No matter who you are, or what you were surfing before, or what mood you are in, when you arrive at the website of HSBC, Standard Life or Abbey, you are welcomed in the same way with the same message and the same range of services. There is little effort (well, no effort at all - I say 'little' in case I missed something) to increase conversion by providing content that is relevant to the user's desires stated before arriving at the site. That's a huge waste of a targeting opportunity, and it needs to change.
Take the Zurich Insurance website as an example (and I am not singling them out as particularly poor, they are a random example).
This is the page I get if I search for zurich car insurance uk and select the first result. Zurich knows (or could do, if it wanted to) what my Google search was, yet there is no acknowledgement here that I am searching for car insurance (half the page is devoted to home insurance); nor that I added the term 'uk' (I still have the option to select global sites); Zurich even seems uncertain whether I am a returning customer, which it is easy to find out with a fair degree of accuracy. All that real estate on options that are very unlikely to be of interest to me, could be used to increase conversion for what I said I wanted, which was UK car insurance. Yes, it may be the case that some car insurance searchers will end up buying home insurance but, come on, how many? And it may be that no matter what the user wants or who he is, it is best to display the link to global sites - but I bet Zurich don't actually know what effect that has on conversions.
Zurich has done what most financial institutions do: given me their standard homepage without bothering to pay attention to the information I am broadcasting about what I want. This is common behaviour, and not just for homepages. This is the Zurich page for car insurance:
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