Focus Partners

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Problem

The website had not kept pace with the firm. It still worked, but it was doing very little to help someone decide that Focus Partners was the right firm for them, and nothing to show the range of what the practice could actually do for them.

Working alongside Platform Marketing & Comms, who had just completed the brand strategy, the assessment picked up a handful of things holding the site back:

• Two very different audiences, one undifferentiated path 
  A business owner looking for advisory support and a family planning for retirement want completely different things. The site sent both down the same route and left them to work out for themselves which services applied.
  
• Services that were hard to tell apart 
  Accounting, business advisory, financial advice and SMSF were all listed, but nothing explained how they fit together or which one a visitor should start with. The breadth of the offer was one of the firm’s real advantages and the site was not showing it.
  
• Few clear points to make contact
  Enquiry paths were thin on the ground. Someone who reached the end of a service page and wanted to act had to go looking for a way to do it.
  
• General content sitting apart from the services
  A large back catalogue of general tax and finance articles had built up over the years, with no structure connecting any of it to the four service lines or to the local market. It brought people to the site who were never going to become clients, and it gave people who might have become clients nothing to follow.
  
• A design that sat behind the brand
  The visual presentation had not caught up with where the business was, or with the new brand work Platform had just delivered.
  
• No structure to build on
  There was no template for a campaign landing page, no obvious home for new service content, and no clean way to add to the site without redevelopment.

Solution

The brief was to turn the website into something that carries its weight in the sales process, not just a place the firm exists online. Strategy came first, before any design work started, so that every page had a job to do before anyone drew it.

• Mapped the site around who is actually visiting 
  The new homepage opens by asking one question: are you a business owner, or an individual or family? From there the journeys separate. There is also a short interactive path finder (“I am a business owner and I want to grow my business”) that takes people straight to the right service, so nobody has to guess which part of the site is meant for them. This is the kind of strategy and user experience work that decides whether a site converts long before the design is agreed.
  
• Rebuilt the information architecture
  A new sitemap and navigation put the four service pillars, accounting and tax, business advisory, financial advice and SMSF, into a structure a visitor can hold in their head. Each has its own page, and each connects back to the audience hubs for business owners and for individuals and families.
  
• Designed and built a fully custom site
  UX wireframes, then custom UI, then a custom website build on WordPress. Purpose-built page templates, including campaign landing page templates ready for future marketing activity, so new pages can be added without going back to the drawing board.
  
• Put enquiry paths where people are already looking
  Calls to action, contact forms and booking prompts sit at the natural decision points on every service page, with automated email notifications behind them so nothing waits in a queue.
  
• Gave people reasons to stay
  An industries section covering healthcare, trades, education, agriculture, professional services, retail and hospitality, and not-for-profit. A three-step explanation of how the firm works. A resources area with calculators, a tax diary, job-by-job deduction guides and video explainers. Plus an FAQ section that answers the questions people were previously ringing up to ask.
  
• Built the search foundations into the build 
  Metadata, heading structure, internal linking, clean URLs and full redirect mapping from the old site. This is foundational SEO, the technical groundwork that makes a site discoverable, done as part of the build rather than bolted on afterwards. It sits alongside the broader local SEO approach used across the region.
  
• Made it fast, accessible and secure Responsive layouts, accessibility standards, security and privacy measures, cross-device QA and post-launch technical support.
  

Results

Figures compare the four months following launch with the same four months a year earlier, on the previous website, so the seasonal pattern of an accounting year sits on both sides of the comparison.

Overall website traffic

More people are reaching the site, and the gain has held rather than fading once the site had been live a few months.

• Sessions rose 16%.
• Users rose 8%.
• Monthly sessions since launch are running 38% ahead of the five months before it, and every month since April has come in above that earlier average.

Visitor engagement

This is where the redesign shows up most clearly. Traffic grew 16%, but engaged visits grew more than twice as fast.

• Engaged sessions rose 34%.
• Engagement rate lifted from 56.9% to 65.8%, an improvement of 8.9 percentage points.
• Average engagement time per session rose 7%.
• Roughly a third of visitors now use the internal navigation links to move between sections, which is the behaviour the new structure was built to encourage.

Every month since May 2026 has held an engagement rate above 64%, against 56.9% across the same four months a year earlier.

Enquiries

The new enquiry paths are being used, and the shift toward the booking form is the clearest signal that the journey is working.

• Enquiry actions, meaning phone clicks, email clicks and form submissions, rose 13%.
• Form enquiries rose 145%.
• Around two thirds of the people who start the booking form go on to complete it.

Search visibility

The foundational SEO built into the site changed the quality of the firm’s presence in Google rather than the raw volume of it.

• Click-through rate from search results rose from 1.1% to 1.7%.
• Brand searches improved most. Focus Partners now appears higher on average when people search its name, with appearances up 91% and clicks up 23%.

Total appearances in search are lower than on the previous website. That volume came from the old general tax back catalogue, which ranked on the fourth page of Google and beyond and returned clicks at 0.8%. The new site is tighter and much closer to the services Focus Partners actually sells, which is why fewer appearances now produce a better rate of clicks. Rebuilding the content footprint around the services and the local market is the natural next step. That is the work an ongoing SEO programme picks up, whether the market is Albury Wodonga or Wagga Wagga, and it now runs alongside AI search optimisation.

Web design and development results

These figures were measured on the live homepage in September 2026, on desktop.

• First Contentful Paint 0.5 seconds. Visitors see something almost immediately.
• Largest Contentful Paint 1.9 seconds. The main content is in place well inside Google’s 2.5 second threshold.
• Speed Index 2.0 seconds. The page fills in quickly rather than assembling piece by piece.
• Cumulative Layout Shift 0.012. Effectively no movement as the page loads, so nothing jumps under the cursor.
• Lighthouse accessibility 91/100 and SEO 92/100. Strong marks on structure, labelling and search readiness.

The Focus Partners website now does the job the firm needed it to do. Two audiences get their own path from the first screen. The four service lines are separated clearly enough to choose between, and connected clearly enough to buy across. Enquiry points sit where people are ready to use them, and the technical foundations underneath mean the site loads fast, reads well to Google and can grow without a rebuild.

The numbers back it up. More visitors, a third more of them engaging properly, more enquiries, and a firm that now appears higher and gets clicked more often when people search for it by name.

Delivered with Platform Marketing & Comms, this was a website strategy, design and development project with foundational SEO built in. The content and ongoing search work are the next chapter.

If a website is not pulling its weight in the sales process, that is usually a structure problem before it is a design problem. Digital Marketer Bee builds sites like this one for professional services firms across the border and the Riverina, from web design in Albury Wodonga through to web design in Wagga Wagga. Take a look at our work, or book a call to talk through what your site could be doing instead.