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So, you’ve overhauled your website with a bright new look and feel, some fresh images, and a revised color palette. You can officially sit back and relax because that’s going to draw the attraction of new customers from all over your market… right?
Here’s a secret — although all of the work you’ve done is critical to presenting your financial institution in the most positive way, there’s so much more you can do to enhance its digital presence and make the money and time you’ve put into the project truly pay off.
(If you’re thinking about a new website redesign right now, this info is for you, too).
Now, let’s take a closer look at six ways you can optimize your newly redesigned website to increase online visibility, engagement, and leads for your financial institution.
The new look of your redesigned website is often the main focus of any redesign project. We often hear from financial marketers that the primary goal of their redesign was to give the website a more modern, updated look since the previous version had been around for a while and felt “dated”. Having a modern design is definitely important to ensure the bank’s digital presence is representing the institution as a credible and competitive organization. However, the aesthetics of a website don’t help increase online visibility, traffic, and leads.
Google uses a lot of variables to determine which websites appear on the first page of search results for a particular search query or keyword.
Many elements that help Google understand and prioritize your website ahead of another financial institution in search results may have been addressed during the website redesign process. This is often true of many technical elements that are best practices for search engine optimization, including mobile-friendliness and Core Web Vitals.
So can you check SEO off your to-do list once the website is redesigned? Nope.
Think of SEO like a farm, the more work you put into maintaining and optimizing the farm, the greater the yield. During the initial redesign process you’ll want to address the following elements at a minimum to ensure the website is optimized for search engines:
Once these items are knocked out, ongoing optimization is needed to maintain and improve organic visibility, traffic, and leads from search engines like Google. Ongoing SEO efforts for your bank website should include the following at a minimum:
SEO is an investment that yields exponential results over time and should be given as much consideration as the website design. After all, what good is a shiny new website if prospects aren’t finding it!
In a nutshell, conversion rate optimization (CRO) means doing everything you can to get as many visitors to your shiny new website to do exactly what you want them to do when they visit. Along with Google Analytics, Google Optimize can help you improve lead generation—which could range from asking for more info, downloading content, requesting a demo, opening an account or any other action you’d like your website visitor to complete.
For example, if you have a page that describes your best checking account, you want everyone who reads about it to tap or click the Open an Account button you’ve also added to that page. (You do have one there, right? If not, go add that first.)
Here’s what you’ll want to do next:
For example, is most of your traffic organic (stemming from solid search engine optimization), or does it come from pay-per-click advertising? Are your live chats, emails, and social posts driving site visits? You might be surprised at where your traffic is coming from—and how it may differ from page to page.
However, don’t add a form for the sake of adding a form. Make sure your forms go hand-in-hand with the page content as well as a call-to-action that won’t scare people away. For example, rather than a lengthy account opening form (something that can be handled with a simple button that’s much less intimidating to a prospect), you could add a simple “Want More Information?” form to each of your current account or product pages. Similarly, a simple subscription form can be added to your news, blog, and financial education pages—a soft-sell approach to getting new prospects in the pipeline.
We’ve already mentioned content in brief, but let’s take a moment to dive into the types of content your financial institution can provide. In addition to product and services descriptions, there’s so much more that can drive prospects to your site—even if they’re not in the market for a new bank or credit union.
Most FIs have basic product descriptions on their website, but to outrank competitors with similar products you’ll need to go further. Think of each page on your website as the first and last impression a prospect will have with your bank or credit union. It’s crucial that all product pages are descriptive enough to answer all the questions a prospect might have about the product, what it can do for them, and also why your FI is their best option.
Increasing online visibility and engagement with your product pages should be a primary objective for your 24/7 branch, but keep in mind there are only so many people in your market searching for financial products and services. There is a great deal more who are searching online for help with managing their personal or business finances. Educational content written specifically for your target audiences and your target geographic markets offers even the smallest financial institutions the opportunity for exponential visibility and engagement online. If you’re not already blogging, you should be.
By producing content that is original, localized, and educational, your financial institution is building credibility with customers, prospects, and Google. This type of content is the fuel that makes all of your digital marketing channels more effective: organic, email, social, and even advertising.
Want to stay top-of-mind with prospects or customers who aren’t hitting your website every week? An email automation campaign will allow you to deliver focused information directly to their inboxes—at whatever cadence you’d like.
Let’s say you’ve been able to gather contact details through website visits, resource downloads, or contact forms. That information is like gold. Now’s your chance to tailor campaigns to individual groups of people based on exactly where they are in the customer journey.
How can marketing automation enhance your FI’s website?
Here are a few examples of “set-it-and-forget-it” email automation:
The possibilities are endless, but the goal is simple: personalized and timely communications with your target audiences.
Any time you redesign a website, the majority of work actually goes into what your site visitors can’t see. So, it’s as important to maintain the technical integrity of your website, its code, and other back-end features that help search engines crawl your site and, subsequently, rank you against other similar sites.
In today’s world, people access websites on computers, phones, watches, and even tools like Amazon Alexa. That means it’s more important than ever to make sure you’ve optimized the metadata of your website— code that helps search engines interpret key page content like images, addresses, headings, titles, and more. We often find financial websites have completely generic metadata, limiting their visibility in search engine results.
Here are two other ways to give your site a quick checkup:
“No matter what analytics platform you use—Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Piwik, Clicky, and so on—there is some kind of site-wide code these platforms use to track how users interact with your site,” said Direct Online’s Jonathan Bentz. “Without it, analytics tools have no way of recording traffic data.”
While you’re at it, review user engagement, too. In addition to analytics, you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking things like conversion events, automation, and pixels (little bits of code that let you gather details about what your site visitors are doing on a particular page.)
Here are a few more ways to optimize your site for all users:
Make your website responsive. Ever looked at a website that looks great at work, but terrible on your phone or tablet? That means it wasn’t built with responsive design in mind. If your site is hard to read or navigate across devices, people aren’t going to use it—especially when it comes to mobile banking and similar account services. Responsive design is also important from a generational perspective, as millennials and Gen Z prospects and customers alike tend to use smartphones to go online with much more frequency than past generations.
Backlinks are simply links that go from one website to another, but they mean the world when it comes to your FI’s online credibility with search engines like Google.
If you link to, say, FDIC.gov, they have a backlink from your financial institution. And, if you got them to link to you, you’d have a backlink from them. That’s a good thing since the FDIC is an extremely credible website that Google already views as authoritative.
“Search engines like Google see backlinks as votes of confidence,” said Ahref.com’s Joshua Hardwick. “Generally speaking, the more votes your web pages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries.”
And, the more “votes” you have, the higher you’ll rank and the more visibility your site will have when people are searching for specific products, features, or services. So, the more quality backlinks you can accumulate, the better off you’ll be. Here are a few ways to increase backlinking.
Website redesigns (and post-design optimization) don’t have to be scary or overwhelming. Whether you’re just thinking about a refresh or want to make sure your existing website generates more engagement with prospects, contact us at BankBound for help or specific ideas to support your digital presence. Talk with a digital strategist to get a digital marketing analysis of your financial institution today!
