If you are a financial services provider, your website is your first point of contact with prospective clients as well as how you position yourself as an expert in your niche. People will not be willing to trust you with their money or financial decision-making if your website does not convey professionalism and expertise and you will find it very difficult to attract new clientele if you don’t take care of some basic web design and SEO fundamentals. With that in mind, below are 5 tips for building a great financial services website.
Recommend Related Non-Competitive Services
If you are running a financial services website, it is always nice if you can recommend other services that are non-competitive with your own that might turn your visitors and clients on to worthwhile investment opportunities. There are plenty of review sites out there that do great roundups of weekly picks and investment services that, depending on your niche, might make a nice addition to what you offer visitors to your site.
Make sure that, whatever you recommend to your visitors, is something you would use yourself. Whatever you suggest to people will affect your reputation, and your reputation is everything in financial services. Do your due diligence before agreeing to partner with or support and third parties.
One Call to Action Per Page Building a Great Financial Services Website
Regardless of whether your website is offering products or services, visitors and customers need to be induced to buy. People often arrive with a vague intention to purchase or find out more about your products. So, use your services, but a gentle, though explicit prompt strategically located can make all the difference. Your CTAs, or calls to action, are those prompts and they should be used throughout your site. So, though ideally just once per page.
Place a call to action where you believe you have given your visitors a value proposition. I.e., you have let them know what they stand to gain by using your services. This could be information about what kind of services you offer. Following a series of customer testimonials verifying your expertise and authority. After an explanation of who you are and what your financial background is. So a great strategy for building a financial website.
Responsive Design
Responsive design is not a financial services-specific feature. It is a universally necessary one that all modern websites need to have. Mobile web traffic is now the majority of all web traffic. This means more people are likely to see and browsing your site using a mobile phone than a desktop.
If you want people who arrive at your site to stay on it. So, you need to ensure their browsing experience is tailored to the specific screen they are using to view your content. Responsive design best practices include using font sizes and colors that display well on smaller screens. Making sure that images and other media are compressed and optimized for phone screens.
Page Load Times Building a Great Financial Services Website
Your page load time is something you will want to pay close attention to. Especially as you build out your site and add more elements and media to it. The more media-heavy a page is, the longer it typically takes to load. If that media is not optimized for fast load times; You could end up losing potential customers. This is no because people will find your products. So, services lacking, but because the average web user has very little patience for sites that take more than a few seconds to appear in front of them.
It is always a good idea to pay close attention to page speed analytics like average page load time. Which tells you how long it takes for the browser. So, hand navigation control over to the user after they have clicked on a link. Arrived at a landing page. If people consistently come to your site and leave because of poorly optimized page load times. Your bounce rate will increase (the rate at which people arrive and then promptly leave your site). Which Google will likely interpret as a sign of inferior quality, meaning you will appear lower in the search engine results.
Your Blog Building a Great Financial Services Website
If you are selling a service, people want to know that you are an expert in the field and trustworthy. One of the ways most professional service websites does this is through their blog. Your blog is where you get to show visitors that you have reasoned. Insightful opinions about industry trends and news and where you can also work the marketing of your products and/or services into your articles.
Blog writing is also one of the principal components of your SEO as this is where you make use of the targeted keywords you are trying to rank for to increase your organic traffic. The basic formula is: 1) find out which relevant keywords people are searching when they look for similar services, 2) determine which of those keywords you stand a chance to rank for, 3) design content around those keywords, and 4) find a way to market your business within that content, driving people to your products and services.
Conclusion
Whether you already have a website up and running that could use a makeover or you are just starting to establish your online presence, the above considerations and online business realities should be high on your list of things to incorporate into your web design. An attractive, functional site that looks good on various screens, communicates professionalism, and entices people to want to find out more about your services is how you will rise above the competition as a financial services provider.
