By Scott Stellwagon
Digital trends are constantly changing, and it’s important to adapt to these changes to stay relevant and visible online. Your website is your digital branch, making it the most important tool when it comes to reaching customers and engaging with them. And like any tool, it needs to be regularly maintained to optimize its effectiveness. If it’s been a few years since you last updated your bank’s website, you may have noticed a few of the following signs that a redesign is imminent.
1. You’re losing traffic and engagement
While a redesign isn’t guaranteed to resolve your traffic flow, a decrease in overall visitors to your website could indicate that your search engine optimization is faltering. Many banks will use a redesign as an chance to refresh their website content and metadata. Unfortunately, the positive impact of these updates doesn’t last forever, so a steady drop in traffic to your site could indicate that your old SEO strategies need to be reworked from the ground up.
In Google Analytics, look for long-term trends in your traffic. Has your organic traffic decreased since your last redesign? Is there a lack of high-value product pages in your landing page report? Are your engagement metrics (i.e. bounce rate, average time on site, etc.) decreasing? If you are seeing decreases for many of these metrics, this could be a sign that your site is in need of a refresh. While a redesign does not guarantee better results, it’s an ideal opportunity to assess your SEO strategy and implement changes that can improve your traffic.
2. Your conversions are dropping
Ideally, you have taken the steps to track your bank website conversions with Google Tag Manager to gain some insight into how your visitors are interacting with your site. If you have not done this with your current website, then the redesign process is an excellent opportunity to take steps toward getting this tracking set up.
If you have set up comprehensive goal tracking, and you are noticing downward trends for multiple goals, this could be a sign that you need to reassess your conversion optimization strategy. Take a look at the conversion points that are available across your site and see if there’s any room for improvement. This is a great time to add new conversion points on your products pages and location pages, allowing you to collect meaningful data on how your users are engaging with your website.
3. Your content has not been refreshed in a few years
If it’s been a few years since you reviewed and re-wrote your website content, a website redesign is the perfect opportunity to accomplish this. Here are a few tips to help you prioritize your content refresh process:
Create individual product pages. If your current site groups multiple products on a single page, you may want to consider building individual product pages when you redesign your website. This has a few benefits. First, grouping products on one page can make it more difficult to get these pages to rank organically in the Google search results. Building individual product pages helps to combat this by allowing you to target more specific, high-value SEO keywords which can help you grow your organic rankings and increase your presence in the search results. Second, these focused product pages are better suited to act as landing pages for your digital ads and email campaigns.
Build a blog and produce regular content. A blog is an ideal solution to help you produce ongoing content that contributes to your SEO efforts. If you don’t already have a blog, your website redesign process is a perfect time to add one. However, building the blog is only the first step. You will need to produce content on a regular basis in order to see any benefits. You may find it helpful to create a content calendar to ensure that articles are written weekly or monthly.
Create individual pages for each location. While it may be tempting to group your locations on a single page, there are many benefits to building pages for each branch. Having high-quality, unique content for each branch can cause your location pages to rank in the Google search results for geo-targeted search queries. These pages an also be linked to your local listings, such as Google My Business, Bing Places and Yelp, to help customers find relevant information about their local branch more easily.
Research trends by visiting other bank websites. If you’re considering a redesign, don’t be afraid to pull some ideas from other websites. You can learn a lot by looking at your competitors’ websites to see what design trends are common in the banking industry, or you may discover insights by checking out sites from other industries. This can help you clarify the objectives of your redesign and create a wish list of features that you can provide to your designer so that they can more easily produce a design that meets your expectations.
Scott Stellwagon is a digital analyst at BankBound, a marketing agency focused exclusively on growing local financial institutions.
