Usually accounting and CPA firms have little option but to take advantage of website templates to get their firms a website. Custom websites are preposterously expensive. Not a lot of small firms can sincerely be expected to create a site from scratch. You need coders, design professionals, copy writers… you should expect to pay thousands and wait three to 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.
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.
The problems templates often have are:
- Dumbed Down Meta Tags
- Use of Duplicate Content
- Use 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. Others have not, and are still selling templates that are not adequate to proper “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. Google can identify this, and they don’t have much respect for sites composed entirely of “duplicate 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.
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 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. A first class website needs to be well designed inside and out. Being good looking, content rich, and easy to navigate is important but it’s also important that the site can be properly optimized for the search engines. 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.
Take the time to contact template providers individuals separately for answers regarding their products treatment of these features. I wish I could say, “you get what you pay for” but I’m afraid that’s not even true. There are some very expensive “premium” accounting website templates that are actually pretty lousy in terms of their SEO potential. If your vendor hasn’t specifically addressed all three of these issues Google won’t be likely to take your site seriously. Now and then this isn’t a big deal. If you’ve got the only CPA or accounting firm in your market with a website you can likely do acceptably without optimizing your website, but keep these factors in mind when assessing the value versus the expense. An accounting website template that can never be optimized to the search engines will likely be an immense liability to your practice in the end if your circumstances should change.
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