If your website is lacking traffic, consider adding personalized, interactive content that complements your SEO strategy.
By Chase Neinken
PPersonal finance is personal. But too often, when consumers seek financial guidance before making a major purchase, they often turn to Google first, rather than their financial institution. This is a missed opportunity for banks to convert potential borrowers into loyal customers.
A strong conversion strategy starts even before potential customers land on your bank’s website. That’s why banks benefit when they focus on attracting the right people to their institution’s website and engaging them well enough to create a lasting relationship with the customer.
Here’s what banks need to do to increase qualified conversions on their digital channels:
Consider your SEO strategy
Before the days of high-speed Internet, if someone had questions about a loan, they would probably visit their local bank branch. Nowadays, they often turn to Google. Therefore, your bank’s search engine optimization strategy is crucial.
Making sure your bank website is SEO friendly will increase web traffic and help your site rank higher in search engine results. Appearing in search engine results is critical because when consumers have an important decision to make, many turn to the Internet. In fact, a Pew Research survey reveals that 81 percent of consumers trust their own research before making a major life decision, and that research most often begins online.
To improve search engine rankings, most organizations produce written content, such as informative articles or a step-by-step list of keywords that consumers use in their search. However, the average consumer’s attention span is about eight seconds, which means a lengthy article probably won’t keep you interested for long. On the other hand, interactive content that is optimized for search engines is more likely to engage website visitors and hold their attention.
Financial calculators are a form of interactive content that consumers are looking for. In fact, more than 2 million consumers in the US search for financial calculators every day. That’s three-quarters of a billion people every year, and it’s growing. However, financial calculators are nothing new, as most bank websites now offer them.
The problem is that most calculator pages on bank websites provide zero SEO value.
Think about the questions a potential customer might be asking or researching on Google:
How much house can I afford? Should I refinance? How much money should I save for retirement?
Banks should edit and optimize the copy within their calculator pages to align with the most used search terms. Additionally, banks should consider supplementing their SEO efforts with paid search. To help increase website traffic and make the most of your bank’s marketing budget, it’s worth boosting your calculator pages with paid search, with the goal of driving more visitors directly to a highly personalized experience and keeping them there. interested in your site longer.
Make every website visit personalized
Now that your bank is attracting more website visitors, the next step is to personalize every interaction. This requires creating content that is relevant to each consumer and their unique financial situation.
However, there is no real way to really know what your website visitors’ finances look like when they land on your bank’s site. The good news is that 83% of consumers are willing to share their data in exchange for a more personalized experience, according to Accenture.
You just have to give your website visitors the opportunity to provide that more personalized experience through interactive content. Financial calculators are an ideal way to do this. By collecting information from visitors, such as their monthly savings budget and savings goal, for example, your bank can guide each potential customer to the right product, like a new savings account. This also makes it easy to capture the demographics of the visitors your site attracts and what they are most searching for. All of these insights will help your bank optimize their website and ultimately increase online conversions.
Inspire visitors to take action
Attracting and engaging website visitors is just the beginning, as the ultimate goal is to win new customers. After interacting with website content, inspire web visitors to take action with a strong call to action (CTA). Banks need to determine what the next steps should be, such as asking website visitors to share their email address or phone number so the sales team can follow up.
Keep in mind that interactive content is also a great way to pre-qualify potential customers. When website visitors share details about their financial situation and seek specific answers, banks can be sure that the consumer intends to move on, either now or in the near future. These aren’t just random visitors that have landed on your site, so be sure to treat them as such. In some scenarios, an appropriate call-to-action will encourage visitors to open an online account or complete an online loan application.
A website to win
The ideal way to attract new potential customers is for them to figuratively “walk in” to your online branch on their own. They start by asking questions online, they discover your site, and then it’s up to you to show them why your bank is a perfect fit for their needs.
Your bank’s website should inspire web visitors to take action. If your website is lacking traffic, or people are visiting your website but not converting, consider adding personalized, interactive content that complements your SEO strategy. Not only does this approach provide valuable guidance for consumers based on their unique financial goals, it also gives your bank meaningful data to create a predictable and scalable lead generation funnel to grow your customer base. In this scenario, everyone wins.
Chase Neinken is a co-founder of Chimney.
