Your website is one of the most powerful tools to attract clients. But it's not enough to simply have a basic website; you need to make use of the best available tools to put it to work for you – like a member of your marketing team. Equipping your firm’s website with the right technical enhancements will supercharge your online presence and make your marketing more effective.
Optimizing your website not only for search engines but for better performance and user experience leads to more introductory call requests, more clients, and boosts your bottom line.
Here’s how to leverage digital tools to differentiate yourself from the competition and level up your marketing efforts.
Google Maps
Adding a Google Map to your website provides benefits beyond offering directions. From increasing engagement to improving SEO, it improves your digital impact.
When you embed Google Maps, it points people to your front door, saving prospects and clients time and making it easier for them to get to their appointment with you. By displaying your location on a map, visitors can easily see where you are located and plan their route accordingly. With a couple of taps and swipes, they can go from browsing to being on their way.
It might seem small, but displaying the map within your site enhances trust. Even in the digital age, people are more likely to do business with firms with a physical location; it gives you legitimacy and stability, demonstrating that you’re part of the local community.
Google Maps also improves your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Owned by the number one search engine in the world, incorporating this tool into your website will help you rank higher in search results, especially for local searches. Whether users notice your office while scanning the map for a new coffee shop or searching for “financial advisors near me,” claiming your location on Google Maps is an opportunity to be found.
It's free, and Google provides the code you can easily copy and paste into your website's backend. Don’t skip this step.
Contact Forms or Schedulers
One of the best ways to get more from your website is to turn it into a communication center for your prospects. Make it easy for potential clients to contact you and book an introductory call. While it is still important to be reachable by phone during business hours, your website can become a 24/7 staff member – with the right tools.
With an embedded contact form, you can keep track of leads through your website in an organized way, allowing you to collect key information from potential clients and manage your outreach more effectively. Incorporate a scheduler that allows prospects to book an introductory call directly through your calendar.
If you use a contact form or scheduler, integrate them with your email tool, allowing you to respond to inquiries in an automated and streamlined way, saving time and effort. They can also be integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) system for more sophisticated lead tracking and marketing strategies.
Having a contact form and scheduler with a user-friendly interface makes your business more professional and easily accessible. Potential clients will feel well taken care of from the start.
PageSpeed Insights
Your website's page speed is a crucial factor that impacts user experience and marketing success. Users expect instant access to information and seamless browsing experiences. Slow-loading web pages are frustrating, which causes high bounce rates; visitors leave quickly, and you suffer low conversion rates (i.e., contacts, booked introductory calls, or newsletter sign-ups). It gives off a subliminal message that your business isn’t up to speed.
Page speed is a critical factor in search engine ranking, which affects your website's visibility in search results. Improving your site's page speed is essential to ensure a positive user experience, reducing bounce rates, improving search engine rankings, and increasing conversions.
The ideal page-load speed is between 0-2 seconds. If your website takes longer to load, run a speed test and identify ways to improve. Adding a tool to your website that measures and helps you improve page-load speed is wise.
One of the most popular speed testing tools is Google's PageSpeed Insights (PSI). This free tool analyzes webpage speed on desktop and mobile devices, providing performance and “Core Web Vitals” scores that pinpoint areas of improvement. It also offers detailed information on issues that affect how users interact with your online business.
While Google PageSpeed Insights is an excellent tool to add to your performance testing arsenal, use it smartly and focus on the data that matters. Scoring 100/100 is not your primary focus; instead, check the Core Web Vitals assessment. A low-performance score indicates technical site issues that need debugging. Be sure to revisit the PageSpeed tool regularly to stay updated on what Google prioritizes and track your Core Web Vitals progress every 28 days.
Image Compression
One of the most common culprits of slow-loading websites is large image files. Images that aren’t optimized for the web slow down your site's load time, resulting in frustrated visitors who may leave before even getting to the content. This is where using an image compression tool comes in handy. By compressing images, you can reduce the files' size without compromising the image's quality.
Find a balance between image quality and file size when compressing images. One popular image format that displays well on the web is PNG. But while PNG files have some compression, they still tend to be large. Another image format, JPG, has better compression but can result in a loss of image quality. WebP is a newer image format with better compression than JPEG and PNG. However, not all web platforms support WebP, so research before converting your images to this format.
When optimizing images for the web, size matters. Images should be no bigger than necessary for the website. This means you may need to resize images to the appropriate resolution, pixels, and dimensions, which can also reduce file size and improve site speed.
In case you missed our previous tips from this series, Financial Advisory Marketing Solutions, you can view them here:
- 4 Steps to Grow Your Client Base
- Maintaining & Growing Your Email Subscribers
- Managing Your Digital Listings
- Tools to Improve Your Site’s Search Visibility
