By Scott Stellwagon
When bank marketers are faced with creating content for their bank’s website, it might be tempting to group products together on consolidated pages. This, generally, means less work writing, editing and placing product-focused content on the site, which can be a real time-saver. Plus, it has the added benefit of making your site smaller and easier to navigate.
However, the long-term benefits of building out individual pages for all of your products will outweigh the short-term benefits of consolidating your content onto single pages. Read on to learn why ensuring thorough, individualized product pages is an essential part of your bank’s effective SEO and PPC digital marketing strategy.
Target more specific keywords
If you’re engaging in SEO activities designed to grow your organic users, then you’re likely using keyword research as the backbone of these efforts. These keywords, when implemented correctly into your content, can have a huge impact on your visibility in the search results. So, when it comes to building your product page content, having pages that are focused on specific products will make your product pages more targeted and powerful for SEO by reducing the number of keywords used on those pages.
Let’s consider a mortgage loans page as an example. Many bank websites will list all of their home loan types—residential mortgages, first-time homebuyer loans, construction loans, mortgage refinancing, etc.—on a single page, with scant details about each product. This is meant to serve as the primary repository for mortgage loan content on the site, and customers are meant to use this page to contact the bank for more information. This is a problem for a few reasons:
The page is unfocused—When Google’s bots crawl your page, they are looking for a major theme or topic that will help them accurately rank your website in the search results. If all your products are being discussed on a single page, Google will have a difficult time understanding the theme of your page.
Your keywords are fighting for dominance—Building on the above concept, your content and keywords begin working against each other due to the unfocused nature of the page. This is referred to as “keyword cannibalization,” which occurs when related keywords begin competing with each other as the primary focus of the page. This will affect the page’s ability to rank for the high-value keywords you spent time researching in the initial stages of your SEO process.
Better conversion data
In addition to the SEO benefits of creating unique product pages, this process will also give you greater control over the conversion goals that you are tracking across your website. Conversion data is one of the clearest methods of measuring user engagement on your product pages, and allows you to demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts over time. If you need some more background on setting up goal tracking, check out this helpful article.
Let’s use the generalized mortgage page example again. You may want to know how many clicks you are receiving to your online application for traditional mortgage loans, construction loans and VA home loans, individually. If you are using a single page for all these products, it may be more difficult to set up tracking if all of these products use the same online application.
However, if your website uses unique pages for each of these products, it is a much simpler matter to track user engagement on all these pages individually using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. This will allow you to track goal completions at the URL level, so you will know exactly how many clicks to your mortgage application you received on your traditional home loans page versus your construction loans page. This can give you greater insight into the results of your marketing efforts and inform future marketing strategies.
Here are more tips from ABA Marketing to help you create financial product pages that stand out.
Create superior landing pages for ads
Running digital advertisements through platforms such as Google Ads or Bing Ads is a great way to connect with more digital customers and drive more traffic to your website. Targeting settings on these digital platforms allow you to reach a specific audience that is in the market for your products and services, making them more likely to engage with your calls-to-action and become a customer.
Every ad you create on these platforms will link back to your website, ideally to a page that closely relates to the content of the ad. This is called a landing page. These pages are designed to drive your users toward a desired conversion point, such as an online application, account opening portal, phone number or form. Having a landing page that is aligned with your ad text will increase the optimization score of your ads. Google uses this score to gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages and how the content on these pages relates to your ad copy to ensure a positive experience for individuals who engage with your ads.
For this reason, pointing users to a landing page that is dedicated to a specific topic that uses well-written, unique content can have a positive impact on your optimization score. This can lead to lower cost-per-click for some of your keywords, improve the visibility of your ads and allows you to run your ad campaigns with greater efficiency.
Build product pages that drive results
If you want your website to act as your bank’s digital branch, then it’s important to provide a full experience for your users, and dedicated product pages are an important part of this process. Make sure to incorporate images, video, and compelling copy that drives visitors to take action, such as contacting you or opening an account online. If the volume of content required feels daunting, you can always outsource some or all of the work to a specialist.
Scott Stellwagon, who regularly writes about websites for ABA Bank Marketing, is a digital analyst at BankBound, a marketing agency focused exclusively on growing local financial institutions.
