Did you know that improving the usability and content flow of your financial website actually helps your SEO? Did you know that you can capitalise on huge opportunities for your financial marketing by optimising your existing page design?
In this article, we’re going to explore how to improve your SEO by improving the design of your financial website. – without embarking upon a whole-scale website redesign.
Presently, this approach is largely neglected by the SEO industry. People tend to be focused on user intent, solving users’ problems and writing content geared towards these.
Of course, these are legitimate and necessary components of your financial marketing when it comes to SEO. However, simply optimising these areas results in the neglect of page design, element flow, content elements, UI elements and so on.
This is unfortunate, as improving content flow can make a huge, positive impact on your search rankings and financial marketing as a whole. So, let’s dive into a bit more detail:
What Goes On This Page? What’s The Order, And What’s The Placement?
These are some of the foundational questions that anyone should ask when constructing a page for their website. Or indeed, when optimising it later for content flow.
Let’s suppose a finance company is trying to rank for “business loans.” Right now, Start Up Loans and Funding Options are both rankings for this search term in the UK. The volumes are huge, meaning there is massive revenue-generating potential here if I can get my client to rank in the prime positions for it.
However, what needs to go on my client’s page, to ensure it performs as best it can in the search engines? What priority of placements should be given to each of the elements on the page? All too often, fantastic content gets buried in poorly-organised page flow/design. To answer this question, however, we actually need to answer some other questions first:
#1 What is the goal of the searcher?
If people are entering “business loans” into Google, what are they actually trying to achieve?
#2 Could there be multiple intents behind the search term in question? If so, which ones are most important?
For those individuals who are searching for “business loans”, could different groups be looking for different things when using this search term? If so, what’s the popularity of each possible meaning? With these questions asked, your financial marketing can then arrange the content layout on the page – addressing each possible meaning in order of priority.
#3 What is the goal of your business behind this search term?
What is your financial marketing actually trying to achieve for your brand by ranking for this search term, and getting traffic onto the page? If there is no meaningful goal behind trying to rank for the keyword, then it begs the question of why bother putting time, money and energy into ranking for it?
Going Forward With Some Answers
So, let’s now assume we have some solid answers to these questions. Simply, if I search for “business loans” I am probably looking for:
Money to help boost my business
This is, of course, one possible goal that the searcher is trying to achieve. However, there might be a range of search intents behind this. Sometimes, the user is:
- Looking for money to start up a new business, because they have no up front investment.
- Looking for cash to buy new assets, such as machinery, which will increase productivity.
- Wanting the means to refurbish a property, or commence a new project.
With these possible search intents now acknowledged, we can now design our user flow to maximise the potential of our financial marketing.
In general, this is going to be your broad framework:
- Navigation
- Headline
- Lead-In
- Hero Image
- Content (body)
- Visuals & Graphics
- Links & References
- Footer
- Sidebar
We need to take great care here. Many things could live on your web page, and the above standard layout includes the typical features that you will probably want to include.
However, the main focus here is the user flow. Do not get so obsessed with following a stand list that your lose sight of this! Quite often, we will see an amazing graphic, visual or content snippet that is solving the searcher’s problem, yet is buried in an obscure place to fit the traditional page structure. So be careful. Do not allow our page design to bury the value your searchers are so desperately looking for.
3 Goals Which Matter In Financial Marketing
When optimising your financial marketing and page layout for user flow, therefore, here are some crucial goals you should be looking to achieve:
#1 How can I solve my searcher’s task quickly, and satisfactorily?
This is not just about UI, but also about the user experience. Many people, for instance, who are searching for “business loans” are probably going to need the money fairly quickly, and so want the important information about terms, APR, repayment periods and so on to be as easy to find, and clear, as possible. When we look at the top search results, it is notable that in most cases this is indeed what we find on the page layout.
#2 Serve each search intent, in order of demand
If most people are looking for smaller, fast loans to help start up their new business, then we should serve this intent first in our content flow. If significant, but smaller numbers of users are looking for asset finance (e.g. to buy a set of large office printers), then serve this set of users next in the content.
#3 Optimise for your business goal, without undermining goals 1 & 2
As much as possible, optimise your financial marketing with the user specifically in mind. If you can then accommodate your business goal into it, then that’s great. If you do things backwards however – serving your business goal first and the user intent second – then you tend to fall down the search results.