Nowadays if you need your accounting business to take shape you need a website. For a significant majority of businesses this means looking at “templates”. Custom sites are absurdly expensive. Few smaller firms can actually be expected to build a website from scratch. A first-class, fully loaded custom CPA or accounting website can cost ten thousand dollars to build, whereas most templates sell for approximately fifty bucks per month.
So why would any accounting firm shell out thousands of dollars a month for SEO?
Templates originally appeared as inexpensive alternatives to fully blown custom sites and by any modern standard they were pretty primitive. They were fine for hobby sites or small businesses in small markets, but they’ve never performed particularly well in the search engines. In order to make them quick and easy to use the companies that provided even the best accounting website templates tended to sacrifice certain technical niceties that would make it exceedingly difficult to really optimize a site for good rankings.
There are three problems traditionally found in website templates, and many providers still have not addressed them… but some have. These problems include…
- Use of Duplicate Content
- Oversimplified Meta Tag Settings
- Lots of I-framed Pages
As the web has become more competitive some of these template providers have shifted gears, successfully overcoming these limitations without substantially increasing the complexity of their content management tools. 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…
Let’s look at the “duplicate content” first as all template driven sites will have this problem. When you first get them even the best accounting website templates will have hundreds of pages 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. Customizable pages can overcome duplicate content issues. Make sure your template provider allows you to modify and add pages freely to your site. 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.
Another common problem with templates is “universal meta tags”. On most accounting website templates there is only one setting for meta tags like page titles, page descriptions, and keywords that affect all the pages on the site simultaneously. 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.
The last problem traditionally associated with accounting website templates is also the hardest to identify. Many website templates make extensive use of IFrames, or inline frames; to apply content to web pages. Unfortunately, while I-frames are often obvious to even casual observers, they can easily be obfuscated in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell if a page is exploiting them at all unless you know how to read the source code. 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. If your content is being presented to your clients in IFrame format the search engines will basically look at the page as blank. 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.
Don’t be put off by a casual examination of a provider’s sample sites. You’ll need to dig a little to find out whether or not an accounting website template is SEO friendly or not. An SEO friendly site with a lazy owner may not be taking advantage of a template providers search features. 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. This might be all right for some companies in less competitive towns and villages, but be certain you consider it when evaluating the value versus the cost. Always think about the the long game. You are likely to need your website for a long time, so make sure you get one that will grow with your practice.