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These days if you need your accounting and CPA company to produce you need a website. For a significant majority of firms this means considering “templates”. Custom websites are ridiculously pricey. Not a lot of small to medium sized firms can actually be expected to build a website from scratch. A great, content rich custom CPA or accounting website can cost a pretty big pile of cash to complete, whereas most templates sell for approximately fifty dollars a month.

So why would any accounting firm shell out thousands of dollars a month for SEO?

Website templates have been around for years and they’ve always been an inexpensive and effective alternatives to expensive custom sites, but they’ve traditionally had problems getting good rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. It’s a pretty common to trade off power for simplicity when designing software for “end users”. Template providers, however, in making their content management systems easy to use, often glossed over or ignored features that would make their templates more appealing to the search engines.

The problems templates often have are:

• Nerfed Meta Tag Settings
• Duplicate Content
• I-framed Pages

Back in the old days, when most markets hosted only a handful of accounting firms with websites, these problems could be overlooked, but today this is no longer the case. Fortunately some accounting website template providers have actually taken the time to develop content management systems that confront these shortcomings. 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…

All accounting website templates come with large amounts 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. This means to get a “standard” page to actually appear in the search results you need to modify the content of that page. In order to do this you need to be able to edit the content in the template, and not all providers let you do this. It’s vital to make sure that accounting website templates allow you to edit all your pages so you can make the important ones unique enough to get picked up as a search result. You don’t need to modify the entire site, but you do need to modify the pages you want the search engines to show people. You will certainly want to modify your home page, and if you have time modify your more important service pages.

Another common problem with templates is “universal meta tags”. 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.

The last problem traditionally associated with accounting website templates is also the hardest to identify. Many sites use a coding trick called IFrames, or inline frames, to deliver content to your website. 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.

When shopping around for accounting website templates it can be easy to be dazzled by pretty pictures and flashing animations. Before buying anything, though, take the time to look under the hood. You’ll need to dig a little to find out whether or not an accounting website template is SEO friendly or not. 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. For example it will often appear that a site has universal meta tag settings, when in fact the owner just hasn’t bothered to change the title of any of his pages.

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. If any one of these SEO features hasn’t been specifically addressed the template cannot be properly optimized. This might be passable for some companies in less competitive towns, but be sure you consider it when assessing the cost. An accounting website template that can never be optimized to search engines like Google could become an enormous liability to your company in the future if your circumstances should change.

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Tags: Accounting Website Templates, Marketing for CPAs, Search Engines, SEO