How to attract more clients to your website

Advisers should consider boosting their profiles by using the internet to advertise their businesses and optimise their ‘hits’ by selecting key words and phrases for search engines, say Victoria Sisson and James Simpson of FWD.

The world is online and advisers need to sit up and pay attention to the internet. One simple way to assess its importance is to look at the number of people searching for terms relevant to your business.

Take the words ‘IFA’ and ‘independent financial advisers’, for example. In the UK, there are 165,000 and 18,100 monthly searches in Google for these terms respectively. There are, of course, hundreds of different ways people will search for the products you offer (see table below).

These include terms with high search volumes and there would be tough competition to get your site on the first page of Google for them. But there are plenty of potential clients to be had if you optimise your site for more niche words and phrases. Nearly 2,000 people a month search using the term ‘IFA London’, for example and ‘inheritance tax trusts’ gets 590 searches a month.

The numbers are smaller, but it’s easier to get your site high in Google’s search results with these because fewer companies will optimise their sites for such specific terms.

However, that just refers to Google searches. To get a true idea of the total numbers of potential customers online, add results from other search engines, such as Yahoo, Bing and Ask, as well as people clicking through from online articles. That could well double the statistics. So what key tips can we give you to get more potential customers to your site?

Step 1

Review your website. Your website is your shop window and is the first opportunity to demonstrate the professionalism of your organisation. Review it, compare it to competitor sites and ask people their opinion. And if it doesn’t stack up, improve it.

Consider the navigation and the design to make sure people can find what they need quickly and easily. And include strong, clear calls to action.

Step 2

List it on IFA-related and other UK directories.There are plenty of directories specifically for IFAs, such as www.unbiased.co.uk and www.searchifa.co.uk. Make sure you are on these. There are also many other UK directories (such as www.freeindex.co.uk) that you need to be on. People use these to search for suppliers but they also show up in search results.

Step 3

Use local online listings. Sites such as Google Places and Yahoo Local have been set up to allow you to list your business locally. This has two advantages:

• The results often show up on the first page of Google: type ‘IFA Epsom’ into the Google search box and you’ll see a Google map with local firms listed on the first page. If you are in Epsom and you’ve registered it on Google Places you’ll be in the results.
• It provides an online link back to your site – and links are important to getting your site seen.

Step 4

Engage with social media and blogging. Much has and is being said about social media and blogging and many professionals do not entertain the subject. However, it is a means to access free online communication tools and our advice is to not ignore it. Using a blog effectively and linking it to a Twitter account will bring benefits.

At the very least you should be using LinkedIn. Set up profiles – for you and your business – build up your contact list, join groups and post useful (not sales-led) information on your subject of expertise.

Step 5

Search engine optimisation. This is the practice of maximising traffic flows to your website via natural search, ie, non-paid-for search results.

Everything you’ve done in the first four steps will help your site to appear further up the Google rankings. But there are many other aspects you need to put in place if your site is to be fully optimised. It would take too long to go into them in detail but a key aim of Google is to reward sites that add value to the reader and provide a good user experience.

To assess this they send out ‘spiders’ to scan websites and look for things such as how relevant the subject matter is to the search phrase used, how good the user experience is (eg, is it a fast-loading site, can users easily go from page to page etc.) and how dynamic the site is – for example, is it frequently updated with relevant material?

Undertaking a successful online campaign is not easy but the rewards can make it worthwhile.

Victoria Sisson and James Simpson are directors of financial services marketing and PR firm FWD