Introduction
As an established financial advisory practice, you will already, no doubt, have a website for your business. We have written this article to help with ways in which you can maximise the number of visitors to your website, which, in simple terms, will increase your firm’s visibility and in good time, hopefully expand your client base.
Traffic is considered to be the most important element in determining a website’s success. If you have a website but no one is being directed to it, then does the site really have a purpose?
In this article, we will look at ways of maximising the impact of your website, by asking:
How should you measure your website traffic?
How can financial adviser firms generate website traffic?
What are the different types of website traffic?
Definition: “Website traffic refers to web users who visit a website. Web traffic is measured in visits, sometimes called “sessions,” and is a common way to measure an online business’s effectiveness at attracting an audience.”
As we have established in this article, your website has huge potential to showcase your brand and acumen, which you need to maximise in order to obtain the best results. Your website is a portal to your business and using it to engage with potential clients whilst demonstrating your values and brand is an easy marketing tool that you should not forget to use.
Whilst writing content, adding backlinks and setting up paid adverts, for example, can be time-consuming, they are worthwhile activities to ensure you feature highly in search engine rankings and that your business is the one that your clients and prospective clients choose to use.
But creating traffic is certainly a marathon, not a sprint, and tangible results can take a while to appear. This being said, it is worth the investment.
What are the different types of website traffic and their associated benefits?
Understanding the ways by which traffic is directed to your website is useful so you can target the traffic type which sources you the most relevant visitors. Let’s look at the different types of website traffic, along with their associated benefits, in more detail.
Direct traffic
Means visitors who accessed your website by typing your website’s URL directly into the search bar, or who have saved your website as a bookmark.
Benefits: This is also free and has a high likelihood that the visitor is very interested in your business as they are actively seeking it out.
Organic traffic
Refers to the visitors who find your website by conducting a search on a search engine like Google and then clicking the link to take them through to your website. It only includes search results that you have not paid for and is directly influenced by the quality of the content on your site and any measures you may have put in place to make your site come up on search engines (i.e. SEO) – for example, using related keywords which visitors might typically search for.
Benefits: It is free and the users are typically accessing your site as they are searching for information related to your services. Additionally, the more visitors you obtain in this method, the higher your search engine ranking becomes.
Social traffic
Refers to traffic directed to your website generated by links from posts that you have posted on your own social media platforms – for example, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. For ideas of content you could post to increase your social traffic, our articles “Content marketing” contain suggestions.
Benefits: This type of traffic can be targeted to your ideal demographic and so can be a valuable resource for new leads. Social media traffic can also lead to increased brand awareness, enhancing your business’s credibility.
Paid traffic
Is generated by visitors who access your website through paid advertising – for example pay-per-click on Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Pay-per-click means that the advertiser (i.e. you, in this case), pays a fee every time a user clicks on their advert to redirect them to your website or social media site. The advert comes up in the visitor’s Facebook feed or a Google search, depending on which platform you are advertising with. The cost-per-click (or CPC) is determined by how much you have agreed to spend on your advertising campaign and you can control how much you wish to spend on paid traffic. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube are just some of the platforms that run this sort of advertising option.
Benefits: As you can set the target demographic and interests of users who see your adverts, this can be a highly effective way to engage with potential new clients.
Referral traffic
Is generated by visitors who reach your website through links on other websites, including blogs or forums.
Benefits: It is likely that the visitor already has an interest in your services and therefore there is greater potential to convert them into a client.
So now you are aware of the different methods of gaining traffic to your website, what is the best way to generate this?
How to generate website traffic
What do you need to do to encourage visitors to your site? There are many approaches you can take to increase your website traffic – some very straightforward and some requiring more input. However, all of them will enable your website, and therefore your business, to be more visible, for your brand to be more prominent, and therefore for you to be able to attract more potential clients and grow your business.
Create content
At this point, it might be useful to read our article “Content marketing” which will inform you on how to devise a content marketing strategy along with full details about what content to create.
In order to attract visitors to your website, you need to fully understand the sort of person you are trying to entice to your site and why. This is called your ‘buyer persona’. Think about your typical client. What might interest them? What would they be keen to know more about? What questions about your industry might they have?
With these questions in the forefront of your mind, create some titles for short articles or blog posts that might answer these questions and help your potential client gain insight into your technical knowledge and expertise along with conveying your business’s brand and values.
You can write the blog posts yourself, use content from Vanguard or engage with a copywriter (see “Building a brand” for more information on how best to do this). Either way, ensure you use interesting angles to make your post stand out, and be aware of SEO techniques to enable your post to be most visible on search functions, too.
Strategies to improve search engine optimisation (SEO):
Use relevant keywords and phrases for your topic – ones that people might use in the search function.
Write quality content that provides value to the reader, answering their questions and providing compelling insight.
Using images with descriptive file names can assist search engines to understand the content on your page.
Create an engaging meta description to encourage visitors to click on your website. A meta description provides a summary of your website’s content, with a maximum of approximately 160 characters. Make sure it is concise, accurately describes your content and uses keywords that your audience may search for. This is something your website designer may need to do unless you are adept at writing code in HTML.
There are many options when it comes to content creation, but don’t forget to use the knowledge available to you to your benefit. Of course, you must remember to credit the writer and note the source.
Once your article is written, publish it on your website. Consider adding a blog section to your site that you can use entirely for the purpose of putting together a library of articles that clients can go to for information. By perpetuating your blog section with interesting and intelligent articles, you can make your website an interesting and relevant resource for your clients to find information about your industry. Prospective clients, too, can see the passion and knowledge you have for your industry from the content you have published. Continue to promote the article through other methods (for example, social media and newsletters) to generate traffic from these areas too. The more traffic you generate, the higher your article ranks in search functions.
Newsletters and email lists
With the expansion and takeover of social media, newsletters and email lists may feel a little antiquated, but they still serve a vital purpose, so don’t forget to use them.
Collating an email list from your clients is straightforward, and you can easily expand this to include potential clients by including a sign-up form on your website. If the content of your website was interesting to your visitor, it is possible that they may wish to read more.
Your newsletter can be used to update your clients on new services, introduce them to your staff or promote your brand’s values, for example. But it should also include backlinks to your blog posts and any other articles on your site that may be of interest. These will then provide a valuable traffic boost to your website. Don’t forget to also promote your newsletter on social media and convert your followers into subscribers.
Be visible on other websites to increase your backlink profile
Backlinks are links on another site that take the reader back to your website. They are useful because they have a strong influence on search engine rankings – so a good backlink profile will increase your SEO and place you higher up on search engine searches, meaning your website is more visible. There are various ways to do these, and it is well worth spending the time adding them if you can.
One way is to publish guest blogs on sites that your clients might also follow – for example, Medium, which is easy, free and open to everyone to use. You could also look at Investopedia or The Motley Fool, as specific investment sites, but you may have to negotiate with the editor to have your article published on these. You could also join, or set up, an online community with fellow financial advisers.
Run paid social media ad campaigns, for example on LinkedIn and Facebook
Using Campaign Manager (the advertising platform on LinkedIn), or Facebook Ads, for example, you can quickly and easily set up an advertising campaign designed to reach your preferred demographic. Take some time to look at the relevant business advertising pages for LinkedIn and Facebook. Their guides are jargon-free and go through, step by step, the process by which to utilise their advertising function and the options available to use it optimally to reach your advertising goals. With a pay-per-click system, you can manage your spending on these platforms, along with keeping track of your campaign’s success through the data and analytics provided. Before you start your advert, think about your target audience and the objectives of your campaign. Make sure you link back to your website as website traffic generation should be on your priority list, and ensure you are consistent with your brand.
Once the advert is up and running, keep track of its success by reviewing the analytics data available on the site you have chosen to run your campaign through. This data will let you know how many people have clicked on your link, what this has cost you, their age group, and where they are located, amongst a huge amount of other information. Use this information to tailor your next campaign.
Be visible on local SEO
Do you have a Google Business Profile? If not, your business may be missed on local SEO searches. It takes less than five minutes to set up a Google Business Profile, so it is worth doing straight away if you haven’t done this already. Similarly, Yelp, Yell and ThomsonLocal (there are others, too) are additional directories for local SEO. It is worthwhile being on as many of the prime options as you can!
How should you measure your website traffic?
As with all new systems or services, it is good practice to measure their performance to ensure that the structures you have put in place obtain the desired outcome.
For website traffic, you can obtain a huge amount of data from tools including Google Analytics, which will measure, for example:
Traffic and traffic sources;
Conversion rate (in Google Analytics, this is calculated as the percentage of visitors to your website who undertake a specific action, for example signing up for a newsletter or filling in a contact form);
Average session duration;
Average pages per session;
User location;
Percentage of return visitors;
Search queries.
Traffic to your website is the first data you will see on Google Analytics and it simply tells you how many visitors you have had to your site. Helpfully, the historical data can be viewed so you can see if the changes you have made to your website traffic generation strategy have increased the number of visitors to your site. You can then obtain more detailed information – for example, clicking on Traffic Acquisition will detail the percentage of traffic obtained from different sources – i.e. direct traffic, organic search, paid traffic and social.
There is a vast amount of information on Google Ads, so it is worth spending some time working through this to ensure that you are gaining the most from your website and not missing out on valuable data.
Conclusion
As we have established in this article, your website has huge potential to showcase your brand and acumen, which you need to maximise in order to obtain the best results. Your website is a portal to your business and using it to engage with potential clients whilst demonstrating your values and brand is an easy marketing tool that you should not forget to use.
Whilst writing content, adding backlinks and setting up paid adverts, for example, can be time-consuming, they are worthwhile activities to ensure you feature highly in search engine rankings and that your business is the one that your clients and prospective clients choose to use.
But creating traffic is certainly a marathon, not a sprint, and tangible results can take a while to appear. Nonetheless, it is worth the investment.
Action points
Now we have gone through the theory, what actions can you put in place over the next month to start generating more traffic to your website, and thereby increasing its SEO rating and visibility?
Here are a few straightforward things you can do to start the ball rolling.
Write four titles of evergreen articles you could write. (An evergreen article is one that is search-optimised and has content that remains relevant to readers regardless of the current news or season.) You can, of course, use content available to you on 365 to inspire your articles if you need ideas.
Write an article based on one of these titles. It can be as long as you wish, but ensure that it is interesting, focused, thought-provoking and relevant to your audience. Once you have written it, with permission if needed, post it on your business’s website.
Write a post on your company’s LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter site (or all their social media sites – why not?), providing a short summary of the article to whet the reader’s appetite, and then link to the full article published on your website.
Using Google Analytics, or another SEO tool, track your website traffic and traffic sources to see if these increase over the next days, weeks or months (hopefully you will have published more articles by then, however), and from what sources the most links were derived.
Enjoy reading “Content marketing” for further advice on writing posts to increase your visibility online.
If you have completed all content in the module, you are ready to take the quiz and collect your CPD
Ready to test your knowledge?
Take the quizMore from Vanguard 365
Client relationships
CPD content crafted to empower you to service your client’s needs effectively, build relationships, create loyalty and achieve new business growth.
Financial planning
CPD content structured to give you access to useful tools, guides and multimedia resources covering diverse topics from risk profiling to retirement planning.
Investment knowledge
CPD content formulated for you to explore in-depth insights on investment principles, portfolio construction and comprehensive product education to expand your technical knowledge.
Investment risk information
The value of investments, and the income from them, may fall or rise and investors may get back less than they invested.
Important information
This article is directed at professional investors and should not be distributed to, or relied upon by retail investors.
This article is designed for use by, and is directed only at persons resident in the UK.
The information contained in this article is not to be regarded as an offer to buy or sell or the solicitation of any offer to buy or sell securities in any jurisdiction where such an offer or solicitation is against the law, or to anyone to whom it is unlawful to make such an offer or solicitation, or if the person making the offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so. The information in this article does not constitute legal, tax, or investment advice. You must not, therefore, rely on the content of this article when making any investment decisions.
The information contained in this article is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell investments.
Issued by Vanguard Asset Management, Limited which is authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority.
© 2024 Vanguard Asset Management, Limited. All rights reserved.