perspectives
What Good is a Store Without Shoppers:
Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Website
By Dan Logan
By now, every bank has a website. Some may have even gone through several iterations of websites. Going forward, many will start to focus their energy on driving more and more people to their sites. There are lots of tools out there to help raise awareness and drive traffic, but what combination is best?
As marketers, we always preach the importance of keeping your site continuously updated with good content. This is probably still paramount to other strategies. But again, good content is only good if someone reads it and can extract value from it. Furthermore, does good content live solely on your site, or might it be worth exploring social media sites, blogs and other trends?
Given there are so many options out there, and many of them are fairly new, below are some simple things to consider as you work to optimize your website:
Inbound Links
Increasing the number of inbound links into your site helps search engines feel more confident ranking your site higher in an index. In many ways, the more inbound links to your site, the more credibility you have with the search engines and even consumers. The key here is to have a good volume of links that are coming from sites somewhat aligned with your own content or offering. One easy way to accomplish this is to inquire about having your website listed on any association or group sites of which your bank is a member.
Paid and Organic Search
Paid search is considered one of the best performing strategies when it comes to supporting online growth. One of the most common forms of paid search is pay-per-click advertising (PPC), in which companies will determine and then bid on keywords that will resonate best with their target demographic. The more popular the words, the more expensive this strategy can get. It’s important to select keywords that match the way financial consumers search. For example, it is far more useful to bid on words such as ‘home equity loans’ or ‘mortgages’ versus the name of your bank.
If you have a very limited budget, you can still optimize your site by applying some basic principles of organic search. Similar to paid search, organic search requires you to give some thought to keywords. With this strategy, the title tags are usually the most powerful. Title tags should be given to each page and should connect to the actual content on the page.
Online Advertising
According to a recent Nielson survey, the financial services industry outspent all other industries in online advertising in 2008, with retail goods and services close behind. But now the effects of the recession are just starting to show. Many banks are struggling with the most effective solution for online ad spending, so as not to pay for any waste. Despite this, online is expected to continue on its path of outperforming traditional media. Banks should be giving serious consideration to placing online ads on sites that are meaningful to their business and are aligned with budgets, target audiences and overall objectives.
Social Media
Marketing has started to shift away from a one-way dialogue and into more two-way exchanges between consumers and brands. Tremendous results can be achieved by banks using social networking sites as a way to engage more with customers and prospects, while differentiating themselves from the competition. Banks that have a solid understanding of the local market are well positioned to be part of a conversation with their consumers versus bigger bank brands that have for the most part lost substantial trust and credibility with the consumer.
Conclusion
Regardless of economic conditions, consumer behavior continues to move online. Therefore it is imperative that you employ all or some of the above strategies in 2009 to capture that online audience. Bank marketers who do this well will see a competitive advantage despite a year filled with such uncertainty. Click here for PDF