Whether you currently have an outdated financial advisor website that you would like to enhance, or this is your first website, you’re probably overwhelmed by all of the options that are available for website design. As a starting point, the two most popular strategies for building a website are using a financial advisor website template or having your website custom-built by a firm that specializes in building websites for financial advisors.
A templated financial advisor website is just like it sounds, a one-size-fits-all approach to getting a website built fast and cheap. Design elements, such as text boxes, photo placement, headlines, etc. are pre-set and often cannot be moved or deleted. This plug-and-play approach is appealing to bloggers and small businesses just getting started because of the low cost and ease of use. A custom website is tantamount to building a custom home - a lot of features to choose from.
You can choose features, benefits, differentiating characteristics, graphics, a color palette, and provide them to a digital marketing agency that specializes in working in your industry. The agency will build a website that is based on your exact specifications. Changes can easily be made with the help of your design team, or even through a CMS (Content Management System for the best long-term solution for your financial advisor website. Here are some important facts to consider before deciding on which type of financial advisor website you will use.
Templated Websites Have Severe Limitations
Based on the sheer convenience of a website template, it’s true that “anyone” can build a website in one day. The question is what kind of online visibility will a templated website produce in the months and years to come.
Most templates are created with the inexperienced web user in mind. They are described as easy to use because there is little to no flexibility in the template’s appearance and structure beyond changing fonts and adding photos. For example, if you were to choose a template with 3 columns and you wanted to switch to a single column, most templates simply don’t allow that.
While this is done in an effort to keep novice users from making unintentional changes, more often than not it becomes a major pain point for users who want to make constructive changes that will impact their sites’ productivity.
Consider New Technologies
While no one knows what the next digital technology will be, there is no doubt that advancements are always on the horizon. With a templated website, financial advisors aren’t able to quickly adapt to shifts in online consumer behaviors.
As an example, it wasn’t that long ago that smartphones were new and had limited success accessing the internet. Fast forward to today and consider the amount of time users are spending on mobile devices, including conducting searches with voice functionality and expecting optimized results that display correctly on the mobile devices they are relying on for information and contact.
Google says 62% of all searches are now being conducted on mobile devices.
Financial advisors who are using templates that were created before mobile responsiveness was a critical element for websites may not be able to provide an optimized experience for consumers searching for their services online. It’s no stretch to think that templates built for today’s technology will be missing out when the next wave hits. Key takeaway: templates are static – technology is not.
Template-Based Websites Are Not Unique
Your potential clients are looking for a financial advisor who is trustworthy, experienced, and knowledgeable. Having a professional website is a big part of making a positive first impression. With a templated website, you risk looking less professional compared to financial advisors who own custom websites that are designed to produce leads.
Why? Because while templates vary in specific elements, the overall look of a website built with a template often gives away the fact that it is, in fact, a template. This is even more important when you consider the competition as not just local financial advisor firms, but also large national firms with fully customized sites. Your website has to compete with all of the other websites that investors find when they conduct keyword searches.
To stand out, financial advisors are increasingly seeking digital marketing firms to help them establish a solid online presence using a custom, lead generation financial advisor website.
Beware of “Free” Templates
When it comes to websites, what you see isn’t always what you get. This is especially true of free or low-cost website templates that do not come from a reputable online source. Sure, a template might look normal on the outside, but often these templates are poorly coded and have incomplete elements that can affect your SEO without you even knowing it.
And while Google doesn’t explicitly give preference to custom-built websites, it does penalize websites for things such as unnecessary code, and browser incompatibility, making some templates create more problems than positive results for a financial advisor website’s SEO.
At best, the templates that are free come with hard-coded (read: unchangeable) elements such as an advertisement for their website, and at worst can contain malicious or spammy content hidden in the code that you’ll never see, but Google will.
You Get What You Pay For
There’s no question that using a template for your financial advisor website is cheaper…at least initially. However, given what you now know about using website templates, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that choosing to go with a template can actually cost you more in the long run.
When you consider the static, rigid nature of website templates and their inability to adapt and meet the needs of new technology, then it’s only logical that sticking with the same template for an extended amount of time is a bad strategy for financial advisors who want to remain visible and relevant.
Because of that, and often because of the overall frustration over their lack of results, many financial advisors ultimately end up hiring an agency to build a custom website that is competitive with other financial advisor websites and pays for itself by producing leads that financial advisors convert into revenue-producing clients.
