Imagine you didn’t know any financial advisors but knew you needed help managing your finances – how would you find a suitable professional?
For most people today, the answer is simple: Google it.
That is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a vital tactic for any financial advisor who wants to acquire new clients and increase their assets under management (AUM). However, given the volume of information out there about SEO, it can be overwhelming to get started.
This article provides a complete overview for financial advisors, explaining how you can improve your website’s rankings and turn it into a powerful source of new leads and clients.
A Basic Overview of SEO for Financial Advisors
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process designed to improve your website’s search engine rankings and ensure it appears at the top of relevant searches. In order to achieve that, the search engine must be able to easily read and index your website, find “keywords” that suggest your website is relevant to the search, and deem your website to be high-value and authoritative.
Three Types of SEO
There are three ways financial advisors can approach SEO, and ideally, any SEO strategy contains all three:
- Technical SEO: These are efforts to adjust your website’s backend and architecture to ensure search engine “crawlers” can easily read and index it. This ranges from optimizing your website’s mobile usability to increasing site load speeds.
- Content SEO: This involves adjusting existing content and creating new content that contains relevant keywords, provides more information and earns external links that are used to evaluate your website’s authority and quality.
- Local SEO: This is a sub-category of SEO that specifically aims to get your website ranking for location-specific searches. This is vital for financial advisors, as most people want an advisor who lives nearby and can speak to them in person.
What Does Google Want from Financial Advisors?
Google promotes a concept called Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) that affects information that can affect people’s “health, happiness, financial stability or safety.” Any page that meets this criterion – which all financial advice inevitably will – is placed under greater scrutiny in terms of validity, accuracy and recency.
The best way to make your content rank is, therefore, to use the EEAT guidelines Google provides, ensuring that every web page demonstrates:
- Experience: It must be clear that your content was created by people with first-hand experience with the topic. This can be achieved by including an author’s bio on the blog or citing real-world examples from your advisory practice (with the client’s permission!) to illustrate your points.
- Expertise: It must be evident that you are a subject matter expert (SME) with a strong grasp of the most relevant facts and a solid professional background. This might mean citing your professional credentials or educational background within the copy.
- Authority: Your content must be authoritative, and reputable sources must be used throughout. Our experience suggests that each piece of content should include at least two links to strong external sources, such as publications like Bloomberg or FINRA reports. This will help build Google’s perception of your website’s authority over time.
- Trustworthy: Your website must be deemed to be transparent and reliable, with clear sources for all information you provide.
This might seem like a lot to ask of already time-poor advisors; will your business really benefit from all that effort?
Why SEO Matters for Financial Advisors
SEO is an important marketing channel for most modern businesses, but there are three clear reasons search is particularly important for financial advisors:
1. Search is Popular
Search engines are one of the most common ways for people to discover financial advisors today. This happens in two ways:
- Active Search: 42% of people start their search for a financial advisor with Google – even more than asking friends or family. That means advisors who rank highly have an immediate advantage over their competitors who don’t appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- “Accidental” Finds: 32% of people now report using search engines to find financial advice. They may not currently be in the market for an advisor, but many will slowly become active leads if they engage with your content and are impressed.
2. SEO is Underutilized by Advisors
Many “traditional” advisor marketing channels are heavily saturated; just think about your last in-person networking event. This creates a lot of competition and ultimately means advisors must spend more time and resources to secure a new client.
Search is still a relatively underutilized marketing channel – making it far easier to “cut through the noise” and generate results. There are two basic reasons most advisors do not yet make full use of search’s potential:
- Inconsistency: SEO is a long-term investment that can take many months to start having a real impact. But 85% of advisors lack a “proper marketing strategy,” meaning they either never engage with SEO or lack consistency.
- Frustration: Most advisors say their website is the digital marketing channel they invest the most effort in, but 62% say theirs is “ineffective” at producing leads. This may wrongly lead them to assume SEO is not worth the investment.
3. Search Builds Reputation
Financial advisors live and die by their reputation, and search rankings are increasingly influential on the overall impression people have of your business. Advisors who rank highly on Google for relevant searches are sub-consciously perceived as more authoritative and successful because they are the “go-to” person for the query.
The bottom line? Increased visibility on search engines helps financial advisors attract new leads, build their reputation and generate a higher marketing ROI due to the relatively low level of competition in the field. But what is the most cost-effective and time-efficient way to improve them – and generate actual leads and new client acquisitions using SEO?
4 Steps to Acquire New Clients Through SEO
1. Select the Right Keywords
Your first step is to determine which keywords – i.e., terms people use in search bars – for which you want your website to rank. Our experience working with financial advisors suggests two factors are crucial:
Search Intent
People use search engines for a variety of reasons – and they are not equally useful to your business. For example, your ideal prospect might search for “investment strategies,” but so might people who are training to be a trader. As a result, even if you rank for that keyword – it might not produce a lot of useful traffic for your business.
Focus instead on keywords that are unambiguously relevant to your practice and service offering. These don’t have to be exclusively “sales-focused” terms, but they should at least suggest the person searching is likely to be in the market for financial advice in the future.
Localization
While advisors can benefit from targeting broader terms like “financial advice” or “best financial advisor,” these are highly competitive keywords, with hundreds of advisors across the country investing in SEO content to rank for them. A better approach is to focus on local terms, such as “Financial advisor in {your location},” which have a few benefits:
- Low Competition: There are fewer advisors competing for these terms.
- Hyper Specific: They have more built-in search intent because they are so specific.
2. Optimize Your Digital Presence
The next step is to ensure your entire digital presence is optimized to send the right signals to search engines and actually convert prospects into leads. There are several aspects to this, including:
- Technical SEO: Ensure your website is easily crawlable and loads quickly. This will likely require external assistance from an SEO expert who can quickly identify and fix issues that often go unnoticed – but negatively impact your website’s search rankings.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Ensure your website makes it easy for visitors to book a meeting – and actively encourages them to do so. This can mean including more call-to-action (CTA) buttons, making the site navigation system simpler, or simply including more copy that promotes your services.
- Business Information: Ensure your website, social media and Google My Business profiles all have accurate and detailed information, such as your full name, business address, hours of operation, location, and a list of your services and specialisms.
- Reviews and Testimonials: Solicit as many client reviews as possible and include them on your website; this signals trustworthiness and authority to Google, as well as making prospects feel more confident in your ability to deliver quality service.
Taken together, these will not only improve your website’s rankings – but will also ensure more people who discover it through Google turn into qualified leads and, ultimately, clients.
3. Optimize Your Content
You can now begin creating SEO content that will help build authority for your website and rank for relevant keywords. For most advisors, the best strategy is focusing everything on maximizing local SEO – using two key kinds of content:
- Service Pages: Create new web pages dedicated to specific services and ensure they include plenty of local keywords and deep explanations of the service. Many advisors offer multiple services yet promote them all via a single page, which both limits the depth of their content and misses a great opportunity to produce keyword-rich content.
- Blogs: Write articles that answer common questions or explain valuable financial concepts that are relevant to your service offering. While there is a danger of “keyword stuffing,” these blogs can easily feature local terms by including specific examples from your practice: “I recently advised a [company type] in [location] on exactly this challenge...”
4. Ongoing Optimization
Producing new content is vital, but you also need to keep an eye on the performance of existing pages – and identify opportunities to make improvements or include new keywords. Given the pressure Google places on advisors to provide up-to-date and authoritative content, it is vital that information is regularly revised to reflect the latest market trends or regulatory changes.
We split this effort into two categories:
- Light Optimizations: Small changes that can dramatically improve search rankings. Often, simply adjusting a few words in headlines or changing a web page’s meta description can improve rankings within weeks – despite requiring very little work.
- Heavy Optimizations: Larger changes that often include rewriting or creating additional content for your web pages. For example, a new financial regulation or public scandal might warrant a new section to be added to an existing blog.
Improve Your Rankings and Increase AUM with ProperExpression
SEO can be a challenge for busy advisors who want results but cannot afford to put in the time required to produce, optimize and manage their SEO content.
ProperExpression takes the pressure off your shoulders, developing, executing and proactively improving your SEO strategy with a full team of experts – from content specialists to skilled developers.
Want to explore how we could help SEO become your best lead generator?
