Your financial advisor website is not only the hub of your financial advisory firm’s online presence—it’s also often where visitors form a first impression of your financial advisory firm’s branding and services. And if that first impression isn’t a positive one, those visitors will exit your website never to be seen again.
Bounce rate is what happens when a user visits a website and doesn’t visit any other pages besides where they landed - most often your home page. This could be for many reasons, but typically a high bounce rate on your financial advisor website is not viewed positively by Google. This is because in many cases, a high bounce rate can indicate that users aren’t finding what they were looking for or weren’t engaged enough to visit any additional pages of your financial advisor website.
How is Bounce Rate Calculated?
The formula for bounce rate is relatively simple: divide the total number of one-page visits by the total number of visitors to your financial advisor website.
A note about GA4 and bounce rates: Google released a new generation of analytics tools known as GA4, which replaced the previous version (UA) which launched last year. This was a major update, but a lot has changed since it went into effect. One of those changes impacted how bounce rates are calculated.
Previously, the UA analytics calculated bounce rate on interactions only, not considering other factors such as engagement. GA4 considers whether that website visit was engaged or not while calculating non-engaged sessions as bounces.
While this calculation can help deliver more accurate data, it’s important to note that any previous bounce rate data gathered for your financial advisor website isn’t being compared directly against the newer GA4 data.
To get a better picture of how engaged your financial website visitors are, you can take a look at other metrics such as time spent on your website or on a page. A greater amount of time spent on the page could mean that your homepage or landing page had enough content that the visitor didn’t need to click further. This isn’t all bad, especially since Google also looks at the amount of time visitors stay on a page and considers that a plus.
However, it’s even better if you can get visitors to stay and visit even more pages on your financial advisor website. Following are 5 tips that will improve your financial advisor website’s bounce rate:
1. Make sure your financial advisor landing page is easy to navigate
With so much competition for your website visitor’s attention, it’s no small feat to get clicks in the first place. But once they’ve clicked, it’s your website’s job to get them to engage. Whether a user ends up on your financial advisor website or a specific landing page, it needs to be easy for them to find what they were coming for. If not, this is one of the most common reasons for website visitors “bouncing” off your financial advisor website.
2. Review Your Financial Advisor Content
Even with the best SEO and easy, intuitive navigation and user experience, your financial advisor website’s bounce rate can increase drastically without quality content. If your financial advisor content is outdated, inaccurate, or not unique in any way, then it’s time for a refresh. This will not only help your bounce rate but also your overall SEO efforts.
3. Your keywords and meta descriptions (SEO) should match your content
Nobody wants a “bait and switch,” and that’s exactly what happens when a website’s SEO doesn’t match the content that users see when they click. This can happen due to “keyword stuffing”—a practice Google considers “spamming” and will take action against in most cases. And whether it’s intentional or not, it’s not good for bounce rates, so be sure this isn’t happening with your financial advisor website.
4. Check for Any Dead/Inactive Pages on Your Financial Advisor Website
Even if a page has been deleted or remains unpublished on your financial advisor website, there’s a chance that the page itself or links to that page could still be getting indexed by Google. This means that it’s possible for this page of your financial advisor website to show up in Google searches.
If a user clicks on it, this will generate a 404 (page not found) error and they’re likely to leave the site entirely. It’s generally considered a best practice to redirect links from any inactive pages to prevent this from happening and bringing up your bounce rate.
5. Check Your Financial Advisor Website’s Load Speed
The dial-up internet days are over. Most digital consumers are using high-speed connections and expect your financial advisor website to load almost instantly. In truth, there’s no reason your site should load slowly. If it does, it’s time to investigate why—and fix it!
That’s because in addition to being a large contributor to high bounce rates, Google factors site speed into SEO. Some of the most common reasons for a slow website load speed are images that are too large, unnecessary HTML and/or CSS code, too many website redirects, and plugins. Not sure if your financial advisor website is running slow? There are many free online resources where you can get an analysis by simply typing in your website.
6. Use Mobile-First or Mobile Responsive Design
People are using mobile devices more than ever before, and that’s not changing anytime soon! And because of this, your financial advisor website should be user-friendly and easy to navigate across all types of devices and screen sizes.
There are two main ways to accomplish a mobile-friendly experience for visitors to your financial advisor website: mobile responsive design and mobile-first design. Making a website mobile responsive means considering mobile viewing after the desktop version of a website is created.
However, the gold standard is now about using a mobile-first approach. As the name would imply, the website design is created for a mobile environment, and then modified for a desktop environment afterward.
