Nowadays if you need your accounting and CPA practice to take shape you need a website. For a vast majority of practices this means looking at “templates”. The expense of custom site design, in both time and funds, puts these projects well out of reach of almost all but the largest accounting practices. You need coders, design professionals, writers… you can expect to pay ten thousand dollars and wait six months for a custom accounting site. A template, complete with hundreds of pages of free reports, custom newsletters, interactive calculators and more, will usually cost about $50 a month.
Website templates have been around for years and they’ve always been an inexpensive and effective alternatives to expensive custom sites, but they’ve traditionally had problems getting good rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. It’s a pretty common to trade off power for simplicity when designing software for “end users”. Template providers, however, in making their content management systems easy to use, often glossed over or ignored features that would make their templates more appealing to the search engines.
There are three problems traditionally found in website templates, and many providers still have not addressed them… but some have. These problems include…
- Using Duplicate Content
- Universal Meta Tag Settings
- I-frames
Back in the old days, when most markets hosted only a handful of accounting firms with websites, these problems could be overlooked, but today this is no longer the case. Fortunately some accounting website template providers have actually taken the time to develop content management systems that confront these shortcomings. Many others have not. This makes some templates vastly superior to others when it comes to SEO, or “search engine optimization”.
So how do you know what to look for if you want to find accounting website templates that are SEO, or “search engine optimization”, friendly? Here are a few pointers…
All accounting website templates come with large amounts of standard content. This content is identical between all the websites from a given provider and this creates problems getting pages “indexed”, or “listed” by Google. Search engines don’t want duplicate results coming up in searches, so as a rule they will only list such a page ONCE and they ignore every page they see after that with the same content. This means to get a “standard” page to actually appear in the search results you need to modify the content of that page. In order to do this you need to be able to edit the content in the template, and not all providers let you do this. It’s vital to make sure that accounting website templates allow you to edit all your pages so you can make the important ones unique enough to get picked up as a search result. Nobody expects you to modify all 600 pages on a typical accounting website template, but it will make a huge difference if you personalize as few a five or ten pages.
In website design the term “meta tags” is a reference to invisible tags hidden in a search engines code that are meant as messages to search engines and other website programmers. Search engines use these tags to identify a web pages meaning and intent, but on many template driven sites these tags either don’t exist, cannot be edited at all, or can only be changed using a “universal” setting. On sites like this there is only one setting for modifying a sites meta tags. This means every page on the site must have exactly the same tags making it impossible to optimize more than one page on the site. If you want to succeed in the search engines make sure the meta tags on your website can be changed separately on every page of your site.
I saved this last issue for the end of the article because, quite frankly, it can be hard to identify. You may even want to retain a website professional to help you get the answers here. Many sites use a coding trick called IFrames, or inline frames, to deliver content to your website. Template providers like I-Frames for a lot of reasons, but their primary advantage is that using them makes it very easy to keep site content updated and make changes to hundreds of websites at once. Unfortunately search engines don’t much care for sites that use them. Search engines will see pages with inline content as basically blank. They can see the content, but they won’t consider your website the source of it. They may index the “inline” content, but they won’t credit it to your domain which is a long way of saying “iFrame pages are worth exactly nothing”. Since it can be hard to tell whether or not a website is using these “framed links” you might want to ask but verify. Find out from the provider if they deliver content using inline frames, but before committing to a site have a web professional examine their product and make sure that they aren’t using them.
When shopping around for accounting website templates it can be easy to be dazzled by pretty pictures and flashing animations. Before buying anything, though, take the time to look under the hood. You’ll need to dig a little to find out whether or not an accounting website template is SEO friendly or not. As a rule not all websites that CAN be optimized ARE optimized. You will find plenty of SEO friendly websites without a trace of optimization ever actually having been done on them. Many of my clients have “Universal Meta Tag” issues. The problem isn’t that they can’t optimize them, the problem is that they often just don’t bother.
To be sure about a template’s suitability for SEO call each provider separately and ask about these features. If any one of these SEO features hasn’t been specifically addressed the template cannot be properly optimized. At times this isn’t really a problem. If you have the only CPA or accounting firm in your town with a website you will probably do all right without ever optimizing your website, but keep these factors in mind when considering the cost benefit. Always keep an eye on the might happen in the future. You’re likely to keep your site for quite a while, so make sure you use one that will grow with you.