Guide 5: Driving more business from your website

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1 Guide 5: Driving more business from your website Andy s handy marketing tips Guide No. 5 of 10 Find out more at justadviser.com FOR FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES ONLY. NOT APPROVED FOR USE WITH CUSTOMERS. How to drive more business from your website A study by UKOM (The UK Online Measurement Company) showed that the size of the UK internet audience grew by 5%* from 36.9 million people in May 2009 to 38.8 million people in May Of these 1.9 million new users, 1.0 million (53%) were at least 50 years old. So with silver surfers being among the fastest growing group of internet users, online advertising could provide plenty of opportunities for you to reach a large section of your target audience. We ll help you make the most of your website presence and optimise it, so you can tap into the benefits of marketing to this huge group of increasingly internet savvy, retired people - and generate more retirement or equity release leads. We can also help you make best use of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is all about making your website visible within search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Why have a website? Most businesses recognise the importance of having a website to give them an online presence. A website gives you another channel to reach a new audience, and provides a good sales tool for your current customers as well. You can use your website to tell people about your products and your expertise, share news and information - and build contacts. You could collect contact data by asking people to sign up for updates, or a newsletter for example. You could also ask people to register to access online tools such as a retirement income calculator, or downloadable guides. A website is also a way to give your customers 24/7 access to your business and many people enjoy the convenience of gathering information online, when it suits them. Reasons for a small business to have a website: 1. Increase your visability 2. Help control your online rankings 3. Creates another sales tool 4. Builds authority 5. Builds an list Websites can be set up very easily. Many domain names are free, and offer free design templates to help you get started. However, if you want a more specific domain name and design then you ll need the help of a marketing agency to create your site and purchase the domain. A professional looking website will always reflect well on your business. *Nielsen, Jun 30, 2010 ( It is vital that when you are planning and implementing your own marketing and promotional activity you follow the rules and guidance set by the regulator or other relevant authority

2 Checklist Steps Things to do Done The purpose of your website Profile your target audience Provide easy navigation Follow a simple, consistent design Provide relevant content Avoid special effects Make it easy for people to contact you Do your research Do you want to provide information, generate leads or both? Make sure your website is written and designed to achieve your goal. Knowing your audience will dictate the tone, style and length of content. Customised content (e.g. sections specifically addressing retirement, including annuity options and equity release) will have a better chance of making an impression on visitors than general content. From your home page, visitors should be able to find any content they want within three clicks. Don t forget, good navigation is also determined by how obvious the clicks are. For example, the navigation is always on the left or on the top. Follow conventional design rules confuse visitors and they will quickly move on. Good content is informative, well presented and up-to-date. It needs to be short to maintain interest, but long enough to cover the essentials data from Google indicates that the average time spent on a website is 5.23 minutes*, emphasising the need for clear and concise data so users absorb as much as possible. Source: Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter July 2011: Site metrics: Avg Pages/Visit: 4.5 Avg Bounce Rate: 47% Avg time on site: 5.23mins Lots of key information and stats can be found here: These can include flash introductions, busy backgrounds, flashing icons and hit counters. In most cases they are annoying and can prove to be a maintenance headache for you too. Make sure you have your phone number and contact details on every page of your site. Study the competition and see what you could do to attract more customers. Do not forget to market your website Keep your site up to date Keep compliant Websites need visitors! Promote your site on other websites, set up link exchanges, learn about how to get good listings on the search engines and ensure you are listed on all free directory sites. Updating your site with fresh news, articles and case studies will encourage visitors to return. If you can t do it yourself you could pay a web development company to update your site on a regular basis. Make sure your website is clear, fair and not misleading and complies with legislation. Be sure to display risks as well as benefits to adhere to Financial Services Authority (FSA) guidelines. Be sure that: 1. Information is presented in an accurate, clear and balanced way 2. Risk information, where required, is placed clearly and prominently 3. The website s customer journey enables key information to be accessed easily Regular reviews and updates of your website are vital to stay compliant. Here are ten key issues to check when running a compliance audit on your website: 1. Do you have in place appropriate terms and conditions of use? 2. Do you collect any personal data via your site and what is it used for? 3. Do you use data for or mobile marketing? 4. Does your website make use of cookies? 5. Is your Intellectual Property adequately protected? 6. Do you provide sufficient information about your organisation and its products and services? 7. Do online trading terms cover all key points? 8. Are you dealing with businesses only or do you deal with consumers online? 9. How accessible is your website? 10. Who is your website aimed at and what services are you offering? Could your website work harder for your business? Ask yourself these key questions and find out 1. Does your website collect contact information? Try to collect the address of every person who visits your website. Display your response mechanism (that is, how they can leave their contact details for example, through a log in button) prominently on every page. To motivate people to register their details or call you, incentivise their decision by offering free seminars, articles, newsletters, guides, downloads, blogs or access to restricted sections on your website for more information on retirement or equity release. Data *Donald Sinatra, Jul 2, 2011 ( 2

3 lists need to be checked against the Preference Service, a global register of addresses that must be excluded from unsolicited sales and marketing s. Include a privacy notice about how you plan to use the personal data they provide, and allow them to opt-out of receiving any marketing promotion. Under the Data Protection Act, when capturing such information, you need to be clear about how you intend to use it. For example, if you plan to send marketing messages to people who register on your site, you need to state this clearly at the point that they register their details with you, and provide an easy method for them to opt-out. This isn t just a guideline but a legality, so make sure this is in place before capturing the data. For more information, visit the Information Commissioner s Office website. A link exchange is when you agree with another website to display a link to your website in exchange for a link to yours. 2. Will visitors understand your key messages? If you have something worth saying, repeat it. If you want to promote yourself as a retirement or equity release specialist, make it clear on your homepage and have a direct link to a section on your website covering each of these topics. To test your website, ask a friend or an existing client: What is the key message on the site? Is it easy to use? Would it encourage them to make an enquiry and hopefully become a new customer? 3. How interactive is your website? The big advantage of web marketing is that it can be more engaging than brochures or leaflets. People will be more inclined to use your site if they feel they can interact with it and you! To make your site more engaging: Create a Frequently Asked Questions page. Your answers will be informative for potential customers and help establish your expertise in the areas that you work for example, in retirement or equity release. Include an enquiry request form. Give people real reasons for filling out the form such as: Find out how to get the best income in retirement, or, Find out how much money you can raise from your home today. Don t Hide Your Enquiry Form Too often enquiry forms are buried on the site. Include a link to your form on every page. Ask people to supply some relevant information. For example, the value of their property and the value of the outstanding loans on their property are useful indicators of the potential for releasing equity on a property. Remember to capture their personal and contact details. Treat personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Act Provide a helpline for advice. People are more likely to respond to a helpline than an office number. Set up an auto response to collect detailed information. Use an auto responder to send people a confirmation when they request information. In the ask them for detailed contact information and a few questions about what aspects of retirement or equity release they re interested in. Ensure that there is a process in place for answering these enquiries in a timely manner and if you promise to respond within a certain time, make certain that you do. Provide users with engaging tools such as calculators and free downloadable guides. Include a customer testimonial page. Quotes from clients are powerful marketing tools and may help reassure potential clients. Be sure that you have all the required permissions to use testimonials, including if they wish for you to quote their name and ensure you update them frequently to prevent any becoming out of date or irrelevant. 4. Do you market your website on and offline? As well as putting your website on all your marketing material such as letters, brochures, business cards and mailings there are lots of ways to promote your site online: Register with directories like Yell.com or ThompsonLocal.com. 3

4 Link your site to other key directories such as Google, Yahoo, and About.com. You may be charged for this, but your site will be more prominently displayed. Link your site to specialised directories and portals like unbiased.co.uk, advisermap.co.uk and financial-index.co.uk. These are great places to register your business details and get seen by potential clients. Optimise your site for the search engines this means making sure you have content that is relevant to your clients, so that when they search under a particular term, such as retirement advice, your website is higher up the list of websites returned. To do this, check you have the relevant keywords in your text, set up your meta tags and limit the use of animations, large images and Flash. A meta tag is an element, usually built into a website s underlying code, that enables a search engine to catagorise your website most effectively. Buy Pay Per Click (PPC) ads on search engines like Google. You can request that your web address appears on Google when someone searches a key phrase such as equity release adviser. Your position in the list (your ranking ) is determined by how much you ve bid for a particular search word compared to other businesses. This can be a cost-effective way to get targeted traffic, because you only pay when someone actually clicks on the link and can set limits on the total amount that you are willing to pay (see below for more information about PPC). Banner ads are the online advertisements that run on a website, and when clicked on, link through to the advertiser s own website. They are a useful way to direct traffic to your website from other websites. Look for relevant sites that have a high volume of traffic from your target market and find out if you can pay to place a banner ad on them. Use this opportunity to get creative, creating a banner which draws the eye and creates enough of an incentive to click. Remember, hypertext links and banner ads could be financial promotion materials depending on their content. If they do, they must be clear, fair and not misleading. Where they are product specific, they should provide a balanced indication of the product or service, the risks and commitment involved. Request links to other sites. Create a preferred links page for other sites e.g. intermediaries who offer advice on areas that you don t, solicitors, estate agents, or tax consultants, and request a reciprocal link to your site. Write articles for others to use in their newsletters. Other businesses and charities that issue newsletters to the over 60s may welcome a contribution from you as an expert on income in retirement or equity release. Ask them to include your web link and phone number. Issue news releases for local or regional papers and include your website address details. Install a signature on your that includes your web address. Send a regular newsletter to all your clients who have given you marketing permission to do so. Include links to relevant articles on your website. Ask visitors to bookmark your site so they can easily return to your site at a later date. Include a Recommend to a friend icon on every page of your website. 5. Does your website work with your other marketing activity? If you re running a retirement or equity release or direct mail campaign, why not create a landing page on your website? A landing page is the web page a customer lands on when they click through from your marketing campaign or type in the web address from a letter. While an or direct mail attracts the customer s interest, it s the landing page that should motivate them to contact you. Follow these tips and you should be well on your way to improving your response rate: Be consistent. It s important that the look and feel of your landing page fits with your other marketing activity. Provide useful, meaningful information. Make sure the text on the landing page builds on your or direct mail including for example, a more detailed explanation of how equity release could help, together with some hints and tips or qualifying questions. Don t confuse your message. Once customers reach your landing page don t offer them too many options. Avoid links to other areas of your website. Build trust. Bear in mind that your prospective customer may never have heard of you or your business when they reach your website. Provide quotes from testimonials, case studies or worked examples. If you are capturing 4

5 information from clients, make sure you tell customers how you plan to use their data, and allow them to opt out of all future communications. Track your results. Some tracking tools are free, such as Google Analytics - a measurement tool that lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications Analysing your results is a good way to know if your pages are working or not. 6. Compliance Remember that all marketing material should be fair, clear and not misleading to comply with general advertising rules as well as the Financial Services Authority s requirements and ensure that you continue to treat customers fairly. You can find out more about both of these at uk/doing/regulated/promo. Other relevant legislation such as the Electronic Commerce (EC Archive) regulations 2002, Data Protection Act 1998 and the Computer Misuse Act 1990, available from You also need to comply with data protection regulations, ensuring that you only promote your business to those existing or prospective clients who have given the appropriate marketing permissions for you to do so. Driving people to your website The higher your website ranks on search engines, the more chance you will have of driving traffic to your site, and the greater the potential for growing your retirement business. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can help you generate leads, sales or simply awareness among your target audience. Unsurprisingly, given the growing popularity of search engines for researching products, services and organisations, SEM is vital if you want to capture the attention of the over 60s market. Where to start Decide whether you want to rely on natural listings or paid for listings such as Pay Per Click (PPC). In both cases you can achieve a healthy search engine ranking, but through different approaches. Sponsored links These are paid for listings which have the top location on Google due to their prominence Free natural listings These sites appear here because their text is highly relevant and their site is well optimised and well visited for this keyword. Secondary paid for listings Cost between 10p and 10 a click depending on what the competition is prepared to bid. Free natural listings Natural listings involve the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to achieve a good ranking for your website. You can employ a specialist agency to do this for you or do it yourself. If you want to run your own SEO, use the steps below to improve your website rankings. 1. Prepare your keyword list This is the single most important aspect of SEO. Try to understand your target audience and how they might search for your service. Most of the big search engines have tools to help you do this. You can also find free tools by searching on the internet under free keyword tools. Develop a comprehensive list of keyword phrases related to your business. For example, if your focus is on annuities and equity release, the obvious ones would be annuity and equity release Other phrases to thnk about that are relevant to your business: Income in retirement Retired or retirement Annuity advice Enhanced annuity Equity release advice Equity release plan or equity release Home or homeowner Mortgage or lifetime mortgage Unlock capital in your home Retirement options/retirement planning 2. Put the keywords into your web text Once you have your keywords ready, prepare the text for the retirement and equity release content on your website. You will want each of your pages to focus on one of the keyword phrases from your list. Your homepage should focus on your most important phrase and each subsequent sub-page should focus on another keyword phrase. Ideally, you should never focus on more than one or two keyword phrases per page. Try to place each keyword 3-7 times on the page. Keywords are also covered by financial promotions rules and need to be fair, clear and not misleading. 5

6 3. Build your title tags The title tag (what the webpage is called) is one of the most important elements of your page. Search engines put more weight on the title tag than any other single element of your page. With most browsers it becomes the default name if the page is bookmarked. The title tag generally has a direct connection with the most important keywords on the website. It appears on the web page and also as the underlined blue hyperlink when the web page comes up in a search query on a search engine. Your title tag should ALWAYS contain the primary keyword phrase for that page. Keep the tag as short as possible e.g. Increase retirement income with equity release Company Name. 4. Keep your pages as simple as possible Things such as frames, animations, videos and large graphics or images can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is that the simpler the page layout, the better it will generally rank. Even tables, when over-used, can break up the flow of the text on a page and hurt your chances of a top ranking, although there may be times when a table is the best way to present the information on a particular page. Watch your competition Have a look at your competition and look at the terms they use in their Page Title (this is the text that appears on your website listing when you do a search on Google). Click on the top ranking websites and look through their pages. What keyword phrases do they use? Where do they appear and how often? 5. Develop good content for each page Very few top ranking sites have very little content you ll have a much better chance of getting and keeping a top ranking with good quality, regularly reviewed content. It gives the search engines more to review and rank. 6. Try to think big What does this mean? Quite simply, a site with 30 pages has 6 times the chances of a site with 5 pages. The more pages your site has with good, relevant, quality content, the more keyword phrases you can target and the more chances you have of attaining a top ranking. However, creating more pages of poor content for the sake of SEO will have a negative effect and cause people to become frustrated and turn off. 7. Create a good system of internal linking Make sure you can get to any page on your site within three clicks. Create a site map with links to all of the pages within your site. This will help search engines to properly index your site. When you create your internal links, try to call the link the actual keyword phrase that you will be targeting on the page you are linking to e.g. Equity Release. Many engines look at the visible text of a hyperlink as a description of the target page. If the visible text matches the focus of that page, it will help to give that page a boost in the rankings. 8. Build your site s external link popularity This can be a time consuming task, but it s crucial to your success. All of the top engines use link popularity when ranking sites. So it helps to remember that the relevancy, quantity and quality of links is important. One link from a site such as Yahoo or Google can be worth as much as 100 links from an unknown site. 9. Monitor your rankings Check your ranking on a regular basis. Search under free search engine ranking report for free software to help you find and monitor your website rankings. If your position drops, look at the sites that have overtaken you and see if you can determine why. Make adjustments accordingly. If another website, blog, etc links to your website, this is considered an external link. If you link out to another website, this too is an example of an external link. 6

7 10. Stick at it! Give yourself time to get used to SEM. Keep track of your progress, analyse the competition, and adjust your keywords and website layout. It can take up to 3-6 months for a new listing to appear. Make The Most Of Your Keyword Phrases From the keywords you have chosen for the retirement or equity release sections of your website, pick a primary and a secondary keyword that you want to rank well on. In the source code of the page: Write the title tag making sure that you include the primary keyword Write the description tag using both the primary and secondary keywords. List the keywords using the area dedicated within the source code. On the web page The first paragraph should be a summary of the overall page and include both the primary and secondary keywords. Write heading and subheading to contain keywords. Once you have your list, rank the phrases in order of importance starting with your most important keyword phrase. Paid for listings Paid for listings (Pay Per Click or PPC advertising) are a highly targeted form of marketing. Targets are not cold prospects they are people who are already searching for what you can offer. So the lead stands a good chance of being converted, compared with other forms of marketing. Unlike other types of advertising, there are no significant costs upfront in terms of media buying, print or creative costs. With prices starting from as little as 10p each, you simply bid on key search words and phrases relevant to your business. Successful companies are then listed in order of bid price and popularity in the paid for listings search results on major websites and portals. You only pay once a prospect actually clicks through to your website. Kick Start Your Online Campaign It can take a while for a natural listing search campaign to come to fruition, so you might consider using paid listings at the beginning of any SEM campaign to kick-start it. 7

8 Using Pay Per Click advertising Managing multiple search engine accounts and adjusting bids on hundreds or thousands of search terms can be time consuming so you could ask an agency to manage this for you. Alternatively, you could create your own accounts at one or more of the main UK Pay Per Click search engines: Yahoo Search Marketing Google Adwords Microsoft Advertising/Bing Miva Mirago Search Listings Webfinder Most search engines will provide you with a range of tools to help you refine your SEM campaign. Major search engines like Google and MSN will let you look at the type of people who are clicking on any keyword - by age, gender, location or time and day of search. This will help you choose the best performing keywords. Quality counts Pay Per Click advertising is not just about placing the highest bid for a keyword. Some search engines particularly Google also rely heavily on popularity to determine rankings. So quality of content on your website is just as important as your PPC budget Direct mail Powerful support for your online activity Direct mail can complement your online communications by allowing you to create a specific response from a targeted group of customers. It can be particularly effective for small businesses because it gives you the chance to focus limited resources where they are most likely to produce results. It also gives you the opportunity to measure results accurately. And there s always the option to test your marketing for example, you can tailor two different approaches to a representative sample of your target audience and see which delivers the best response before mailing a larger number of clients. For more information on direct mail, take a look at Guide 4 - Tips to help you generate more enquiries from direct mail. For more marketing guides and free sample marketing material, visit: Remember that all marketing material should be fair, clear and not misleading to comply with the Financial Services Authority rule requirements and ensure that you continue to treat customers fairly. You can find out more about both of these requirements at Just Retirement Limited. Registered office: Vale House, Roebuck Close, Bancroft Road, Reigate, Surrey RH2 7RU. Tel: Registered in England Number Just Retirement Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. For financial intermediary use only. Not approved for use with customers. Lines are open 8.30am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday. Please note your call may be monitored and recorded and call charges may apply. 8