It’s not easy to convince a person to invest their savings with you. That’s why it’s important to take every opportunity to make the best impression on your prospects. So, why don’t you start with your website?
Although most banking websites are functional, a large majority of them are not optimized. That’s why bugs such as login errors, web page crashes, or slow loading times are seen. The gap becomes even greater when a person with a disability visits a poorly optimized site. Your banking website needs to be set in such a way that visitors would feel like returning. Therefore, there’s a need for website optimization in the banking sector.
What Is Website Optimization?
Before we understand the need for website optimization in the banking space, let’s understand its definition first. Website optimization is the process of increasing conversions, growing revenue, driving more traffic, and enhancing website performance. Several tools and strategies are used in the process of optimization and deployed in a calculative manner.
One of the most important ingredients for a website to be optimized is search engine optimization (SEO). This technique refers to the practice of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to a website from search engines through organic search results. SEO doesn’t only boost your ranking status but also makes your brand easily found. You could also invest in audit tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs to solve technical issues such as broken links and broken pages.
Another important strategy used is on-page optimization. A technique that involves optimization of content, structure, and HTML of a page to make it more appealing to both users and search engine algorithms.
While both SEO and on-page optimization are necessary, they’re not the only elements that are included in website optimization. A more holistic approach to improve your website would also feature:
- Web Analytics: Web analytics has the data that can be studied and analyzed to learn how people behave when they visit a website. This information is used to better understand how users interact with the website, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and more. With the data, website owners can make changes to improve the user experience and tweak marketing campaigns accordingly for higher conversion rates.
- UX Design: User experience (UX) focuses on how the user feels about the website. Impressive graphic designs, clean layouts, and fast page speeds all come under user experience and are important. The customer journey is another aspect that falls under UX.
- Back-end Web Development: Back-end development means working on the part of a website that you cannot see. This includes server-side software such as Java or Python that makes the website work properly. Back-end developers focus on making sure that the website performs correctly by working on things like databases and servers. These things are important for making sure that the website functions properly and that it can handle lots of visitors without crashing.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) aims at improving a website to improve the percentage of visitors to perform a desired action.
For example, let’s say a website sells products, but only a small percentage of visitors actually make a purchase. CRO would involve analyzing the website to identify possible reasons for the low conversion rate, such as confusing navigation or an unclear checkout process. Then, changes would be made to improve the website, such as simplifying the checkout process or adding customer reviews, to encourage more visitors to make a purchase.
Now that we have a brief understanding of website optimization and how it functions, let’s take a look at why this practice is needed for the banking industry.
1. It Provides Users With An Enhanced Experience
Out of 10 retail banks, only 2 are actively involved in endeavors that improve customer experience regularly, which is appalling. When consumers visit your banking website, they should feel like it’s a journey. There shouldn’t be any friction between a prospect and your website. If there is, it could lead your users to confusion, making them leave and select your competitor’s website. To avoid that, here are some general guidelines for you to follow while keeping customer experience in mind:
- Add Useful Links: Users come for information on your website and they need answers quickly. Study your website and see what information would be useful to add as links. You could include bank locations, customer login details, and contact information. This helps in simplifying navigation, which in turn improves user experience.
If you look at Wells Fargo, an American financial company, you’ll see how easy it is to navigate through its website. They have a login information section that takes up some space on the landing page. Plus, they have also provided useful links that direct users to web pages if someone wants to create an account or find mortgages.
- Easy Layout: Financial institutions don’t need to complicate the process of banking. Some websites have a lot going on the landing page to increase a visual impression. That shouldn’t be the case on your website as that negatively affects customer experience. Your website layout should be simple and decluttered. Eliminate any unnecessary information on the page as that would be an added distraction.
If you observe the website of the Bank of Princeton, you’ll realize that it takes a “less is more” approach. The landing page has a small amount of text and it doesn’t have many large images. It also has made good use of whitespace, and this helps users to read content easily. The overall flow of the website is digestible, offering a user-friendly experience.
2. It Helps To Increase Website Visibility
When you optimize your website via SEO, you can determine effective keywords that’ll help you rank on search engines. The more those keywords rank, the more organic traffic will be directed to your website. Let’s take a case study to show how SEO optimization works for an organization.
West Gate Bank, an American financial institution, wanted to improve its reach in the local community. The company that the bank contacted began the strategy by adding tailored descriptions for each location and cleaning up NAP (name, address, phone number) across Google Business Bureau. As months progressed, the company monitored the bank’s search presence by suppressing duplicate listings and deleting incorrect updates. The company even responded to reviews on behalf of the bank for better success. The results? The website gained a 270% increase in Google search views and a 209% increase in website clicks.
3. It Helps In Increasing Conversions (Link Conversion Article Here)
Research shows that for every $92 a company spends on attracting new customers, they only spend $1 on customer rate optimization. In other words, they’re focusing more on getting people to their website than on making sure those visitors actually become customers. This is one of the main reasons why many websites fail, in turn affecting company growth.
The ultimate goal of CRO is to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for a business by increasing the number of visitors who take the desired action. This doesn’t necessarily include increasing the amount of traffic to the website. In addition to increasing customers, CRO has other benefits:
- It’ll Help You Understand Your Customers Better: By knowing your customers, you’ll be able to detect leaks in their customer journey. It gives you a chance to improve customer touch points such as product pages and determine your customer’s needs. Via digital analytics, you’ll be able to examine your customer’s behavior and their interaction on your website. Doing this will help you generate more leads and develop strong customer relationships.
- It’ll Help You Get Better Results: The information you’ll get from CRO testing will enable you to make better decisions for your site. If the data shows that changing the color of a button generates 6% more clicks, you’ll get at least that 6%, as opposed to not testing the website.
- You Can Overtake Your Competition: However, the benefits of CRO can extend beyond just improving conversions. In fact, it can also help with SEO (search engine optimization), which is all about improving your website’s ranking on search engine results pages.
When you test different elements on your website as part of your CRO efforts, you may find that certain changes improve the amount of time visitors spend on your website. This can lead to lower bounce rates, which is when someone visits your site but leaves quickly without engaging with any content. Google considers bounce rates as a factor in determining search rankings, so if you can lower your bounce rates, you may have a better chance of outranking your competitors.
BankFive, an American local bank, optimized its pages for town-specific searches. Google Analytics was used to track the conversion rate. After a few months, BankFive was ranking for 87 keywords with 48 of them on the first page of Google.
4. It Helps With Web Accessibility
The Internet is an inclusive place and adapts to all types of individuals. However, not many banking websites have web accessibility for the disabled. Even if they follow, they’re not up to the highest level.
It’s important to cater to all types of users on your website. If a person with vision impairment can’t recognize your “open account” button, then there’s a high chance that they’ll go to your competitor’s website.
Including elements such as adding alt text to images, having an on-screen color contrast switch, and making browsers accessible to assistive technology goes a long way. It helps those with disabilities not experience seclusion in any form.
FCN Bank, a local American bank, complies with the standards of web accessibility. Apart from internal sources testing, the bank has a third-party app called AudioEye as well. This software provides an added sense of security, determining flaws that could be a threat to web accessibility. The site has an ally bar that has an in-built player so that those with hearing impairments can listen to the content aloud. The website also has a dedicated web accessibility help desk for feedback or any accessibility queries concerning the site.
Summing Up
If you want your bank to be set apart from your competitors, ensure that your website is thoroughly optimized. It’d be good if you audited your website to find out areas impeding your performance and accessibility. Hire experienced professionals as they’ll employ a variety of techniques to make your site robust.
FAQs
What Is Website Optimization In The Banking Sector?
Website optimization in the banking sector refers to the process of improving a bank’s website to enhance the user experience and increase conversion rates. This involves improving website design, functionality, and usability, as well as optimizing website content for search engines.
Why Is Website Optimization Important In The Banking Sector?
Website optimization is important in the banking sector because it helps to attract and retain customers, improve customer satisfaction, and increase revenue. In today’s digital age, customers expect a seamless online experience, and a poorly optimized website can turn them away from a bank.
How Can Website Optimization Benefit A Bank?
Website optimization can benefit a bank by improving website performance, increasing customer engagement, and boosting conversion rates. It can also help to reduce customer service costs by providing users with the information they need, thereby reducing the need for support calls or visits to bank branches.
