This article will discuss a couple of tips to help better your website’s internet profile while you’re still in the design stage. Your company’s CPA website design can be consummate down to the last detail and yet be a total failure. To earn capital the proper prospective clients need to be capable of finding your site at exactly the right time, and the most reliable way to achieve this is to acquire a first-rate position in the search engines.
Title Tags Matter
Meta tags are a vital component of any CPA website design process, and the most authoritative meta tag is called a page’s “Title”. The search engines will ignore everything after the first 70 characters so keep your Title tag short, concise, and to the point. I’d recommend using some variation on this title tag:
Town, ST Accounting: Practice 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.
A firm name isn’t usually a strong enough brand for people to just type in, so insisting on putting the firm name first is usually a foolish vanity. Very few accounting firms have the same kind of brand recognition as “McRib” or the kind of search frequency that “Jenifer Lopez” might have. It’s also something of a waste to use your title on words that nobody else is competing for. For most firms ther name just isn’t on anybodies keyword hot list. 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.
Page Descriptions
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.
Track Your Traffic
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. If a visitor comes in from a search it will tell you what keywords they used to find you, which page the search landed them on, and whether they stayed long enough to read it or just “bounced” back to the search page. The amount of information provided by this product makes it an absolute must for any serious CPA website design. Even if you don’t use it right away I can guarantee at some point you’re going to want exactly the kind of conversion data that Google Analytics offers. 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. This can help you determine where your marketing dollars are returning value, and where you might be wasting money. For more information on Google Analytics and what it can do for you, just type “google analytics” in a Google search.
Content is King
Good meta tags won’t help you unless the tags on each page are actually relevant to the content on their respective pages. 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.
Google is hip to all the dirty tricks that spammers used to rely on like cramming the page with keywords, using tiny text, writing hidden text on the same colored background, etc, so don’t even waste your time trying to be clever. You need to take the time to write some good, high quality content that will demonstrate to Google that the page is truly relevant to the title by using your title tag keywords in the text. Don’t go too crazy. Google can also recognize “keyword stuffing” and will discount the page if it has too many keywords in 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. If they see keywords in headers they tend to assume they are more relevant. The same is true of keywords found in opening paragraphs or in the article summary at the very end of the page. They look at keywords in highlighted fonts like boldface and italics. They even consider the relevance of other pages on the site that link to the one they’re ranking.
The Road to Success
After your CPA website design is posted you’ll still have some more work ahead of you. You’ll really have to do some organic optimization by hustling up as many backlinks as you can, and you’ll want to improve your position in the local search results by claiming your business and getting your clients and friends to leave your company numerous good reviews. If you observe these fundamental CPA website design tricks, however, you’ll be on precisely the right track to success.