How to Audit your Financial Advisor Website: 6 Easy Steps

When was the last time you analyzed the success of your website and tweaked it to bring in the results you have been searching for? Auditing your financial advising website allows you to determine if your website is optimized to boost your SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your website. In addition, a website audit is a great way to closely examine the success of your page performance before you choose to redesign your website as well as see if there are any missed opportunities within your website.

Follow these 6 steps to auditing your financial advising website:

Step 1. Is Your Site Mobile-Friendly?

Have you ever considered what your website looks like to users on their cell phones? Is the layout and design of your website ideal for an optimal user-experience on phones? The increase in the use of mobile phones has influenced the way that clients interact with websites. If you want to keep your current and prospective happy, it’s critical that your website is optimized for mobile. Instead of viewing websites and performing searches for businesses on a computer screen, the majority of people now use their phones to engage with businesses. Furthermore, mobile usability is ranked as the third most important factor that influences your SEO ranking. With a statistic like that, it’s critical that you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.

How To Ensure You Have A Mobile-Friendly Website:

• Make sure your website’s content is easy to navigate
• Use larger font sizes
• Make information easy to find so users don’t have to search extensively
• Make buttons large enough so that it’s easy for users to click on them
• Use larger font sizes

Since all Twenty Over Ten websites are mobile-friendly, it’s hard to pick one that we love. In the example below client, IMPACTfolio, LLC has a great mobile-friendly website since its homepage flows so effortlessly. In addition, the three CTAs on the homepage immediately draw the user’s attention and really stand out on mobile.

Step 2. Do You Have CTAs?

Having strong call-to-actions (CTAs) on your financial advising website is a must in order to make sure that your website is successful. But first, what is a CTA? A CTA is text or a graphic intentionally placed on a website to attract visitors to engage with your business and ultimately take action. It should consist of a short phrase of only 3-5 words and create a strong sense of urgency. CTAs are essential to the success of your business and when used correctly can be a great marketing tool to drive leads.

On the Twenty Over Ten platform, it’s easy to add CTA buttons. Here’s how:

STEP 1

Select a location to place your button and give your button a title.

STEP 2

Highlight your title and select the link icon to open link upload menu.

STEP 3

Paste the link’s URL.

STEP 4

Click the box in the lower left-hand corner to open the link in a new browser tab. After you have made your changes, click the insert button.

STEP 5

To style that link as a button, click on the link and select the wand icon to open the button’s style menu.

STEP 6

You can manually choose the button’s style between a list of preset options. These are additive properties so in addition to selecting ‘button’, you should only select primary OR secondary (not both) to assign a specific style to that button.

STEP 7

After you have selected the button of your choice, click the Save Changes button.

A CTA can do many things including leading people to schedule a phone call, offering a free consultation, asking users to sign up for a newsletter or sign up for a webinar. In the example below, Twenty Over Ten client, Lifeguard Wealth has a compelling CTA button that encourages viewers to sign up for their newsletter.

Step 3. Is It Secure?

Is your website secure for not only yourself but for users as well? Ensuring that your website is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certified is critical in order to guarantee that personal information is protected. SSL certificates help to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords and usernames, consumer information and more. In addition, having an SSL certificate can also protect your own website from scammers.

At Twenty Over Ten, we know the importance of making sure that your website is secure and we also want to give you the best chance to optimize your site for SEO to boost your rankings. That’s why we provide FREE SSL Certificates to all of our clients.

Step 4. Is It Compliance-Friendly?

Compliance can be a major challenge for many financial advisors. To avoid legal troubles, it’s essential that you make sure that your website is compliance-friendly. A good rule of thumb is to always make sure that you have your own compliance officer check out your marketing materials before sharing or posting.

One of the most important components of compliance is archiving, which needs to be integrated into any online communication. At Twenty Over Ten we know the importance of archiving which is why all Twenty Over Ten websites are automatically archived to meet SEC standards. Now, what exactly does this mean? This means that for Twenty Over Ten users, your initial website build, as well as all future changes and updates will be archived. This is not a specific package but a feature included for all clients using our platform.

Compliance Features For Twenty Over Ten Users:

• All activity and edits made to your website (including all blog posts and landing pages) will automatically be archived in the system without any manual action
• Archiving process meets SEC (17a-4) standards
• Archives are available in various forms including a PDF of all of your website content and a private URL
• Browse a visual calendar to access individual archives by day, making it easy to find what you’re looking for
• All of your archives are sent to you directly via email and also accessible anytime through your dashboard upon login
• Our Providence platform includes other advanced compliance features, such as allowing team members review, request changes, and approve edits before updates are published to your website and an internal communication tool where advisors can talk with their team and compliance officers

Step 5. Are You Creating Content?

Generating fresh and compelling content is a great way to educate your current and prospective clients as well as prove to Google that you are relevant and have expertise in your field. Ultimately, regular content creation helps boost your SEO ranking because Google views you as valuable and will reward you for your content creation.

Blogging is a great way to show your current and prospective clients that you have knowledge to help them with their needs and that you are an expert at what you do. Twenty Over Ten offers unlimited blog posts and an editable content library which helps you manage your content creation. Here’s how to edit a blog within the Twenty Over Ten platform:

STEP 1

From your dashboard, hover over any blog style page in your navigation list and click the ‘manage posts’ icon.

Step 2

Click ‘Add New’ and select ‘Content Assist’ from the dropdown.

Step 3

If you are not already subscribed to Content Assist, select ‘Unlock Content’ to gain access to our library for 12 months.

Step 4

Peruse the library of posts via categories or article titles. Click ‘preview’ to review any article before adding to your blog.

Step 5

Click ‘Add Post’. You are welcome to use each post as-is, however, we HIGHLY encourage you to use the content as a starting point and add your own flavor to it. Customize content for your particular niche, geographic location, or for your audience and search engines like Google. Click “save post” when you’re finished customizing the post.

Step 6

Once you have added your new content assist post (and edited for your audience), proceed through the publish step.

Step 6. Are You Collecting Data?

One of the most important parts of auditing your website is to take a close look at your analytics. After all, how will you know what is and what isn’t working if you don’t have data to show you? Using your analytics to help inform your marketing strategy is very helpful because they can show you where you need to improve as well as what you are already doing well with.

The Twenty Over Ten platform has a one-click integration with Google Analytics. Here’s how to do it:

Let’s Sum It Up

Regularly auditing your financial advising website helps you determine where you can improve in order to make for a better online user experience and ultimately bring more traffic to your website to turn visitors into clients. We hope that these 6 steps help you ensure that you have a website worth visiting.