If your website lacks traffic, consider adding personalized and interactive content to complement your SEO strategy.
By Chase Neinken
ppersonal finance is personal. But all too often, when consumers seek financial guidance before making a major purchase, they often turn to Google first, instead of their financial institution. This is a missed opportunity for banks to convert potential borrowers into loyal customers.
A solid conversion strategy starts before potential customers even land on your bank’s website. That’s why banks benefit when they focus on getting the right people to their institution’s website and engaging them well enough to create a lasting customer relationship.
Here’s what banks should 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 probably visited their local bank branch. Today, 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 your web traffic and help you rank higher in search engine results. Showing up 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% of consumers trust their own research before making a major life decision, and that research most often begins on the Internet.
To improve search engine rankings, most organizations produce written content such as informative articles or a step list of keywords that consumers use in their search. However, the average consumer’s attention span is about eight seconds, which means a long article probably won’t keep them engaged for long. On the other hand, interactive content optimized for search engines is more likely to attract website visitors and capture 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 growing. However, financial calculators are nothing new, as most banking websites offer them today.
The problem is that most calculator pages on bank websites offer 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 on their calculator pages to align with the most commonly used search terms. Additionally, banks should consider supplementing their SEO efforts with paid search. To help increase website traffic and get the most out of your bank’s marketing budget, it’s worth boosting your calculator pages with paid search, with the goal of bringing more visitors directly to an experience highly personalized and keep them engaged on your site for longer.
Make every website visit personal
Now that your bank is driving 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’s no real way to really know what your website visitors’ finances are like when they arrive at your bank’s site. The good news is that 83 percent of consumers are willing to share their data in exchange for a more personalized experience, according to Accenture.
Just 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, such as a new savings account. This also makes it easy to capture the demographics of the visitors your site attracts and what they’re most searching for. All these statistics will help your bank optimize its website and ultimately increase online conversions.
Inspire visitors to take action
Attracting and capturing website visitors is just the beginning, as the ultimate goal is to get new customers. After interacting with website content, inspire web visitors to take action with a strong call to action (CTA). Banks should 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 leads. When website visitors share details about their financial situation and seek specific answers, banks can be confident that the consumer intends to move forward, either now or in the near future. These aren’t just random visitors who landed on your site, so make sure you treat them as such. In some scenarios, an appropriate CTA will encourage visitors to open an online account or complete an online loan application.
A website for the win
The ideal way to attract new potential customers is for them to figuratively “walk into” your online branch on their own. They start by asking questions online, discover your site, and then it’s up to you to show them why your bank is the perfect fit for their needs.
Your bank’s website should inspire visitors to take action. If your website is lacking traffic, or if people are visiting your website but not converting, consider adding personalized and interactive content to complement your SEO strategy. This approach not only provides valuable guidance for consumers based on their unique financial goals, but also provides your bank with meaningful data to build 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.
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