5 Tips to Improve Financial Services Website Conversion

Your website is the gateway to attracting prospects to your financial business. This is true whether you’re a personal accountant, bookkeeper or lender.

Having a business website is the key to converting prospects into customers – or at least, it should be. If your site is suffering from low to non-existent conversion rates, there’s something you can do about it.

So rather than sitting around and waiting for things to improve, you can take a proactive approach to your marketing efforts.

Let’s review five ways you can boost conversions on your financial services website.

1. Make Your Content Consumer-Focused

It’s common for a financial services website to boast about all of its stats, promises, and status in the industry. Most believe high credentials is what converts prospects.

But the truth of the matter is it doesn’t. In a sense, everyone is selfish, so you should focus on talking about the consumer and how they’ll benefit from doing business with you.

For instance, they’ll get lower interest rates, better loan terms or a higher loan amount. What consumers look for are deals and benefits, not features and numbers.

In a nutshell, your content should have a “you” mentality versus an “us” mentality. For example, you don’t want to say: “Our financial advisors have over 30 years of experience, various industry awards and can ensure the best outcome for our clients’ retirement.”

Instead, you should say something like: “You get direct access to financial advisors with over 30 years of experience, who can guide you towards financial security during retirement.”

Take a look at all of the pages on your website to ensure the correct approach is taken.

2. Add Value to Your Financial Services Website

When visitors come to your site, what do they get out of it? Are they constantly bombarded with promotions and ads? Or are you delivering real quality, such as data, information, and resources?

One way to turn your website into a financial resource is to add a blog. Then fill it with lots of relevant and valuable content. For instance, if you own a personal accounting firm, you can write content about filing taxes, types of deductions and so on.

The idea is to learn what questions your audience has and then offer answers via your blog. Consistently uploading fresh content to your site will continuously draw in more of the right traffic.

Now, there are different ways to learn about your audience’s wants and needs. One way is to visit forums and partake in conversations. See what questions and concerns they have that you can answer.

Create a blog post that answers these questions and then link to it in your forum comments. You can do the same on social media and blog comments.

Here are some more helpful tips to improve content creation:

Target specific topics, don’t be general
Include stats, graphs and other visual insights
Ensure it’s mobile-friendly
Invite guest bloggers to post on your blog
Relate the content to the needs of your audience

3. Build a Solid SEO Strategy

If you’re not already implementing SEO into your marketing strategy, then you’re leaving money on the table. How will your prospects find your financial services website if it’s not on the first pages of search engines?

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most widely used search engines. And it’s the first place consumers go to look for financial services and finance information. Through content marketing, you can target specific keywords your audience is using.

In turn, this will improve your ranking in search engines, making it easier for consumers to find it. Then if your titles and topics are on point, it will drive users to click on it.

From here, users will browse through your site for more information and possibly financial services. And this brings us to our next tip.

4. Use Actionable Language & Calls to Action

Once you drive traffic to your website, it’s important to tell them what to do next. Because if you fail to include calls to action, many simply won’t do anything. They’ll leave your site, possibly never to return.

Make sure your calls to action are clear, so visitors know exactly what to do. For example, “call now,” “request a quote,” or “subscribe.”

You should place these strategically throughout the site. For instance, above the fold, along the sidebar, and at the end of your content.

If it’s a landing page, then calls to action are best placed throughout the piece – beginning, middle and end. Never expect users to make it to the end of your content.

Actionable language is also a must in your blog content. You can include links to other pages or blog posts using phrases like “learn more about our financial services.”

5. Improve Security & Safety

Consumers today are tech-savvy, yet they’re very aware of how their data is being used. If they feel your website is insecure or has one too many bad reviews, then you can count on them heading elsewhere.

The internet makes it easier to find what we need, but it also helps hackers and thieves access our precious data. So it’s up to you to reassure your visitors their information is safe when making transactions or submitting documents through your site.

One way to do this is to showcase security certificates you have. For example Verisign, Geotrust, and Thawte. Once users see this, they’ll feel at ease with using your website.

The amount of security you need depends on the functions of your site. For instance, if you process credit card information or take applications with personal data, such as SSN, then you need proper security protocols in place.