Lots of accounting businesses hold off until their site is posted before thinking about things they can do to better promote it, and this is a horrendous irony. There are several enormously critical steps your practice can take while you’re still in the design process that will pay outstanding dividends in time. Having the best CPA website design around isn’t really going to help you one iota if nobody finds it, and the proper way to get your accounting site to the right prospects at the right point in time is to acquire an improved ranking in Google.

Title Tags Matter

Meta tags are a central component of any CPA website design operation, and the single most significant 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:

Your Town, ST CPA: Practice Name

In this example, of course, “ST” is the abbreviation for your state.

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. 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. 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! Keep your description tag below 150 characters or Google won’t display the whole thing or may not even use it at all.

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. 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. 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. It’s easy to install. A simple strip of tracking code on the bottom of each page is all it takes.

Google Analytics offers a lot of market research factors that most site owners never use, but as an accountant you’ll very likely see some value in it. For example, you can use IP addresses to get a pretty good idea what nearby towns your visitors are coming from. 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.

Cliche of the Day: 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.

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 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%.

The search engines won’t just count your keywords. They also consider the placement of your keywords on the page. 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.

A Good Start

Once your CPA website design is public you still have some more work ahead of you. If you dismiss these minimal principles, however, you’ll presently find you’re working significantly harder to get acceptable results. Once your site is public you’ll need to begin hustling up links, and you’ll need to figure out how to promote your site on “Google Places”. If you comply with these fundamental CPA website design secrets, though, you’ll be spot on exactly the right track to succeed.