Tips to Improve Your Financial Website’s Authority and Credibility
In the financial industry, building trust is incredibly important. People won’t bother checking out your brand, services and content if you can’t display a certain level of expertise. Your target audience will want assurance that the advice they receive is reliable and actionable.
Establishing trust doesn’t happen overnight, but adding authoritative content to your website surely helps. Posting targeted, high-quality content tells the world that you know what you’re doing. Quality content will constantly help you develop and nurture relationships prospects and potential clients as long as it is online. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – good content never sleeps.
To connect with customers, your business needs to have more than an impressive logo and tagline. Your business also needs its own personality. People need to feel that they’re dealing with a solid team of people who have lots of experience and not just a random company with a brand name.
In addition, a website that is considered authoritative and trustworthy will have no problem showing up on the top spot of the search results — making it easier for the right people to find you.
- Educate Your Website Visitors
Informational articles and tutorials are important because if you teach someone how to do something or what something means, it immediately demonstrates your skills and expertise. It’s also a very neighborly thing to do and is a sign of goodwill.
In fact, it’s a good idea to think about what your next-door neighbor would want to know or would find interesting whenever you need to come up with new content. There really isn’t any point in creating content that doesn’t offer any value to your target audience. A business blog isn’t a journal or a place where you should share random thoughts.
It’s not just about generating more website traffic either. People will prefer to work with a business that anticipates their needs and has a proven track record of being knowledgeable and helpful.
- Use Language People Will Understand
Many industries try to keep people ‘out of the loop’ by using industry shorthand and jargon. And a lot of websites make the mistake of using highly technical terms and concepts so that they appear more knowledgeable. However, if you want to connect with your readers and potential clients, you need to use language that they can easily understand.
You’ll still be considered an authority figure even if you sound like a regular person. They’ll be more willing to listen to what you have to say if you talk to them as if they were your next-door neighbors. Just like in real life, you don’t want to intimidate the people you encounter every day with ‘big words’ just so you can prove a point or display your level of expertise.
What matters is that you thoroughly explain ideas in a manner that everyone can easily understand. You need to be able to break down complex concepts into simpler ideas using very little technical jargon. When you make your content more approachable, you can attract more visitors to your site.
- Deep Dive Into Every Topic You Tackle
Whenever you create content, make sure to discuss the ideas you bring up completely and not just gloss over them in as few words as possible. The path to becoming a respected authority figure is much shorter if you constantly show that you have in-depth knowledge about the topics you’ve chosen to tackle.
Even if you write about more common topics that use highly competitive keywords, you need to make it as comprehensive as possible. There are lots of other pages on the web that are trying to attract visitors using the same basic information, so you need to set yourself apart by providing all the information they’ll ever need all in one place.
People can easily search online for definitions and simple explanations. It’s much harder to find a website that is willing to discuss things in fine detail using real-world examples, analogies, and graphics — especially when it comes to more obscure topics.
If you’re one of the few websites that adequately tackles a very specific topic, you’ll be able to boost awareness and recognition for your brand.
- Stay up to Date
It’s important to stay on top of the latest news and developments in your niche and the industry in general. It not only gives you new ideas for your content and strategy, but it also allows you to freshen up your old content with updated information.
The financial industry is constantly evolving to meet the demands of a new generation of clients. If you show that you’re always striving to stay on top of all the changes in the industry, people will gain more confidence in your brand and feel more comfortable doing business with you.
If you have a lot of old content on your site, make sure you audit it for accuracy at least once a year. If your pages contain a lot of outdated information, people will form negative impressions of your brand. It’s also a good idea to date your posts, and indicate when it was last updated. This way, people will understand why the outdated information is still there.
Your business doesn’t always have to be at the bleeding edge of the financial industry. But you have to demonstrate that you know where things are headed, how it might affect your clients, and how your business will respond to the changes.
- Engage with Customers on Social Media
Being active on social media gives you lots of great benefits for relatively little effort. It’s more than just a platform where you can share and repost your existing content. It also allows you to easily get feedback and build up lots of real world social proof for your brand.
Trust and communication is a two-way street. When people see that you take their feedback and suggestions to heart, you become more trustworthy because they know that you’re the type of business that will listen. Compare this with a social media page that just mindlessly posts updates without responding to questions or concerns. This behavior gives people the impression that you’re only really concerned about yourself and not about what your clients need.
Social media also lets you organically build up credibility through social proof. If you’re constantly providing valuable information and great service, you’ll receive lots of positive feedback and more mentions. When your leads and prospective clients see that you have a loyal following, they’re more likely to follow suit. In many cases, a couple of good reviews is all it takes for someone to choose you over your competition.
Lastly, Google also uses social media shares as one of its ranking factors. When it sees that a social media post that links to your website gets lots of shares, it will bump your website up the search engine results pages.
- Generate More Inbound Links
One of the oldest and most effective ways to improve your website’s credibility is by getting your links placed on more established sites. These are called inbound links or backlinks because they bring in more traffic to your site.
When people see that a website they trust links to your page, they’ll consider it as a recommendation that your site is also trustworthy. Google and other search engines also see inbound links as a sign of credibility. If other people are linking to your site, that suggests that your site contains worthwhile content.
Do note that it’s better to get inbound links from one heavy-hitting website than having multiple links from poor quality websites. The perceived quality of the site that links to you rubs off on your site. But if you’re more concerned about improving your search engine ranking, it’s going to be a numbers game. You’ll need to get as many backlinks as you possibly can. You need to do it as ethically as possible though. If Google sees that you’re trying to gain an unfair advantage by paying for lots of low quality backlinks, you might get penalized.
Building authority and trust is more crucial than ever if you have a financial website. It takes time to build your online credibility, and there’s no better time to start than now if you want your website to eventually become an effective marketing and lead generation machine.