Proven Tips That Increase Organic Traffic to Your Financial Website
Increasing organic traffic to your site doesn’t have to rely purely on SEO tactics. You also don’t have to spend on ads and PPC to get more visitors to your site.
Financial websites have a much harder time getting to the top of search engine results because it involves topics that deal with people’s money and happiness. Google puts these websites under much tighter scrutiny to ensure that people only get the most accurate information.
Your website needs to have expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness before you can get to the first few pages of search results. This means that simple SEO strategies are not as effective. You’ll have to pour a lot of time and effort into increasing your website’s credibility in the eyes of both search engines and your target audience.
Let’s take a closer look at 8 proven strategies you can use to increase traffic to your site.
Optimize Your Site
Optimizing your website should be one of your top priorities. People won’t bother waiting more than a couple of seconds just to see what you’re offering, so make sure your pages load up quickly. It should also be mobile friendly since roughly half of the world’s web traffic occurs on mobile devices.
Audit and update your on-page SEO to make sure search engines can properly understand what your content is all about. You may have valuable information on your site that is not properly referenced and is just going to waste.
Focus on Your Content Strategy
When it comes to establishing a new brand and building up your website’s credibility, the best thing you can do is to focus on the quality of your content. Each piece you put out should provide lots of value to the reader. It should answer questions that your target audience are asking. On top of it all, it should all be written well and interesting to read.
The quality of your content is a direct reflection of how your company does business. If you just put out poorly written content just to target specific keywords, you’re also wasting the opportunities to earn people’s trust.
Keep in mind, simply increasing traffic to your site doesn’t guarantee higher conversions. You should make the most out of every website visit and make sure they leave with a positive impression of your brand.
Think Local
Focusing on a solid local SEO strategy lets you target a much smaller audience, but these local individuals are also more likely to do business with someone who is nearby. There’s little point in trying to market to people who are on the other side of the country, especially in the financial services industry. People will always choose a business they can easily reach and meet with face-to-face when it comes to important matters like their money and their health.
When you’re on top of your local SEO strategy, you’ll be more visible to people in your area. People are always searching for nearby businesses, and they’ll want to see all your details in an instant.
You can start by claiming your Google Business and Yelp pages so people can see that you’re a legitimate business. These pages will also show user reviews about your business, which helps build your credibility.
All this helps build interest in your website. If they really need your products and services, they’ll eventually check out your website and compare it with your competitors.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn give your brand more exposure to a very large audience. Lots of people search for brands and businesses on social media. Just having an active profile ensures you’ll get more visibility from interested parties.
You can also build a following that can share your posts and content on their own feeds – and give your brand more visibility.
It’s important to be active on social media. Otherwise, people might think you’ve gone out of business. To stay active, you can simply post regular updates that lead to different landing pages and blog posts on your site. You can also come up with special promotions that can only be redeemed directly through your site.
Reach Out to Other Established Brands and Websites
Building up a website’s credibility from scratch is extremely difficult. If you’re starting from the very bottom, you can reach out to established websites and ask them to link to your sites.
When people see that your site has been recommended by someone they trust, they’re more likely to click on your links. This also has the added effect of giving your site more credibility when search engines see your links on an established site.
When a website with high credibility links to your site, search engines consider these links as a vote of confidence. You can think of these backlinks as a way to transfer some of their credibility over to your website. SEO professionals call this transfer of value or credibility as ‘link juice’.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. Pretty much everyone has an email address that they check on a regular basis. If you don’t have a mailing list yet, it’s time to get one up and running.
People who sign up for your mailing list are already interested in your products and services. All you have to do is nurture this interest and convert them into clients.
A well planned email marketing campaign not only drives up traffic to your site, but also significantly boosts conversions.
Analyze Your Metrics
You can’t have a successful site if you don’t pay attention to the data it’s giving you. Here are some key metrics you should be paying attention to.
- Find out where your traffic is coming from
- What’s the ratio of new and return visitors
- How much time does each visitor spend on your site
Use this data as a baseline and look for ways to improve them. You’ll need this information to be able to ask the right questions.
Is a lot of your traffic coming from visitors in a different country? What can you do to attract your target market?
Why are you not getting more return visitors?
How can you get people to spend more time on your site?
Finding the answers to these questions will help guide your content and SEO strategy.
Revamp Your Old Content
If you already have lots of content that’s just not performing as expected, you shouldn’t necessarily throw it all away and start over from scratch.
It may just need a couple of tweaks. Even if it needs a complete rewrite, the overall topic may still be viable.
Check out what your competitors and other successful sites are doing with the keywords and put a different spin on it. Personalise your content more to appeal to a specific niche. The most important thing to remember is you always have to be authentic and be consistent in your messaging to build up your brand image.