Why landing page design can’t be an afterthought

If you’re putting time and effort into your content marketing strategy then you can’t leave your landing page design as an afterthought. A well-designed page ensures the leads you’re gaining from your content are actually being converted. At the end of the day, an effective page designed to convert will help ensure your lead generation campaign is successful.

With the average landing page conversion rate across all industries being 9.7% (with 10% being widely considered a good conversion rate) getting them right is critical. As Hubspot explains, “Marketers who create landing pages that build trust with page visitors, provide valuable information, and use different content types see higher conversion rates.”

How to design a landing page that converts

Creating not only an engaging landing page but one that converts is all about the design. Here are our top tips for creating an engaging landing page:

• Keep it personal – Ensure your landing page is personalised to the user. Utilising generic messaging won’t lead to conversions or maintain engagement, with studies revealing personalised CTAs convert 202% better than a normal CTA.
• Optimise, optimise, optimise – Consistently testing your landing page and optimising it is critical to its success. Utilising A/B testing will ensure your landing page operates smoothly and help convert clients, with 1 out of 8 A/B tests shown to have driven significant change.
• Keep it simple – Too much information can overwhelm your clients. Keep your information clear, simple and concise.
• Have a clear call to action – Ultimately, you want your clients visiting your landing page to take action. This means an effective CTA is critical.
• Ensure it’s mobile-friendly – With more people using their mobiles to find and research businesses it’s critical your landing page is not only designed for mobile but is fast, quick and responsive otherwise people simply click off.

Two great examples

These two finance brands demonstrate what makes a good landing page design. Keeping it simple and immediately trying to gain important first-party data makes these landing pages particularly effective.

Future Green Steps has made its landing page eye-catching and engaging. Keeping the information simple, users gain the necessary information seamlessly. Additionally, it has incorporated short-form videos to make the page feel fresh and provide a variety of content appealing to a wider range of visitors while also increasing users’ time on the page.

Odin’s Crow has also created an innovative and engaging landing page design. Utilising intelligent web design, Odin’s Crow combines interactive graphics with accessible typography that provides critical information. Odin’s Crow highlights that landing page design doesn’t have to be boring, instead, it can be modern and contemporary.

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Digital marketing trends for APAC finance brands

In the report by Adobe and Econsultancy, there are three key digital marketing trends in the APAC region that finance brands should understand.

• CX design as a priority – One in five (19%) of organisations in the APAC region said that CX is the most exciting opportunity for them. With 73% of consumers saying a good CX design is key in influencing their brand loyalties, creating a great digital customer experience should be a strategic priority for APAC finance brands.
• CX design maturity – APAC organisations are lagging behind their global counterparts when it comes to CX design and the overall customer experience. In fact, only 7% of businesses in the APAC region said that they consider themselves ‘mature’ in customer experience, compared to 12% in North America and 11% globally. With 75% of customer loyalty driven by CX, improving your finance brand’s CX design offers an opportunity to gain a competitive edge.
• CX design investment – Investment in CX technology is set to increase significantly across the next few years in the APAC region in an effort to catch up to global counterpart. In fact, 57% of organisations in the region reveal they are likely to increase their investment in CX-related technology, compared to 47% of companies across the rest of the world. If your finance brand hasn’t yet created a plan to improve CX design, it’s time to start.

How to create a great CX design

CX design is all about catering to what your customers want. Understanding the customer journey is vital to getting your CX right. There are five key areas that are important to get right, if you want to nail your finance brand’s CX:

• Reachability – It should be easy to find and interact with your finance brand, whether that’s your website or social media channels. If leads can’t find you, how do you expect to convert them?
• Convenience – It should be easy and convenient to not only purchase from your site or mobile app but to also get in contact with your customer service team.
• Personalisation – Consumers want personalisation. Ensuring your website, digital app and all communications are personalised with tailored product offerings, insights and key information.
• Ease-of-use – At the heart of great CX design is that every channel you have, whether it’s a website or digital app, is easy to use. This means ensuring your website is not only accessible on a desktop but it’s also mobile-friendly.
• Omnichannel approach – Key customer data should be transferable across all digital channels. This means the customer journey shouldn’t get lost if they transfer from your digital app to the desktop website.

Key takeaways for APAC finance brands

At the end of the day, these digital marketing trends indicate a clear need for APAC finance brands to focus on creating a great CX design. With CX design becoming a key area of competition for finance brands, there’s never been a better time to improve it.

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CX design can make or break your finance brand

A 2020 Walker study found that customer experience overtakes price and product as the key brand differentiator. CX design plays an important role in acquiring and retaining consumers. CX is the new battlefield with over two-thirds of brands now competing primarily on the basis of customer experience alone.

When it comes to delivering great CX design, understanding what consumers want is critical. Yet, more often than not, finance brands are getting it wrong. Redpoint Global did an extensive survey to find the three key areas finance brands aren’t delivering great CX for consumers: They are:

• Understanding the consumer (77%)
• Personalisation (77%)
• Omnichannel marketing (72%)

Understanding the consumer

Like with any aspect of financial marketing, it’s critical you understand your target audience well. Gaining superior data quality is a key area of opportunity for your finance brand.

While it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in data, you need to set parameters for the type of data you’ll analyse. Your checklist may look like:

• Target market (age, gender, income, location, etc.)
• Marketing and social media analytics (click-throughs, impressions, conversions, etc.)
• Customer data (persona, spending patterns, offers they’ve declined, online activity, social network activity, service preferences)
• Prospect data
• Qualitative data
• Competitors

By understanding your consumer’s data you can find customer pain points and areas for improvement, leading to the creation of a great CX design.

Personalisation

Personalisation is becoming increasingly more important as consumers continue to increase their dependence on digital finance management tools. In fact, 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalised messaging. But where should you focus your personalisation strategies?

According to research by McKinsey, here are the five top areas your finance brand should focus on:

• 75% of consumers want personalisation to make it easier to navigate in-store and online purchasing
• 67% of consumers want relevant and tailored product/service recommendations
• 66% of consumers want messaging tailored to their needs
• 65% of consumers want targeted promotions
• 61% of consumers want brands to celebrate their key milestones

Omnichannel marketing and CX design

Consumers are wanting more consistent, omnichannel marketing from finance brands. With brands that implement omnichannel marketing experiencing 23x higher customer satisfaction rates, it’s a key area your finance brand should improve.

Omnichannel marketing in the context of CX design means no matter where your consumers interact with your finance brand they always have a great customer experience. Rather than focusing your CX design on one area, like your website, taking a holistic perspective and identifying areas of improvement across your entire marketing strategy can give you a competitive edge.

The Redpoint Global report asserts, “with consistency being consumers’ most important dimension and also among the top area they feel brands are falling short, focusing on overcoming the challenges this dimension presents to marketers should be a top priority.”

It’s time to improve your CX design

At the end of the day, CX design is now one of the most important aspects of acquiring and retaining consumers. While your finance brand may believe it’s delivering great CX, it probably isn’t aligning with your consumer’s expectations. It’s time to reconsider your CX and align it with what your target audience is demanding.

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Creating a frictionless in-person experience that transfers seamlessly into the digital space can be difficult and requires new and emerging technologies to be incorporated into your finance brands’ technology infrastructure. Adobe and Stripe are some technology brands helping finance brands build integrated systems that better enable them to accommodate all customer experiences. Another way of facilitating a hybrid shopping experience, is for finance brands to build partnerships with retailers to enable them to integrate their digital products within the in-person shopping experience. A hybrid shopping experience balances the best of both worlds by providing the hyper-personalised and accessibility of the digital space within the real world. So, how can your finance brand create a hybrid shopping experience and why should you?

The hybrid shopping experience

Younger generations, like Gen Z and Millennials, are digital natives and highly value online experience for its personalisation and ease of use. Yet, many of them, alongside older generations, still value the in-person shopping experience. Creating a hybrid shopping experience, that incorporates digital technologies within the physical space, is the way of the future. In fact, 74% of consumers now expect a hybrid shopping experience.

Tesco and Amazon have already implemented this style of customer experience, implementing a “just walk out” technology where they’ve removed the need for checkouts – and consumers are loving it, with many of them enjoying the efficiency and ease of use. This technology

Addressing consumers’ digital and social needs is an important factor in the overall customer experience. Consumers are demanding more personalised customer experiences and hybrid shopping enables this. Research by McKinsey noted personalisation yields a 20% higher customer satisfaction rate and a 10-15% boost in sales conversion rates.

But what can your brand do to create a hybrid shopping experience?

Two technologies helping finance brands create a hybrid shopping experience

Stripe is one fintech highlighting how they have created and integrated a hybrid shopping experience within the retail space. While usually they exclusively provide online payment systems, they have recently introduced their online payment structure into the physical world.

By building a point-of-sale terminal product Stripe bridges the gap between online and offline payments, providing merchants with an omnichannel platform that helps make it easier to manage eCommerce transactions with in-person transactions. This product helps to streamline merchants’ workflows and provide a greater customer experience by improving the customer service. By creating an integrated offline and online payment system for merchants, consumers’ information is more accessible meaning purchase history, warranty, and receipts can be stored, making customer claims easier to process.

Tesla is another example of how finance brands can integrate themselves within the physical shopping experience through retail partnerships. As a customer purchases a Tesla, they are also encouraged to purchase insurance digitally during the process to ensure consumers’ car insurance is completed even before they leave the store. Partnering with Aviva and Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in America and Canada, these finance brands have made the customer experience even easier by providing their digital services during in-person shopping experiences.

Technology brand Adobe has created an innovative technology that enables banks and finance brands with physical stores to build a hybrid shopping experience.

Adobe’s creation of Sensei has revolutionised the physical store experience. Sensei is a digital technology that enables banks to adapt their digital content and online experience into physical stores. Adobe Sensei can do a number of things including:

• Automatically reformat content on a finance brands’ website or app to fit a screen inside the branch helping to consolidate marketing campaigns.
• Finance brands with physical stores can capture and analyse location data. This means when a consumer enters the store staff are alerted, if the consumer walks up to a screen personalised suggestions are available and finance brands can analyse consumers’ time within the store.
• Finance brands can understand and accumulate data on what consumers are doing both in-store and online, which hasn’t previously been possible.

Learning lessons for finance brands

The customer experience is critical to retaining consumers and acquiring new ones. In fact, consumers who have a great customer experience are 5x more likely to recommend a brand and 54% more likely to make another purchase. As technologies continue to improve, consumer demand for more advanced, personalised, and seamless customer experiences will increase.

Hybrid shopping is the way of the future.

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Human connection

Customer service is often seen as one of the top reasons for cultivating consumer loyalty, trust and retention, yet is often scored the lowest in customer satisfaction scores. In fact, 47% of customers would switch brands after a poor customer experience and 91% would leave without warning. While people are doing their banking more and more online, they still desire human connection when contacting customer service.

80% of consumers say speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the top things they’re looking for when interacting with customer service. Your finance brand should therefore prioritise technologies that support these core areas rather than ones you adopt simply because they’re considered cutting edge. Technology like AI and chatbots are becoming expected from customers as they enable easy queries to be solved quickly while remaining personalised and ‘human’.

CX design as a product

In this regard, the CX design improvements your finance brand has made across the pandemic must be maintained and continually updated to ensure customer retention. Consumers now expect a forward-thinking, personalised, and easy-to-use online experience. Without constantly improving your CX you are losing out to brands that do.

Financial wellness and improved trust

According to Accenture, only 29% of people trust their banks to look after their financial wellbeing compared with 43% two years ago. Consumers are wanting more help from their finance organisations with the pandemic increasing financial uncertainty globally. There’s now a link between financial wellness, CX design and customer satisfaction. This indicates a growing need from consumers for their finance providers to help them understand how to manage their money.

Offering educational resources and tools to manage spending easier are some ways to improve the financial wellness of your clients. Consider what your clients need and are struggling with when creating a customer-focused CX design.

Why CX design is important for financial marketers to consider

CX design is now one area consumers consider the most important when making their decisions. Ensuring you maintain the digital evolution your brand has adopted is critical to ensuring you retain customers and improve conversion rates. Think about the customer’s needs, digital habits, and wants first and foremost in your overall customer experience design.

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How does API technology work?

Simply put, APIs are a technology that enables two applications to communicate with one another. Whenever you use a messaging app or the weather app on your phone, you are using an API. In terms of financial services they enable your finance brand to link your database with other applications or programs. This is done securely, without the need for third party applications meaning your customer’s data is protected. By allowing your finance brand to link to other applications this enables you to expand the services you can offer and enables you to create and implement innovative tools in a matter of weeks not months.

In terms of financial services, API technology can be utilised in several ways. Some ways APIs can improve your customers’ experience include:

• Account authentication
• Payment processing
• ATM or branch location software
• Credit score checking
• Loyalty programs
• Link services to fintech apps

Deutsche Bank nailing API technology

One example of APIs being utilised to better the online financial experience is Deutsche Bank who have rolled out, in partnership with Swift, their new Beneficiary Account Validation (BAV) service. This service enables consumers to verify payee account information before an international payment is sent.

This directly addresses consumers’ concerns regarding international payments being sent to the wrong person. Additionally, it also helps reduce consumer dissatisfaction by improving end-to-end efficiency. In terms of the benefits for the bank, it reduces fraud rates and sets them apart from the competition enabling greater lead generation and brand awareness.

The benefit of APIs for financial services

At the core of it, API technology is critical for your finance brand as it enables innovative ideas to be created easily but also implemented quickly. This means you can respond to consumers’ needs and wants fast, benefiting the customer and helping to improve brand loyalty and trust.

The ability of APIs to enable innovations means they have the power to increase a bank’s revenue by 20% when implemented. Employing APIs shouldn’t be seen as a maybe but instead a must-have piece of technology for your finance brand.

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Making finance inclusive

The financial sector can be highly competitive with hundreds of finance brands vying for the same customers. Creating a design experience that’s inclusive means your finance brand can generate meaningful leads from the widest pool of consumers. Not only that, but inclusivity can set your finance brand apart from the competition, gain consumers’ trust and build brand loyalty with customers that have never previously had products catered to their unique circumstances.

According to research by PwC, “Inclusive design enables organisations to increase their revenue by growing the size of their target markets and reducing the need to make costly retrofits when products and services don’t meet the needs of excluded population groups. In turn, organisations can improve their brand reputation and recognition.”

Your finance brand shouldn’t assume a one size fits all approach for your digital experience. While it can be difficult to recognise and cater to all abilities and needs there can be a range of measures your finance brand can take that range from simple to more complex. Inclusivity is about centring the human user at the forefront and recognising everybody’s different.

Inclusive design principles for every finance brand

At the core of it, your finance brand should engage with a variety of users in the design and creation stage to fully understand the unique requirements of consumers. Not all inclusive design elements will be obvious or easy to implement which is why your finance brands need to converse with the end-user.

However, there are a number of changes your finance brand can make today, to help create a more inclusive design. These include:

• Text-to-speech – This is to benefit those who are visually impaired.
• Translated digital experiences – This is to benefit people whose first language isn’t English.
• Plain language – This benefits all users but caters towards those whose first language isn’t English and low-income users who may be intimidated and confused by complex financial jargon.
• Not utilising colours to signify actions – This is to benefit users who are colourblind.
• Large buttons that are distinctive and operate logically – This benefits a variety of users but can be particularly useful for the elderly.
• Readable fonts that can be magnified – This can benefit a wide variety of people but particularly those who are visually impaired or the elderly.

Inclusive design benefits everyone

While inclusive design is catered to and created for edge consumers, people who don’t fit within the one size fits all approach, they benefit everyone. At its core, it’s about including everyone within your finance brand. Offering inclusive design principles provides users with more options and ways to manage their money. This provides greater flexibility and satisfaction with your financial products and services.

At the end of the day, inclusive design enhances the reach of your finance brand, helping to build trust, loyalty, and lead generation.

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Move along Xbox finance apps are in

Gamifying your finance brand’s app or digital platform isn’t quite like making it an interactive game. Instead, it’s about incorporating game elements and mechanisms to incentivise users and create greater engagement. The gaming industry has deployed various tactics, that have been well-documented by psychology, to create more addictive habits, generate more fun and ensure users feel rewarded for spending their time playing. By taking these elements and incorporating them into the financial sphere, finance brands can gain a competitive edge. In fact, using gamification can help a company increase customer interactions by 40%.

The fundamental aspect of gamification isn’t to turn the user experience into a game like you’d play on an Xbox but instead create:

• An engaging and enjoyable experience
• Challenge the user to create a feeling of accomplishment
• Turn a boring finance problem into a fun activity
• Change user behaviour to make them continue to go back to your platform
• Educate and teach the user about financial topics (check out Zogo who are nailing this area)

Shifts to a more fun financial experience

Millennials and Gen Z have grown up around technology and video games, meaning a gamified experience in the finance world is a simple way for your finance brand to stand out and gain attention. This shouldn’t come at the expense of providing meaningful and quality content, instead finance brands should merge valuable information with a fun online environment if they want to capture the attention of a younger demographic and keep it.

Some gaming elements that can be incorporated into a finance digital platform include:

• Leaderboards
• Points
• Missions and objectives
• Sounds and illustrations
• Avatars
• Performance markers
• Rankings
• Progress bars
• Story elements.

Where can gamification be used?

Gamification is great for finance brands to encourage better financial behaviours, build trust and loyalty and capture an engaged audience. By creating a fun user experience your finance brand can create a meaningful connection with users. Not only does it encourage greater engagement but it’s also a way for finance brands to gain valuable data, as making financial decisions on apps leaves a digital trace. This can be another method for finance brands to create a personalised customer experience.

While it’s dependent on each finance brand, you should ensure a balance between a gamified experience and maintaining a trustworthy reputation as too many elements may make you seem cheesy and unprofessional.

Gamification is a practical element to include in a number of ways across a range of financial services. Some include:

• Encouraging better savings. By making saving more enjoyable and applying a sense of achievement to it, more of your customers can create a savings goal and achieve it.
• Educating your customers. Creating informative and high-quality educational content about a range of finance topics is a must for finance brands and adding game elements can make this experience more enjoyable. In fact, informative content is what your users want and can improve trust as educational content makes users 131% more likely to buy.
• Change overall behaviour. Games allow for positive reinforcement enabling character changes and habits. While this won’t necessarily improve a finance brand’s revenues, what it can do is build rapport and trust as they improve their financial habits as a result of working with your brand.
• Create an online community. Depending on what gaming features your finance brand adopts, a community can be created through leaderboards and avatar features for example, increasing customer enjoyment working and improving loyalty.

Finance brands nailing gamification

While gamification isn’t a very new concept in the finance world many brands have been slow on the uptake. Those that have embraced it have seen large benefits in customer acquisition, loyalty and positive user experiences. The US finance app Mint encourages better saving and budgeting habits by creating a fun and gamified experience. Users can track their expenses, investments and credit scores through fun infographics, progress charts and goal-setting.

Emirates NBD incorporated a more fun approach to their finance app by merging fitness and finances through an engaging gamified experience. Emirates NBD synced with fitness apparatus like Fitibit to keep track of users exercise. For example, if users hit 12,000 steps they would earn 2% interest everyday. This launch saw great success with 99% positive sentiments and in just one month over 53 million steps were counted and AED 16.07 million saved.

It’s time to get creative with user experiences

As the finance industry continues to go digital it’s time finance brands embraced this trend and incorporated creative and engaging elements into their user experience. One way to do so is through gamification but how each finance brand does so will be unique to its target audience. An older demographic may not appreciate the sounds and graphics but could respond well to goals and progress trackers, whereas a younger demographic may enjoy the community-based element more and personalising their experience through avatars and leaderboards. With companies who employ gamification elements experiencing seven times higher conversion rates, it’s an area finance brands should look to incorporate into their own marketing strategy.

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With Ecommerce expected to make up 22% of global retail sales by 2023, websites are fast becoming one of the most important aspects of a successful marketing strategy. By combining product marketing and design, a harmonious balance can be found that will ensure your website is both functional and beautiful, as well as being informative and profitable.

The difference between UX and UI design

To get started, it’s important to understand the difference between user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. At its core, UI design is focused on visual design and brand image. Alternatively, UX is centered around user experience and how customers interact with a website. UX design solves structural pain points to make the purchasing process easier.

UX design and UI design collaborate to deliver a holistic customer experience. A website that focuses on both UX design and UI design will be both functional and visually appealing and finance brands must incorporate both. Yet, often, it’s UX that’s forgotten about with 86% of companies failing to consider UX when developing their website.

Users want UX design

With so much choice online, users expect websites to be easy-to-use and functional. In fact, more than two-thirds of businesses compete on customer experience alone, making UX design a key weapon in remaining competitive. UX is an investment that has great returns for finance brands with a study by Forrester finding that every $1 invested in UX design generates $100 in return. Customers want their online experience to be easy and UX design allows for that.

By altering the focus from the aesthetic qualities of a website to the users’ experience it can help finance brands reduce visitors dropping off and choosing an alternative business. 88% of customers were less inclined to purchase from a company after a bad user experience indicating the influence UX design has on customers’ purchasing decisions.

Know your audience

UX design is human-focused. It places the customer at the forefront of your website’s design. By researching and understanding not only who your finance brands’ audience is but also how they use your website, finance brands can drive customers to take certain actions. Whether this is to purchase a product or to engage with a specific campaign, when UX aligns with a strategic content program they work in partnership to deliver on business goals. In fact, companies that focused on customer experience saw their revenue increase by 4-8%.

While 81% of banks believe they understand their users’ needs, only 37% of customers agree. With web design a key aspect of the customer experience, it’s an important component to ensure finance brands are meeting the needs of consumers. Whilst visual design is a way to capture attention and engage customers, to strengthen customer relationships and drive them to take relevant actions finance websites need to be designed with customer behaviours front of mind.

Here are three simple fixes to improve your UX design:
Count how many clicks it takes for your user to get to the page they need. Remove any unnecessary pathways as you want your site to be easy and quick to navigate.
Ensure the front page of your website showcases who your brand is and what they do. Look to showcase content that will drive customers down the funnel as well as providing quick links to products for customers ready to act.
Ensure you have a call to action (CTA) that is noticeable and relevant. Having a personalised CTAs converted 42% more visitors into leads than un-personalised ones.

Design and marketing go hand-in-hand

UX design and marketing are symbiotic. UX design can improve marketing campaigns by ensuring website visitors both enjoy their experience and are directed to relevant information and ultimately to make a purchase. By merging key user experience information with rich marketing data, a finance brand can gain a competitive edge as lead generation can turn into profitable conversions.

Great design stops for nobody

It’s important that finance brands understand UX design isn’t a one-time investment, but a continuous aspect of their overall marketing strategy. UX must continue to evolve with its users and remain driven by data and research into audience habits and goals. With half of all customers who switched finance brands doing so because of a bad user experience, it pays for finance brands to continue to invest in UX design.

92% of businesses that have adopted a customer-centric marketing strategy have seen an increase in customer loyalty and 84% experienced an increase in revenue. Focusing on how your target audience experiences your website and digital platforms is an important aspect of improving a brand’s overall marketing strategy.

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Mobile-friendly web design is the future

Optimising your finance website so it’s mobile-friendly is a competitive decision that can ensure you remain discoverable over your opposition. Currently, only around 13% of websites retain their search engine ranking across all devices, showcasing a prime opportunity for your finance brand to increase organic traffic.

Nowadays, almost everything is performed on mobile phones, so even if you’re ranked high on desktop searches this may not be benefiting your finance business as much as you’d think. With Google implementing mobile-first indexing back in 2017, it’s time finance brands altered their web design to reflect these algorithm changes. Shockingly, 30% of businesses that appear in the first page of Google search results on desktop don’t appear in the top ten search results on mobile.

Quick! Check your website design now

If you’re unsure if your website design is mobile-friendly or not, Google provides a mobile-friendly test that’s a simple and easy way to double-check. It also provides a detailed analysis of key areas of your overall website that could be improved, such as if your:

• Text is too small to read on the screen
• Clickable elements are too close together
• Plug-ins are incompatible

Another way to check the health of your website’s mobile design and how it’s performing on mobile search engine rankings is Google Search Console.

Other than the technical side of things, a simple check on your own mobile should reveal just how easy your website is to use. If it’s difficult for you to use, then it’s most likely being penalised by Google for its poor user experience.

Unlock search engine traffic with responsive web design

With Google’s reindexing of mobile search results to favour websites designed for mobiles, if your finance brand doesn’t keep up it can negatively impact your visibility and organic traffic. For a website to be favoured by Google it must have a responsive web design. With 94% of consumers judging websites on responsive web design, not updating your website would be doing your brand a disservice.

Here are some quick tips regarding the core aspects of best practice mobile-friendly design.

• Your website must respond well to the different devices it appears on. Your web design should adjust to the size of the screen it appears on to ensure it’s easy to use by everyone.
  The transition from a desktop website to a mobile website should be seamless.
• Create visuals that say something. Less is more when it comes to mobile-friendly design.
• Ensure your mobile site is not separate from your desktop site. With Google’s mobile-first indexing they now favour mobile websites over desktop ones. If these are different it could be hurting your discoverability.

Strengthen your SEO with mobile-friendly web design

To ensure your SEO is working well, get comfortable with using structured data. This is simply a method of explaining exactly what your website is to search engines and when used in collaboration with a responsive user experience can greatly improve your mobile rankings.

If you’re not sure you’ve implemented structured data correctly then you can always double-check by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Faster, faster, faster

The final aspect of a mobile-friendly website is its speed. A slow site ranks poorly on Google and will lead 50% of people to click off if page load time is longer than three seconds.

• To ensure your mobile website stays as quick as Usain Bolt take a look at your browser caching and image optimisation.
  Browser caching is information that your customer’s computer saves, like your site’s HTML or images. By saving this data, the next time they click on your website it will load faster. Talk to your developer to ensure that your browser caching is working as efficiently as possible.
• Optimising your images to ensure fast load times could take the form of compressing the file sizes, utilising fewer images, or ensuring the dimensions of the images are correct. It’s all about making sure your visitor’s computer has to do less work.

To check how fast your website really is, then take a look at Google’s Site Speed Tool.

It’s time to optimise

A mobile-friendly website has a direct effect on customers’ perceptions of your finance brand, with websites optimised for mobile improving 60% of users’ opinions and ensuring that 74% of users return to your site. With 52.16% of businesses’ rankings altering on mobile devices by three places, and 29.16% changing by 10 places, your finance brand could be losing out on potential customers every day.

While it may seem like a nice option rather than a non-negotiable, with 67% of users more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly website, it pays for finance businesses to create a responsive user experience.

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