Most CPA practices wait until their site is published before considering things they can do to better market it, and this is a big misjudgment. There are a selection of very critical steps your business can take throughout the design stage that will pay impressive dividends in time. Your company’s CPA website design can be perfectly executed and nonetheless be a complete failure. In order to make wealth the correct prospective clients need to be able to find your site at just the right moment, and the correct way to do that is to get an excellent ranking in Google’s search results.
Title Tags Matter
Meta tags are a vital element of your CPA website design operation, and the single most important 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 Accounting: Firm Name
In this example, of course, “ST” is the abbreviation for your state.
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. 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. Stick to your town, your state, and a primary keyword like “CPA”.
Descriptions Matter
Back in September of 2009, Google announced that they do not use the meta description tag in their ranking of websites, but they often still display it on their results page. This actually makes age descriptions really important since they are often the first impression searchers get of your firm. A good search ranking won’t help you as much if you have a lame description that costs you clicks! 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.
Tracking With Google Analytics
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. 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. 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.
Content
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. Make sure it looks and reads well, but as a rule you want a keyword density of about 1%.
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. So do keywords that appear in headers, boldface, and italic fonts.
The Road to Success
After your accounting website is published you’ll still have a lot more work ahead of you. If you don’t follow these elementary guidelines, however, you’ll presently find you’re working substantially harder to get the same results. After your design is published you’ll want to begin bringing in backlinks, and you’ll want to learn how to market your site on Google Places. If you observe these easy CPA website design pointers, though, you’ll be spot on just the right track to success.