Boost Your Financial Website’s Traffic and Quality With SEO
You may be wondering if you need Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a financial website. The answer is that any website can benefit from SEO.
Optimizing your site to make it more discoverable by search engines and people who use them will save you time and money. It brings targeted visitors directly to your doorstep. Instead of selling to the masses, you will get more visitors who are actively looking for your services. There’s no need for the hard sell when you make it easy enough for the right people to find you.
But you need more than SEO. While SEO brings visitors to your website, you then need a great-looking, usable, and useful site to convert them into customers.
More About Search Engine Optimization
SEO is no longer about cramming your website with as many keywords and keyphrases as you can fit on the screen. This is a good thing. The changes to SEO and how search engines operate mean that the focus is firmly on creating positive, valuable experiences for web users. Optimizing your site for search engines means creating content that your ideal audience would like to see and delivering it in a way that helps this existing audience find you.
If you focus on quality content, rather than looking for ways to trick the system, you will be rewarded with better rankings.
SEO is More Than Keywords and Page Titles
Trust and reputation are of major importance in the financial industry. You need to convince your visitors that they will be safe if they do business with your firm and that you know and care about their needs.
Many of your visitors will come from referrals. They may have no knowledge of how well you are doing according to Google. Like everyone else who visits your website, from any source, ultimately they will be deciding whether to do business with you based on the quality, usefulness, and usability of your site, all of which are considered when you embark upon SEO.
Image Matters
In short, you need your website to look the part. The content of your site is critical and everyone knows the saying about how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but in those first seconds of seeing your website, your visitors will make decisions about the trustworthiness of your business and how they feel about doing business with you.
Think about the qualities you want people to take from your business and make sure that your site is saying the same thing. Your website should display your branding clearly and consistently. It needs to look professional and considered.
For a financial website, you might want a design that appears solid, grounded, and dependable. Alternatively, you might look for a design that is modern and forward-looking.
Yes, the information you provide via web content is important, but so is making an impression. Don’t cut corners with your web design or your visitors may not stay on your site long enough to read more than a couple of your well-crafted sentences.
Note also that Google has staff to provide the human touch when it comes to assessing websites for quality. Make sure you look your best when Google comes to town.
Think Fast
We’ve established that your visitors will make an evaluation of your page within seconds. This applies even if your page takes more than a few seconds to load. According to KissMetrics, 4 out of 10 web users will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Take 3 seconds to let that statistic sink in.
If your site doesn’t load quickly, you could be losing almost half of your hard-earned traffic. There are lots of cold sweat-inducing statistics like this on the web. Optimizing your pages so that they load more quickly is a big deal.
You can achieve fast page loading speeds by paying for quality, dedicated hosting, but that won’t necessarily save you if your site is poorly designed. One way to make your pages load more quickly is to make the file sizes of your images as small as possible. It can take some skill to do this without sacrificing the quality of your images, but it’s worth doing to provide the best experience possible for your visitors, who are increasingly using mobile devices to perform searches.
If your site isn’t loading within a couple of seconds, it might be worth seeking help to check your code and optimize your images. A professional will be able to help you achieve fast page loading without sacrificing the quality of your visuals.
The speed of your site affects how usable it is. Thus, it also affects your ranking on Google.
Get Mobile
Ever tried surfing the web on a mobile device? At times, this can be the definition of frustrating. This is less and less frequently the case, however, as more businesses catch on to the fact that people like to use the internet while on the move.
As mobile technology improves, and becomes cheaper, more people are taking to the net while way from home or the office. At the end of 2016, mobile usage of the internet surpassed desktop usage. Making sure that your site works on mobile devices is essential if you want to compete in almost any industry.
Google’s algorithms favor sites that are mobile ready.
Provide Proper Navigation
Imagine a bricks-and-mortar financial institution with pillars and steps and banners announcing great deals for new customers. Now imagine that inside the building are dozens of corridors and hundreds of doors, none of which are labeled. What would be the result?
Proper navigation helps your users find what they are looking for. If people don’t know where to look for what they need, they will click away.
There are various navigational structures for websites. Navigation needs some planning to make sure that all the parts of your site are clearly identified and within easy reach.
Just as people need to be able to find their way around your website, so do Google’s spiders. If there are dead ends, broken links, or pages that are hard to find on your website, Google may take longer to index them or they may not be indexed at all. Provide coherent navigation and a thoughtful navigational structure so you don’t lose visitors when they arrive on your website.
High-Quality Content
To attract potential customers, creating and sharing high-quality content should be a major part of your marketing plan.
People often ask whether they should be creating content for people or for machines, i.e., Google. The answer is that you can do both. If your content satisfies Google’s requirements for a Google-friendly site, you’ll be satisfying your potential customers as well as Google’s spiders and algorithms.