Overwhelmed Marketer's Guide: Focus on your homepage to make the most of your limited time.

OMG! Five Fast Fixes for Credit Union Homepages

No time for a complete, detailed, whole-site content review and SEO glow-up? Overwhelmed marketers can get a lot of bang in not very many minutes by paying close attention to just one page, your credit union website’s homepage.

After all, it’s typical for the homepage on a credit union website to get 60-80% of the total pageviews, so it just makes sense to make the most of your limited time by focusing here.

Resize and optimize images

This is the most common issue we see on CU homepages; those gorgeous full-screen images are great at communicating your brand, but without paying careful attention to cropping, sizing, and optimizing, you’ll end up with a badly bloated homepage. Slow loading annoys mobile users, tanks your Google Search Console page speed scores, and massive files burn up server bandwidth.

We’ve put together some resources for optimizing images, but in general make sure you crop and resize images to the correct sizes needed for your page layout (keep a list of the dimensions needed) and export them with reasonable quality settings. You can also shave file sizes very effectively without losing visible quality using a free tool like TinyPNG. 

Stop misusing images as headlines

Google’s bots don’t have eyes, so you have to make sure that they can understand your site’s content using only the code. In other words, words in headlines and subheads need to be available as actual headline text in the page because words inside images are not visible to search.

What’s worse, words inside images can be bad for Accessibility if you’re not paying close attention to the ALT text, because people using screen readers only get the ALT text (you DID add correct and complete ALT text for each image, right?).

In other words, limit the use of text in images, make sure the content and headlines is understandable without the images, and if you do put text in images, make sure the ALT text is correct. Images are used to enhance your text content, not as a substitute for text or headlines.

Give your headline hierarchy some help

Those eyeless Googlebots are also trying to make sense of your site, and they could use a little help. It’s common for text on CU homepages to be styled to look great, but you also have to pay close attention to your headline hierarchy in the HTML. If you imagine the text on the home page as an outline, does it still make sense?

There are some simple best practices to consider for HTML headlines:

  • There should be one and only one H1 headline per page, and it should be at the top of the content area.
  • H2 headlines are used for the major points on the page, H3 headlines (and H4, H5, etc.) are used for subheads.
  • It’s best to not skip headline levels. In other words, don’t put an H3 as the next headline after an H1.
  • Don’t use blank headlines as visual spacers

These are best practices, not Federal law, so no, you’re not going to Google Jail if you violate them, and Google can still mostly figure things out if you make a mistake here and there. But these are best practices for making sure your home page (and your other pages) make the most sense to Google and to humans, including humans who may be using screen readers. 

Make “The Big Six” answers easy to find

We put together data from Google and in-site search to come up with this list of the six most-needed pieces of information that MUST be easy to find on your credit union’s homepage. And consider making them part of the header, navigation, or footer that appears on every page.

These have proven very consistent over the years we’ve been building credit union websites, so make sure these answers to these questions are always easy to find:

  1. What’s your routing number? (Still consistently the top search term)
  2. Got any good deals? (People love bargains!)
  3. What are your current rates? (See #2…)
  4. How can I call or email a real live humanoid? (HELLLLLP!)
  5. Are you open? (Especially mobile users)
  6. Where the heck are you? (City(s) and state(s), please. And mobile users need fast links to maps/directions…)

Master the mobile experience

Depending on your membership, it’s likely 50-80% of visits to your homepage are from folks on mobile devices. Make very sure you regularly review the mobile experience and keep it clean, fast, and focused on their unique needs.

De-clutter

Mobile real estate is precious, so remove or minimize all those announcements, popups, app offers, etc. Pare down logos, navigation, animation, headlines, etc. to the minimum. 

Optimize images

Mobile data is still a little slow and limited in many places, so make sure your home page is fast and light.

Emphasize internal search

We’ve found that mobile CU members often ignore the navigation and use the internal search engine, – but only if they know it works well.

Focus on mobile-specific needs

Make sure there are easy, prominent links to calling, to texting (if you offer this), to your online chat, and to locate branches and ATMs.

Test every so often with a variety of mobile devices

It’s as easy as walking around and asking several people “hey, pull up our site on your phone” to monitor for things like awkward images, animations, line breaks, etc.

Bonus: Give your “secondary” home page(s) some love, too

We’ve also found quite consistently that many credit unions get significant traffic on the page discussing their online banking. This may be because your online banking sends members back to this page, or they Googled “YourCU login”, then bookmarked that page. 

Whatever the reasons they’re there, they’re there and they probably skipped your home page. You have an audience of highly involved members here on their way to the login, so start thinking of this page as a secondary home page, and figure out what you’d like to say to them.

Brian Wringer
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