Accounting Firm & CPA Promotion- Use These Vital SEO Techniques on Your CPA Website Design
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011Many accounting firms hold off until their site is published before thinking about steps they can take to better market it, and this is a terrible irony. There are a selection of very crucial steps your firm can take throughout the design phase that can pay impressive dividends in the long run. Your firm’s CPA website design can be perfect down to the last detail and still be a complete failure. In order to make cash the proper prospective clients need to be able to locate your site in the right moment, and the most reliable way to achieve this is to get an improved ranking in Google.
Meta Tags: Your Page Title
Meta tags are an important part of your CPA website design procedure, and the most relevant meta tag is called a page “title”. The search engines will ignore everything after the first 70 characters so keep your Title tag short, concise, and to the point. As a CPA firm you’re going to want your title tag to include your market and some primary keyword. You’ll want it to look something like this:
MyTown, ST CPA: Firm Name
You’ll notice that in this example we used “ST” as the abbreviation for your state. When writing page titles keep in mind that very few searchers actually write out the name of their state, so as a rule it’s best to optimize your page to the abbreviation.
Title tags do appear in the margin of most browsers, and as a result many web noobs want their firm name to figure prominently in their page title. This is almost always a huge mistake. Titles are a primary element of a pages relevance to a specific search term so unless your firm has a recognizable brand like “Netflix” or “Kelly Clarkson” it’s not likely to actually be used as a search term by people looking for your service. Also, your firm name is probably not a terribly competitive phrase. If you only get 70 characters to describe your page do you really want to spend them on your firm name? Unless there are 10 other firms with exactly the same name it’s pretty likely you’ll be able to get on the first page for that search term without any trouble. Keywords like “accountant” and “CPA” are highly competitive, as is the name of most towns. You’re going to have to work hard to get listed for these keywords so use your title tags to get a leg up on them.
Description Tags
The “Page Description” is also a meta tag, and it’s rather like the red-headed stepchild to the “Page Title”. Google doesn’t use it to rank sites anymore so a lot of CPA website designs ignore it, and this is a mistake because Gooogle actually displays this tag as part of it’s search results. This makes a good page description an important factor in converting an impression into a click-through. Again… Google isn’t going to let you go nuts on your description. There’s a 150 character limit so make it short and sweet but, like a headline, enticing enough to get people to want to read more.
Traffic Tracking
Tracking software allows you to monitor the activities of visitors to your site and Google analytics, while free, is the best tracking program you can get. It will tell you how many visitors you got, how long they stayed, which pages they visited, and much… much more. Google Analytics also has the ability to show you what keyword phrases people used to find pages of your site. This product has so many advantages that I would make it mandatory for you to have if you are looking to improve the position or ranking of your site in the search engines. All you need to do to make it work is add a strip of code to the bottom of each page.
With Google Analytics, you can find out the location of your page viewers down to the town through the individuals IP address. The product can even help you decide where you might need advertise more or ease off. Not sold? It’s much easier to add this system to your CPA website during the design process so PLEASE take the time to find out a little more.
Cliche of the Day: Content IS King
Meta tags in and of themselves used to be enough to get a CPA website good rankings, but scores of meta driven sites began to crop up with truly terrible content. This resulted in pages of spammy irrelevant content appearing at the top of search pages and Google quickly changed their algorithm. The search engine robots have become very sophisticated and can easily compare a pages tags to it’s visible text and make sure they match.
To demonstrate to Google that your tags and content are relevant to one another use the keywords in your title tag prominently and often on your page. Don’t overdue it. The best way to optimize the page is to NOT worry too much about optimize the page. Shoot for about a 1% keyword density, so if your page is 500 words try to use each keyword in your title about 5 times.
Keyword placement is also a relevant factor. Keywords used in the introductory and/or closing paragraphs look particularly prominent to search engines. So do keywords that appear in headers, boldface, and italic fonts.
A Good Start
This won’t be over yet, it’s just the start. No matter how search engine friendly your practice’s CPA website design is you’ll have a country mile to walk if you really want to rank well in today’s competitive market. You’ll have to do a bit of serious “off-site” search engine optimization by getting as many “backlinks” as you can, and you’ll have to improve your position on Google Places by claiming your business and asking your clients to give your business a lot of good reviews. If you follow these easy CPA website design secrets, however, you’ll be on just the right track to succeed.