For financial service providers, your website serves as both your initial greeting to potential clients and a platform to showcase your niche expertise. A website that lacks professionalism and expertise will deter individuals from entrusting you with their financial matters, making it challenging to attract new clients. This is especially true if basic web design and SEO principles are neglected. With that in mind, here are 5 tips to create an outstanding financial services website:
Suggesting Complementary Non-Competitive Services
When managing a financial services website, recommending non-competitive services can be beneficial, as it can introduce your visitors and clients to valuable investment prospects. Numerous review sites provide excellent weekly picks and investment services that, depending on your niche, could complement your site’s offerings.
Prioritize recommending services you would personally use, as your recommendations directly impact your reputation, a crucial asset in the financial services industry. Conduct thorough due diligence before partnering with or endorsing any third parties.
One Call to Action Per Page: A Key to a Great Financial Services Website
Whether your website focuses on products or services, prompting visitors and customers to take action is crucial. While visitors often arrive with a general intent to purchase or gather information, a subtle yet clear prompt strategically placed on your website can significantly influence their decision-making. These prompts, known as CTAs (calls to action), should be strategically positioned throughout your site, ideally once per page.
Place a call to action where you’ve effectively conveyed your value proposition, showcasing the benefits of utilizing your services. This could be after detailing your services, following client testimonials that highlight your expertise and credibility, or after explaining your background and experience in finance. This strategic placement of CTAs is instrumental in developing an effective financial website.
The Importance of Responsive Design
Responsive design is a universal requirement for all contemporary websites, not just those in the financial services sector. Given that mobile web traffic now constitutes the majority of all web traffic, it’s more probable for people to access your site on a mobile device than a desktop.
To ensure visitors remain engaged on your site, optimize their browsing experience by tailoring it to their specific screen size. Implement Responsive design best practices, including using legible font sizes and colors on smaller screens and optimizing images and media for mobile display.
Page Load Times: A Critical Aspect of a Great Financial Services Website
Page load time is crucial, especially as you expand your site with more elements and media. Media-rich pages tend to load slower, particularly if the media isn’t optimized for fast loading. Neglecting this aspect could lead to customer loss, not due to inadequate products or services, but because the typical web user has limited patience for websites that take more than a few seconds to load.
Monitoring page speed analytics like average page load time, which measures the time taken for the browser to grant navigation control to the user after clicking a link or landing on a page, is recommended. Consistently slow page load times can increase your bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your site shortly after arriving), signaling inferior quality to Google and potentially lowering your search engine ranking.
Leveraging Your Blog for a Great Financial Services Website
When selling a service, establishing yourself as a trustworthy expert is vital, and a blog can effectively achieve this. Your blog serves as a platform to demonstrate your well-informed Insightful opinions on industry trends and news while subtly marketing your products or services within your articles.
Furthermore, blog writing plays a crucial role in SEO by incorporating targeted keywords to enhance your organic traffic. The strategy involves identifying relevant keywords potential clients use when searching for similar services, selecting keywords you can realistically rank for, creating content around those keywords, and seamlessly integrating your business within the content to attract customers to your products and services.
Conclusion
Whether you’re revamping an existing website or establishing your online presence, the aforementioned considerations and online business realities should be prioritized in your web design. By creating an appealing website that is functional site that looks good across various devices, conveys professionalism, and motivates visitors to explore your services, you can effectively stand out from the competition in the financial services industry.