for accounting, tax or audit advice to a person at the firm. It never gives professional advice on the firm's behalf.

03What is the "plus AI usage" line on the middle tier?

Partnership is $297 a month plus the actual usage cost of running the AI systems, billed at what our providers charge, with no markup added on top. It is not a flat add-on fee.

Search, AI answers and speed

01Will a faster website make our Google Ads cheaper?

It can help. Landing page experience is one of the three parts of Google Ads Quality Score, and a faster, more relevant page can lower the cost of each click and keeps more of the paid visitors who would otherwise leave before the page loads. We guarantee 90+ PageSpeed; we do not promise a specific cost per click, because bids, competition and the ads themselves matter too.

02What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO gets the firm's pages ranked in normal search results, through technical foundations, one page per practice area and one page per office. AEO (answer engine optimisation) structures content as direct answers and FAQ blocks so it can be pulled into featured snippets and voice answers. GEO (generative engine optimisation) makes the site easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to understand and cite, through an llms.txt file, consistent firm details and structured data. All three ship on every plan.

03Can you guarantee we appear in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?

No, and nobody honestly can. What we do is make it more likely: plain factual statements about the firm, answer-first pages, structured data, an llms.txt file and consistent details across the site and the Google profile. Which sources an AI assistant cites is decided by the assistant.

04Do you build location pages for our offices and the cities we serve?

Yes. Each office gets its own page with its address, the partners based there and the practice areas served from it, which is how a second or third office starts to appear in searches run in its own city. Pages are written for real offices and real service areas, never thin copies with a city name swapped in.

05What structured data (schema) do you add?

JSON-LD matched to each page: Organization or ProfessionalService details for the firm, Service for practice area pages, FAQPage where a page has visible questions, BreadcrumbList for navigation, Person for partner bios and BlogPosting for articles. Review markup is added only for real reviews the firm has permission to publish.

Policies, accessibility and compliance

01Which policy and compliance pages come with the site?

A privacy policy, terms of use, a cookie policy with a consent banner that genuinely blocks analytics and marketing scripts until a visitor agrees, an accessibility statement, and a disclaimer that website content is general information rather than professional advice. Pages are built with the ADA and WCAG 2.2 AA in mind. These help a firm meet common expectations; they are not legal advice, and firms with specific state board or regulatory obligations should have counsel review the wording.

02Will the inquiry form collect sensitive client financial data?

No. The form asks what kind of engagement someone needs, their contact details and a short description, and tells visitors not to send tax documents, account numbers or Social Security numbers through it. Documents belong in the firm's own secure client portal, not in a website form.

03Is SMS from the AI Engine compliant with US texting rules?

We file A2P 10DLC registration with the carriers on the firm's behalf and use consent wording written with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in mind on every form that collects a mobile number. That helps the firm text within carrier rules; the firm stays responsible for how it uses the channel.

Hosting and management

01Is hosting billed separately from the monthly fee?

No. Hosting runs on Cloudflare's global network with SSL, a content delivery network, DDoS protection and unmetered bandwidth, all included in the monthly fee with nothing itemised. There is no hosting invoice, no SSL renewal charge and no bandwidth overage.

02What PageSpeed do you guarantee?

90+ PageSpeed on every plan, checked at launch and rechecked with every weekly update, since a slow page loses a referral before it finishes loading.

03Who fixes the site if something goes wrong?

We do, as part of the managed plan. Server issues, security patches and uptime monitoring are handled on our side; the firm reports anything unusual through the client portal and it is treated as a priority ticket.

Domains

01Do we need to buy a domain separately?

No. One domain is included free for as long as the plan is active, registered in the firm's name, so the firm owns it outright. If the firm already has a domain, we point it at the new site instead and nothing changes for anyone who already knows the current address.

02What happens to the domain if the firm ever leaves?

The firm tells us where to send it and we transfer the domain at no charge, since it is registered in the firm's name and belongs to the firm regardless of the hosting arrangement.

Moving from your current site

01What happens to our current website when we switch?

We review the current site during onboarding, migrate what is worth keeping (practice area content, partner bios, published articles), and set up redirects from the old URLs to the new ones so search rankings built up over time are not lost when the site changes.

02Will our current Google ranking be affected?

Redirects and a faster, better-structured site are built specifically to protect and improve search visibility, not disrupt it. We never claim a specific ranking outcome or timeline; ranking movement depends on many factors outside a website alone.

Billing and cancellation

01What do we pay and when?

The monthly fee for the chosen plan is paid up front: $137, $297 plus AI usage, or $747 a month. The $797 one-time build fee is invoiced only after the site is live and the firm has approved it. Domain and hosting are already inside the monthly figure.

02How do we cancel, and how much notice is required?

Email us to cancel. The message must reach us at least 2 business days before the next invoice date, during business hours, 9:00 to 17:00 Central Time, Monday to Friday. A message sent outside those hours counts from the start of the next business day, so a weekend email does not give 2 business days of notice for an invoice due Monday or Tuesday. With valid notice, no further invoice is raised and the site runs to the end of the paid month. With late notice, the next invoice is charged as normal and cancellation takes effect at the end of that month.

03Are fees refundable?

No. All sales are final, including monthly fees, the build fee, extra revisions and any pass-through cost billed at what our providers charge us. The one exception is a duplicate or incorrect charge caused by our billing: report it within 30 days and it is corrected within 10 working days. The build fee is only charged after the firm has approved the site, which is why it is not refundable afterward.

Still have a question about the offer?

Email us and a person replies within one working day, or book a demo and ask on the call.