It’s time to audit your website to verify you have these six must have pages on your website.

Service and Products Landing Pages

I’ve seen far too many community bank and credit union websites lately with combined pages for all service offerings. For instance, if an institution has a page for consumer products, the page simply has a listing of all the consumer products listed on it.

Instead, create a detail page for each product or service under their respective landing pages. Here is an example focusing on business products and services. For clarity, let’s say this institution uses the words “Business Services” to categorize them.

First, we would create what is known as a landing page for “Business Services”. This page would be off the root of the website in the structure as:

/business-services/

Why do we use the entire phrase “business-services” in the URL structure? This is so we can attract search engines with some words which describe the content on this page and all pages underneath it. If the page has “business services” on it, you should use that phrase in the URL structure, the title of the page, the H1 header of the page, in the body of the text on the page, and in the ALT text on any photographs on the page. All of this is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is a critical part of how well your website is indexed by search engines such as Google.

The content of this page should describe the various business services you offer in a table, graphic or some other way to provide links to details about each business service. I have seen everything work from a table of icons to custom graphics. Just make sure it is mobile friendly.

Once you have the landing page built (/business-services/), it is time to start building service detail pages which describe each of your services in detail.

For instance, say you offer a service called “Business Checking”, this service would have a service detail page located at:

/business-services/business-checking/

There are many reasons for creating service detail pages, but the most important of them all is to attract search engines to the page. If someone is searching for business checking accounts and you have a page specifically built for responding to the query “business checking”, it is more likely that a search engine will offer that page in a search result.

Create each service detail page with an eye toward search engine friendliness (see the page tips paragraph above about the URL structure, the title of the page, the H1 header of the page, the body of the text on the page, and the ALT text on any photographs on the page). In addition to these elements of the page, the text on the detail page should be somewhere between 500 and 1500 words – the longer the better.

Here is what your “Business Services” page URL structure should look like”

/business-services/

/business-services/business-checking/

/business-services/business-loans/

/business-services/business-wire-origination/

/business-services/positive-pay/

/business-services/lockbox/

/business-services/business-online-banking/

I think you get the point here. Create a page for each of your services so the search engines know where to find the proper information on your website.

Contact Us

Your site needs a dedicated page for reaching your staff. If you have different contact methods for consumer and business customers, list them on this page. This page should have contact forms, email addresses (if applicable), phone numbers, hours of operation, physical addresses, mailing addresses and any other thing you can add to make contacting your institution easy and friendly.

Privacy Policy

Your site should already have a Privacy Policy page and reviewing it annually should be on your to-do list. Privacy laws change all the time, and you need to keep yours current – especially if you serve any customers in California or the European Union.

Terms & Conditions

This page is necessary to cover terms of doing business with your institution not covered in your privacy policy. Again, it needs to be annually reviewed.

About Us

This page is a great place to showcase your institution’s founding and history. The more detail, photos, and stories you can add to this page, the better.

Location(s)

The reason you need a location page (even if you have only one location) is to make it E-A-S-Y for your customers to find you. The location page should have your addresses, photos of the site and a Google or other map link the site visitor can click on for mapping detail. If you have multiple locations, I recommend building out a /landing-page/detail-page/ structure for each of your locations to help the search engines and your customers find each of your locations.

While this is not an exhaustive listing of everything you need on your website, we feel this core list is a great place to evaluate the six must have pages on your website.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.

Adding new products (or eliminating them) should be a regular part of the product lifecycle at your institution. To help with this task, we’ve developed a new product launch checklist for banking products designed to get you or your product management team thinking in the right direction.

Does your new product solve a customer need?

Solving a need (either an obvious need, a latent need, or an unknown need) is an important step in your product launch process. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Does your new product solve a need for the customer? Can your sales team match the need with this new product? If this product solves an unknown need (I didn’t know I needed that!), how will you convey the unknown need and how will your sales team uncover that unknown need?

What is the purpose of this new product?

While your product needs to solve a need for your customer (see above paragraph), internally, you need to state the purpose of this product. The purpose will be the internal way the product is described so your sales and operations teams are clear on the outcomes your client’s will receive when using this product. If your internal team does not know the outcomes, it will be difficult for them to match a customer’s needs with the product and the product will fail.

What is the target market for this product?

The target market for this product generally falls within your institution’s target market. If your institution services 90% consumers and you are introducing a business product, you might have a product-target-market mismatch. An exception to this would be if you are looking to increase the percentage of business customers.

When building your new product, fully define the target market. For instance, if we are introducing a remote deposit capture product for business, you could define it as: The Owner, CFO, Controller, Accountant, or Office Manager at a Businesses with between 1 and 10 million dollars in sales, processes over 25 deposits per month (daily deposit), who has offices over two blocks away and values faster cash available balances.

How are you going to market this product?

Your new product won’t sell by itself. “If You Build It, He Will Come” never works. You have to tell your target market about it. Building a full marketing plan for your new product generally does not fall to the product management team, any help you can give to the marketing team is appreciated and helps.

Are there branding opportunities for this new product?

Most of your products (if not all) are outsourced to third party providers. Many of these providers can brand them to your institution’s branding. Logos, single sign on, and customized prompts and dialog boxes are just a few of the branding points you may want to consider.

How are you going to train your sales and operations staff?

Training generally falls into to two areas: Sales and Operations. Many times, we see product managers train the sales team on how to sell the new product. Sometimes they bring in a third-party to train the sales staff. The operations and customer service personnel who support the products must be trained as well—not only on how to properly implement/setup the customers on the new products but also how to maintain the product itself in the system.

We recognize that there are many other steps that could (and should) be added to our new product launch checklist, but we hope this is a good starting point for your next product or service launch.

Have any good ones to add? Let us know in the comments.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.