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Why Every Financial Advisor Website Needs to be Mobile Friendly

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you can’t ignore how big smartphones and mobile Internet connectivity have become. Since 2017, mobile phones have accounted for roughly half of the world’s Internet traffic. This won’t be a surprise to many considering how attached most people are to their phones. 

With this in mind, it’s quite obvious that businesses simply can’t ignore this huge chunk of the market. If you don’t take any steps to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, then you’re going to be frustrating and alienating roughly half of your website visitors.

Unfortunately, the financial sector is one of the few industries that’s been quite slow to keep up with the times. 

According to Deloitte University Press, ‘Financial services companies have only scratched the surface in using mobile technologies to connect and strengthen relationships with customers.’

Another study by Refinitiv found that 46% were either ‘partially satisfied’ or ‘not satisfied at all’ with their wealth management company’s digital offerings. None of those surveyed said they were ‘very satisfied’.

If you want to meet and exceed people’s expectations, you not only need to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly, but that it’s optimized for the mobile experience. This will ensure that you’ll leave a great first impression on whoever visits your site, and it will also give you an edge over your competitors.

Here are a couple more reasons you need to prioritize your financial advisor website’s mobile user experience.

People Who Are Ready to Invest Research Online First

According to Google, when people are thinking about investing, they’re going to go online to research their options no matter what step of the customer journey they’re in. 

From 2015 to 2017, searches for the keywords ‘financial advisor’ increased by 75%. So there’s a lot of demand online for information on financial advisors, financial planning, investing, and wealth management. A lot of these people are going to be using their mobile phones to do their research since it’s the most convenient way of doing things and they have it with them wherever they go. 

Many of your clients will first hear of your brand through either a referral or an online search. You want to make sure that when they reach your page, it shows up properly and it gives them access to all the information they’re looking for no matter what device they’re on. 

A Lot of Financial Transactions are Done on Mobile Phones

People nowadays expect to do pretty much everything online through an app. It definitely makes life easier when all you need is your phone to pay bills, transfer funds, and even to trade stocks and monitor your portfolio. So if you’re not able to get something as basic as your website to properly work on mobile devices, people might question your abilities as a financial advisor.

A lot of financial advisors now offer client portals directly on their websites so that their clients can easily monitor their accounts in real-time. This extra bit of transparency also gives clients the assurance that their financial future is in safe hands. 

Mobile-Friendly Websites Rank Better on Google

Google has completely switched over to mobile-first indexing, which means that it will always try to crawl the mobile version of your site first. If your site is not compatible with Google’s mobile crawler, it will revert to the desktop version. While this ensures that your site is still indexed, your website’s search engine ranking could still take a huge hit.

Another important ranking factor that’s related to mobile-friendliness is bounce rate. If someone clicks on your link and sees that your website is not mobile optimized, they’re going to click the back button immediately and move on to the next result. In SEO terms, this type of traffic is called a bounce. 

A higher bounce rate tells Google that your website didn’t deliver what the user needed and that it’s not as relevant to the search result. This will again negatively affect your future search rankings.

Making Your Site Mobile Friendly

The easiest way to ensure your site is mobile-friendly is by using responsive design. Responsive websites can easily adapt its layout to any screen size, so it won’t matter whether the user is on desktop or mobile. It also removes the additional hassles of designing and maintaining a separate mobile website. 

If you’re starting from scratch or thinking about a website redesign, it’s better to use a mobile-first philosophy. Even if you use responsive design, it doesn’t guarantee that your desktop version will translate well into mobile. It’s much easier to adapt a mobile-oriented design to a larger screen than trying to make a desktop layout fit into a smaller mobile screen.

If you want to properly address your website’s mobile issues, send us a message through the contact form below. Here at AltaStreet, we’ve helped hundreds of financial advisors sort out their web design and digital marketing issues over the last 20 years.

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