When creating an advisor website, you want it to not only be unique and stand out from the competition but to drive more quality leads, which in turn will generate more revenue. If you are putting out strong content regularly, but you just aren’t getting the types of results that you want, then you may be missing these five crucial elements on your site.
5 Elements Your Advisor Website is Missing
For a stronger website, make sure you are utilizing the five pieces below to your advisor website.
1. Calendar Link
If your website doesn’t have a calendar link, then how do you book your clients? Including a calendar link on your site is crucial for getting your website visitors to take the next step down the sales funnel. You need to make it as simple as possible for leads to book an appointment with you, and it easily shows them when you are available and it also helps you keep your calendar organized and up-to-date.
In fact, in a 2019 survey about the effectiveness of digital marketing for financial advisors, found that advisors who get 6-10 or 11+ clients per year had a calendar link right on their website. A popular meeting scheduler that many of our clients use is Calendly. It allows for flexible scheduling between clients and team members, integration to your Google, Outlook, or Office Calendar, and is compatible with all devices. It also easily integrates into your Twenty Over Ten site.
Twenty Over Ten client Kelly Financial Planning has the call-to-action “Schedule a Call” visibly placed on their website. Once that is clicked, clients can easily choose a day and time to have an introductory call with Mike Kelly, CFP®.
2. “Start Here” Page
A “Start Here” page is a great way to direct visitors exactly where they need to go. Ask yourself what you want your potential clients to do and achieve when they land on your website.
Taylor Schulte, CFP® founder, and CEO of Define Financial discusses the importance of a “Start Here” page and how it can be used to convert more quality leads. Define Financial’s “Start Here” page includes everything that a lead or client could want to know. When they land on this page, make it very clear what the should do, then include a step-by-step process.
3. Site Speed
Did you know that visitors expect a web page in 2 seconds or less? After 3 seconds, you can expect visitors to go check out a competitor’s faster loading website. Search engine bots can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on your page’s HTML code. These are also known as crawlers and are used by Internet search engines to collect information about websites and individual webpages. Google has also been known to use Chrome user data to get a better handle on a page’s loading time. That way, they can measure how quickly a page actually loads to users.
At Twenty Over Ten, we make sure that all our are frameworks are optimized for fast loading speeds. Additionally, all images and uploaded assets utilize a global Content Delivery Network to ensure your page loads swiftly at all times so that you are not losing prospects due to a lack of page-loading speed.
4. SSL Certificate
SSL simply stands for Secure Sockets Layer. They are very important to include on your website, as they help to protect the transfer of sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords and usernames, consumer information and more. Additionally, if you don’t have an SSL certificate, then your website is more open to scammers and phishing scams.
WHAT ARE THE FOUR MAIN BENEFITS OF USING SSL CERTIFICATES?
- Authentication – Ensures the servers we are talking to are who they claim to be.
- Data Integrity – Makes sure the data is not modified in transit between your client and the servers
- Encryption – Protects the actual communication from eavesdroppers so that they cannot tell what the communication is about
- SEO Ranking – Google now provides a slight ranking boost to websites using HTTPS.
At Twenty Over Ten, we provide free SSL certificates to all of our clients, and it can be easily done on the Twenty Over Ten system.
STEP 1: Ensure the domain you want to enable SSL on is properly connected to your account. Navigate to the DNS Settings by clicking the “cog” icon for the domain in your list of Domains under your Site Settings:
STEP 2: In the Settings panel that you pulled up from the previous step, scroll down to the section titled “SSL Certificate”. You’ll see a green button that says Enable SSL. Click this to initiate setting up your FREE SSL certificate for this domain:
STEP 3: Once your SSL Certificate is successfully set up, you should see the following:
It’s as simple as that, all of your website pages can now be accessed over https://
5. Freemium
Incorporating a freemium on your website is a great way to impress leads and show them that you have valuable information to offer them. What’s even better about a freemium is that you are willing to share this information to help your clients with their financial needs for FREE.
Examples of “Freemiums” can be a downloadable guide, an eBook, a Whitepaper or anything that can be easily accessed and offered to prospects and clients to help them on their financial journey.
If you are offering this type of information free of charge, imagine what you can do for them once they are actually a client.
Twenty Over Ten client Ascension College Planning targets a unique niche and helps individuals and families to plan and pay for college. In their “Resources” section, they offer a free eBook entitled “A New Approach to Paying for College” by simply providing your:
- Name
- Phone
- A Short Message
By simply providing this, you can learn how to:
- Get pre-approved for the cost of college
- Shop for schools that are in your budget without sacrificing the quality of education
- Get valuable tax education credits
- Leverage all available funding sources
- Create a strategy to pay for all four years of college
Is Your Website Losing Money?
If your website is missing any of these five important elements, you could be leaving money on the table. Reassess your advisor site, see what it is lacking and then start implementing them and see how your prospects change.
Related: Key Performance Indicators Financial Advisors Should Track