7 Financial Website Marketing Strategies to Increase Traffic

When it comes to building financial websites, many funds, advisors and, service firms put all their attention in describing their offerings and, oftentimes, neglect to take into account how to increase website traffic.  One financial services firm said to us, “We simply have no need for search optimization, people know who we are.” Three months later, we received a panicked call about how a web 2.0 competitor was stealing their customers and what they could do to change it.  Financial search engine optimization has significantly leveled the playing field for hedge funds, broker dealers, and other financial orientated firms.

This competition translates into an asymmetric online warfare of sorts, where a larger competitor can’t respond or compete with their younger more nimble counterparts. So how does your brand’s website win in this guerilla warfare? The key is to employ a number of website strategies that will increase traffic and deliver more visibility online.

One of the primary goals for your website is to bring in qualified, organic traffic. Let’s break that down.

Qualified = We want to attract visitors that are interested in your financial services products, not couch surfers looking for news articles on a similarly named story.
Organic Traffic = There are many search engines, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll refer to Google search.  One option is to purchase search engine listings for your website. Alternatively, organic searches allow your website to show up based on content relevancy determined by Google.

For this example we used the keyword “Hedge fund Services”:



By increasing your organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO), your website will be listed higher in search engine results. The higher you’re listed, the more referral traffic will come from people searching for a specific keyword and clicking on the link to your website. There are a number of ways an effective financial website can deliver more traffic. Here are our top seven.

1. Add a Financial Blog

Financial blogs have quickly become one of the most influential marketing tools. Many financial firms have a blog authored by the CEO, Fund Manager, or a third party marketing firms. Marketing studies have shown that an effective blog can increase website traffic and position your company as a thought-leader.

PerkStreet Financial has a great financial blog here:



2. Add a Financial News Feed

Unlike traditional news feeds, adding a moderated news feed will stream highly relevant content for your site’s visitors.  A news story that is relevant to your organization can then be repurposed on your website along with social media networks in which you participate.

Financial Times has a RSS Feed here:



3. Add a Financial Industry Event Calendar

Want to add authority to your website in a very simple way? Add a financial industry calendar that can highlight all the major events and conferences in your industry, vertical both domestically and internationally. Take advantage of the fact that large, well-established firms don’t bother to take the time to aggregate financial events because of politics or complicated internal regulations. Visitors to will benefit from the valuable information provided on your website.

A great example of a financial association calendar is SIFMA, you can view it here:



4. Add a Domestic and International Holiday Calendar

Bank and holidays in America have become synonymous with each other. Once a user finds a good holiday calendar, they usually book mark it and refer to it regularly. For a small or medium-sized business, it’s an easy project because it only has to be done once a year for the following two calendar years. 

PNC utilizes a financial holiday calendar here:



5. Globalize Your Financial Website

Many financial websites are increasingly relying on international traffic to boost their brand’s online position. Chances are some of your customers, clients, and investors may speak another language. With today’s globalization tools, it’s easier than ever to add additional languages that co-exist with your existing content.  You can give users access to international content in a specific section or completely translate your entire website. The time and effort to translate a website can be quickly evaluated by an experienced web design company familiar with the intricacies of deploying a solution on your new or existing website.

Select Country Sites from the JP Morgan page here:




6. Add Full-Page, Custom Biographies

The financial world is full of large egos and extremely qualified individuals that are often under
promoted on their companies’ websites. It’s ironic that in the legal world (where partners are also considered rainmakers) the opposite tends to be true and biographies on each of a firm’s members are readily available. So what can the financial world learn from legal biographies? Attorneys have long ago embraced that idea that it’s important to promote your human capital effectively. By going beyond a simple synopsis and creating partner-specific pages, you can break out expertise and effectively control the due diligence process an outside entity may be performing.

Capital One offers an easy to browse tool for each officer here:



7. Optimize Your Financial Website for Specific Keywords

The most important information to keep in mind when you look to optimize your financial website is that focusing on improving only one keyword won’t make a large impact on your traffic.  A successful financial SEO strategy usually takes into account a dozen or more keywords that are specific to your company’s offerings. When determining which keywords to pick, put yourself in the same mind set of the individual searching for your services. Searches tend to be short and specific, usually relying on four or less keywords. It’s important to also run a competitive SEO report to benchmark your closest competitors. The report identifies what’s working for them and what you can do to benefit from the same search strategies that are generating results for them already. 

Pay special attention to the title and page tags in your website pages, for example, here’s a search for “Hedge Fund Services.”



Alliance Interactive not only provides technology solutions to fuel your financial marketing efforts, we offer full-service creative support to help you implement the most successful marketing programs. For additional information, please contact us at 888-222-9056 or here.