The Purpose
To Lisa Dieter, the wealth advisory and the financial field does not have to be drab and unapproachable. She believes that personal and empathetic practices help her build finances in a way that gives her clients confidence and peace of mind. After realizing that the “financial industry was broken,” she needed room to grow into her own. Dieter founded EmberHouse, a wealth advisory firm, so that she could help people grow in the most comfortable and honest way.
In this study, I explore EmberHouse’s website, branding, content, and metadata to demonstrate how content and its presentation is important to even the smallest startups out there.
The Website
EmberHouse website has an extremely minimal approach to HTML and metadata when compared to competition. The website’s pages have beautifully designed interactive elements to make for a fun viewing experience. Motion is heavily involved in this website and the animations make a noticeable impact; allowing the user to really feel integrated in the process – just like Dieter wants.
Throughout the site, the branding and imagery is consistent with duotone images and ember-like elements. For ease of viewing, all of the pages are completely scalable and responsive.
The EmberHouse website really shines through its content. Each page’s content is engaging, not only through the interactive UI, but through its words as well. Written in colloquial, active language, EmberHouse’s mission is easily understood by all.
To ensure that EmberHouse’s site is optimized for search engines and to organize the site’s content, metadata and title tags were implemented. Metadata can help to heighten discoverability and organization, but it can also be used to indicate site structure. In EmberHouse’s case, the meta descriptions and the title tags were very interesting.
The meta description, that was listed 12 times, was simply “Wealth Advisory.” This simple description tanks searchability and doesn’t inform the searcher about the unique features of the company. The title tags also followed this consistency and contained the name of the page and then ended in the same identifier, for example, “Page Name – EmberHouse.” For the most impact EmberHouse should take a second look at these elements.
Competitive Analysis
To get a better idea of how EmberHouse’s unconventional approach stacks up against the competition, I took a look at two other independent wealth advisory businesses, Wealth Advisory Group and Bone Fide Wealth, LLC.
After doing a light analysis, I could see that EmberHouse is off to a good start when compared to similar competition. The website design adds major points, and the well-defined Ignite strategy makes the viewer feel secure and valued.
With these two competitors I noticed that they either had meta descriptions that were a bit obnoxious or had none at all. For what it is worth at this starting point, I think that EmberHouse is in a good position to redefine their SEO strategy.
EmberHouse needs to focus on creating more original content and solidifying their digital presence. The competition, like Bone Fide Wealth, LLC – who caters to the same Millennial audience – uses these platforms to solidify themselves as an authority and interact with potential clients.
Alex Piwtoratsky. 