After you have gotten through the content creation step of your inbound marketing strategy, you've got to optimize your financial website content. Without optimizing it for clicks and search engines, the exchange of a lead's information for content can't occur, and conversion opportunities disappear.
The last thing you want is for all of your created content to be for naught.
|1. Add calls to action
Calls-to-action, or CTAs, are exactly what the name implies: a button, an image, a link, or text that directs your audience to take an action that you've called for.
Some of the most popular CTAs include “Schedule a Meeting” or “Subscribe to My Newsletter,” but when it comes right down to it, you can ask your website visitors to do anything.
CTAs can go anywhere — throughout your blog posts or at the bottom of them, within the body your emails, or as a tweet. And even though it took a call-to-action for a prospect to get your eBook, you can add them in there, too.
The bottom line is that you want to make it really, really easy for your web visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do. So the bigger and more obvious your call-to-action, the better.
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Have you considered pay-per-click advertising? (Photo: Thinkstock)
|2. Tackle search engine optimization
While many advisors consider search engine optimization (SEO) to be a low priority, the fact remains that a higher ranking on a search engine results page means greater visibility. That means more web traffic and therefore more conversion opportunities. Ultimately, going to the trouble to create your web content is a fruitless endeavor if no one's ever going to see it.
Here are a few ways to optimize your content for search engines:
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- Fresh content. Adding new material to your website on a regular basis is important for keeping it in a search engine's spotlight.
- Specific content. Articles centered on keywords or phrases are preferred over unfocused financial content.
- Lots of keywords. Give search engines plenty to look at by also including keywords in the title tags, descriptive text, headers, sub-headers and links. A good meta description will help convince searchers that your page is worth navigating to.
- Don't over-stuff keywords. Not only will you be penalized by search engines for it, but redundancy doesn't make for a particularly enthralling or informative read.
- Accessible text. Search engines like it, and so do readers. In other words, refrain from obfuscating your intended message with excessively verbose or inordinately intellectual language.
- Close counts. Your keywords don't have to be an exact match to what is being searched. In 2012, Google introduced the “close variant keyword search” so that exact matches would appear, and so would various tenses, synonyms and semantically related terms. For example: “custom website” → “customized websites” → “customizable web page.”
According to Google, 7% of searches contain misspellings, a number which increases with every word added in the search bar. Just because none of us can type particularly well on our phones, doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to find what we're looking for.
|3. Create a pay-per-click ad
The alternative to search engine optimization is to buy your content's exposure with pay-per-click links, or PPC.
PPC advertisements, which you pay for, appear at the very top of a list of search results — above all the organic chumps in the rat-race below. As the name suggests, you pay only when your link is clicked.
A PPC means that you don't have to tinker with your website to fit an ever-changing algorithm, you can direct traffic to pages that aren't built around your keywords, and you have complete control over the ad. PPC provides a quick, easy and guaranteed effective way to immediately start increasing the visibility of your content.
Just make sure the content you're providing on the other end of your PPC ad campaign has a high conversion opportunity. In the end, you want the ad to be able to pay for itself.
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