Deciding whether to add financial calculators to your website is easier when you know the value they bring to your brand and the appeal they will have to your site visitors. Financial calculators can add value to your site by increasing search presence, visitor engagement, and brand trust.

To get the most added benefit, you need to choose the right financial calculators for your bank or credit union website. We'll review a few of the key differentiators:

• Differentiator #1 – Be sure the calculators you consider are mobile-friendly and then evaluate them on design elements like readability, usability and interactivity.
• Differentiator #2 - As you evaluate vendors, be sure you include a rating of the average loading speed of the calculators.
• Differentiator #3 – Evaluate calculators on their ability to share the page with related content and calls to action. Is there room to feature SEO-friendly content to attract and engage visitors?

Engage but Don’t Frustrate Your Visitors

When a site visit turns into a calculator session, you have an opportunity to show the visitor what makes your brand different from the competition. To offer a calculator solution that will improve visitor engagement and experience, you will have to evaluate many factors as to how the calculators you provide will integrate into your site.

The best calculator pages have a calculator that is intuitive and easy to use and understand, mobile-friendly, and interactive. Calculators that offer toggles and sliders to adjust values will typically make it easier for users to explore a broader range of scenarios. On more complicated calculators, are helpful prompts or guides included? Can the calculators be used as well on a mobile device as on a desktop?

The SEO Value of Financial Calculators

Financial calculator terms, such as “mortgage calculator,” “auto loan calculator,” and “retirement calculator,” are some of the most popular search terms on the internet. When you add financial calculators to your bank or credit union website, you make your site more likely to be found by potential customers. Consumers perform millions of searches each month for calculators that pertain to significant financial events, and by having those tools available on your site, you are showing you have the resources they need.

Different financial calculators will not provide the same SEO benefits, however. When looking at the impact of the calculators on your search profile, you need to know how the embedded calculator will affect a page on your site. To begin with, will the calculator slow down the page it is embedded in so that the page is deemed too slow to be offered up in search engine results?

Helping Visitors Become Customers

For a calculator to be genuinely useful for SEO and visitor engagement (generating leads or applications), it must be able to coexist with other content related to the purpose of the calculator. Don’t expect visitors to look for an auto loan rate on your site just because they use your auto loan monthly payment calculator. You should share that information on the calculator page clearly and engagingly.

You should also have the opportunity to direct them to the information that you offer to help them to understand a financial product or application process related to the calculator’s purpose. To do that well, you need to be able to host one calculator per page, and the calculator has to be able to effectively answer the user's questions while not eating up all the valuable screen real estate.

Benefits of Providing Financial Confidence

Financial calculators can build consumer confidence and enhance your brand image for visitors who use them. You will only reap the rewards if your calculators help improve your search presence, engage the visitor with a clean and intuitive interface, and guides users into exploring the solutions you provide that are related to the purpose of the calculator.

At Fintactix, we believe we have addressed the primary challenges of deriving value from providing financial calculators to website visitors. We continue to improve our calculators to make it easy to integrate into any website and be compatible with your SEO and content strategy.

We welcome the opportunity to demo our solution with you. If you are a financial service provider marketer or agency serving a financial institution, contact us to schedule a demo today.