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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, 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, Hendrickson Advisory Group has included a call-to-action with the phrase, “Schedule A Call To Learn More.” This is visible under the types of clients that they serve so that it makes for a simple transition to scheduling a 30-minute meeting on the Calendly page.
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 they should do, then include a step-by-step process.
Additionally, another firm that is utilizing this is Twenty Over Ten client, Matterhorn Financial Planning. They briefly discuss who can be a client while also including an introduction video and an additional video series.
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: Access your Domains Panel:
Log into your Twenty Over Ten account. From your dashboard, click the Site Settings button from the bottom of your sidebar and then click Domains.
Step 2: Enter your Domain:
Under Connected Domains, you’ll see a list of your already connected domains if you have any, as well as an input box to enter a new one. Enter the full domain name here. Be sure to exclude HTTP:// as well as www when you enter it and then hit the Save button.
Step 3: Publish your Website:
Once your domain is added via your site settings you MUST publish your website before proceeding to the next step.
Step 4: View your DNS Settings:
Once you add a domain name and publish successfully, you can access the DNS Settings panel by hovering over your domain from the Connected Domains list and clicking the Cog icon:
Within your connected domain’s DNS settings, you’ll see a section titled DNS Records which contains a list of the records you will need to input with your domain’s registrar account. Keep this panel open for reference in the next steps.
Step 5: Log in to your Domain Provider Account:
In a new browser window or tab, access your domain provider’s website and login to your account for that service. Find where to manage your DNS settings for the domain you just added in step 3. Depending on your provider, this may be called Zone File Settings, Manage Domains, Domain Manager, DNS Manager, etc.
Step 6: Add in the A and CNAME Records:
Copy and paste each entry from your domain settings panel (from Step 4 above) into new DNS entries accessed from your domain provider’s DNS settings (from Step 5 above). Save your changes to complete this step.
Step 7: Verify Records:
Once you have added the A and CNAME records to your DNS, you can verify if the records were successfully entered through the Domain Settings panel. Click the Verify Domain Records button to verify. If the status of a record does not turn green and say “verified,” please check that the record was entered into your DNS correctly. Though you can generally verify your records within 5 minutes of making those updates, in some cases it may take up to 3 hours for your DNS updates to be verifiable.
Step 8: Enable your SSL Certificate:
You can enable your SSL certificate once all three of your new DNS records have verified. Click the Enable SSL button to enable the certificate.
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.
Retirement Matters offers a free webinar to prospects that offers them free advice in regard to the Medicare options that are right for you.
Is Your Website Losing Money?
If your website is missing any of these five important elements, you could be leaving money on the table. It’s more important than ever to have a strong website that is efficiently driving leads and therefore revenue. So, if you aren’t seeing as much money as you would like, then re-assess your advisor site, see what it is lacking and then start implementing them and see how your prospects change.
Related: Facebook Marketing for Financial Advisors: Top 9 Ways to Promote Your Business