Why Is SEO Important for Financial Advisors?
Here’s what we learned after working with 120 different advisors on their SEO.
- Which terms are most important? Some matter more than others.
- How does SEO support referral generation?
- How do you know if you need help?
Watch this short video to learn the foundational elements of SEO for financial advisors.
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Additional Resources: SEO Mastery
SEO for Financial Advisors Guide: Table of Contents
Overview
- What is search engine optimization (SEO)?
- SEO for financial advisors, why does it matter?
- How is SEO different for local professional service providers?
- What’s the difference between on site and off site SEO?
Most Important Keywords for Financial Advisors
Taking Action: Start Making Improvements to Your SEO
- How to improve your website’s on site SEO
- Three changes to make to your homepage today
- How to check if your site is mobile responsive
- Updating your title tags
- Optimizing your meta descriptions
- How to improve your website’s off site SEO
- Google Business Profile
Going to The Next Level
- How to learn more
- SEO for financial advisors, getting help
- Download your free DIY SEO checklist for financial advisors!
- Register for a free webinar to learn more!
SEO for Financial Advisors: Let’s Get Started!
SEO for financial advisors can seem overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. We know that most financial advisors don’t know a lot about search engine optimization or SEO. In today’s competitive landscape, it’s more important than ever for advisory firms to complete basic foundational steps to secure their place in the eyes of Google.
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing your website’s traffic by helping people find your site online. Believe it or not, there is a lot of competition and money to be made by being the best search engine, so Google, Yahoo, and Bing invest hefty resources in trying to return the best search results for their users.
How can they tell which search results are best for a given search? They look for behavioral clues from users, like which results they click on, how long they stay on a site, and whether they continue their search or not after visiting a website.
But not all SEO is created equal. Search engines treat different types of searches differently. If you search “headaches and insomnia” you’ll be directed to a credible national medical website. If you search for “plumber,” you’ll get a local service provider. Google knows that it wouldn’t be helpful to direct you to the definition of a plumber, or the history of the plumbing industry, it knows that most people who search for “plumber” want a highly rated plumber in their area.
The same is true for financial advisors. Because Google views financial planning as a local service, it uses local search engine optimization “clues” to return the most relevant local financial advisors. These clues include:
- Whether your business address, hours, and phone number are listed
- How recently your website has been updated
- Whether your business is featured on Google and Apple maps
By making sure your website is optimized for local search, you can get more traffic to your website when people search for a financial advisor in your area.
SEO For Financial Advisors, Why Does It Matter?
Benefits of SEO
- More traffic
- Look better in search results (building trust instantly)
- Support your referral process
Challenges With SEO For Financial Advisors
- Most businesses rely on online reviews to bolster their credibility and FINRA prohibits reviews for advisors. Making the most of your business listings without using reviews requires a specific strategy.
Getting more traffic to your website is not the only reason it’s important to optimize your website for search engines. Optimizing your site also helps it look better in search results, by including images, maps, business hours, and your logo.
Building out your search engine results page can make it easier for your existing clients to get directions to your office or find your phone number online. It can also help referrals from existing clients to find you and establish trust.
Establishing Credibility Online And Helping Your Referral Process
As Michael Kitces, partner at Pinnacle Advisory Group, points out, “Even if they are referred by someone they trust, no one is going to give their life savings to a financial advisor without typing their name into Google.” Customers explore businesses online before they make decisions. In fact, 9 out of 10 referrals will Google you before they set up an appointment.
Even if they have already met you in person, potential clients look at your business online and form an opinion about how much they trust you. If a customer searches for your business in Google, what do they see? Are you hard to find online? Do you show up on the second or third page of search results? Do your social media profiles show up before your website? We want to make it easy for them to find you online and get a positive impression.
Getting More Organic Traffic To Your Website
The Internet has changed everything about how we live from how we select a restaurant to how we choose a CPA or financial advisor. For financial advisors, showing up within relevant search terms can be a powerful marketing tool to get more traffic and more business.
There are two main ways to get more traffic to your website via search engines:
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or paid ads: Search engine marketing or pay per click (PPC) allows marketers to purchase traffic. Google sells placement within various searches at a price per click. Each time someone clicks your ad, Google charges your account.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Think of the O in SEO as “organic.” With SEO, we are affecting the free or organic search traffic to your website. We aim to get your website to show up in those search results “organically” by being what Google considers the most relevant site to meet their search need.
Why not use SEM and pay for clicks? It can get expensive in a hurry! If for example, if you are a financial advisor in San Diego and you want people who searched for the term “Financial Advisor San Diego” to click through to your site, that would cost you between $15 and $20 per click. Ten clicks using PPC could cost $150 or more!
But with SEO, we can invest less than $1,000 to get you to show up in top search results month after month for free. Then, you will see traffic coming to your site for “free” based on those search terms. Additionally, users who search the terms might place more trust in businesses that show up organically than businesses that paid to be there.
How Is SEO Different For Local Professional Service Providers?
The most effective way for financial advisors to use SEO is to build out your local online presence so that you show up higher in search results and look good when people search for your business (either directly or through keywords that you’ve targeted).
At Indigo Marketing Agency, we’ve worked with hundreds of top financial advisors to optimize their websites and took two years creating and refining our SEO process. For our search engine optimization strategy, we combine the knowledge that we’ve developed building marketing programs specifically for financial advisors and combine it with SEO best practices.
Financial advisors have a unique position when it comes to SEO because many financial advisors have not completed even the most basic SEO work. There’s not a lot of SEO competition from most local advisors!
But there are challenges too. Part of SEO work leverages “Local SEO” best practices, but financial advisors are not exactly like a local coffee shop. For example, reviews are highly relevant for coffee shops but against the rules for financial advisors. What is a well meaning financial advisor to do?
How Can You Tell Where You Rank?
Before we get in to exactly what you can do to improve your SEO, it’s a good idea to take a look at where you are starting and how your business appears on Google today. Make a note of your starting point so you can track your progress over time. If you need help figuring out where you rank, get your free SEO Audit Report for your site now!
Search For Your Business Name
First, go to Google.com and enter the name of your business to see if you come up. If you aren’t searching from the location of your office, enter your business city name too, for example, “pilot wealth management troy, michigan.”
If you’re website is not coming up as the top search result for your business name, that means your SEO needs some serious work. If you do not have a Google Business Profile Page on the right sidebar with your information, that’s a good clue that you have not laid the SEO foundation for your firm yet. This is what an incomplete business listing looks like.
Search For Relevant Keywords
Next, you’ll want to see how you rank for relevant keywords. Enter a few keywords and your city name to see where your firm ranks, for example “financial advisor in paradise, ca.” Check the Google Places listings to see if your business shows, then scroll through the organic listings below the Google Places to see where you rank. Make a note of the page number you show up on and your overall rank for a given keyword.
Search For Your Business On Maps
Finally, open up your map application on your smartphone and search for your business name. Make sure that your office shows up on maps with the correct address, website, and phone number to make it easy for your clients to call you and get directions to your office.
If you’re disappointed in the results of your search, don’t worry, it’s easy to make big changes in your SEO rankings with a few important actions. Read on to find out how.
The Best Keywords For Financial Advisors
Before you get started making any changes to your website or registering your business online, you’ll want to consider the keywords you’d like to target in the future so that you can be consistent with your efforts.
Keyword traffic depends on simple supply and demand, so targeting high volume keywords will mean that you have more competition, whereas it may be easier to rank higher for lower volume search terms, though you’ll have less traffic to capture.
Examples of Keywords for Financial Advisors:
- Financial advisor san diego
- Financial planning for women in des moines
- Financial advisor business owners chicago
You could also target services as a keyword:
Financial Advisor Or Financial Planner?
Many advisors aren’t sure if they should use the term “financial advisor” or “financial planner” in their keywords. I recommend using the term “financial advisor” because it gets much more search volume. Here are the daily national search volumes for relevant keywords for professions:
- Financial Advisor: 60,500
- Financial Planning: 12,100
- Financial Planner: 9,900
- Wealth Management: 9,900
- Investment Management: 2,900
And here are the search volumes for relevant keywords for services:
- Retirement Planning: 18,100
- Estate Planning: 14,800
- Long-Term Care: 8100
- College Funding: 480
Make a list of up to three keywords (one profession and two services) you’d like to target and be consistent in your efforts for the most impact. Be sure to only choose one profession keyword to target or you risk diluting your efforts.
What’s The Difference Between On-Site and Off-Site SEO?
There are two main types of SEO, on-site SEO and off-site SEO. The first refers to work we do on your website, like making changes to your home page and the content on your website to help people find you. Google relies on the information within your website to determine what your website is about and whether it will return you as a relevant search result.
Off-site SEO refers to work we do away from your website to help your search results, including listing your business with search engines. Search engines give hierarchical importance to the home page and headings on your website. They also look for important information like your title tags and meta descriptions to assess you site’s content.
How To Improve Your Website’s On-Site SEO
To make an impact on your website’s on-site SEO, you will need to make some changes to the most important areas of your home page and update your tags and descriptions. You may need to enlist the help of your web designer to complete the process.
Update Your Home Page To Include Your Keywords
It may sounds obvious, but most advisors do not capture their keywords on their homepage. Google gives preferential treatment to the content at the top of your homepage, so you’ll want to make sure it’s accurate and includes your keywords.
Make sure you include the following: NAME OF YOUR CITY + KEYWORDS
Here are some examples:
- Fee-Only Financial Advisor in San Diego, California
- Retirement Planning in Roswell, Georgia
- Financial Planning for Business Owners in Newark, New Jersey
Check To Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Responsive
Google will penalize your site if it is not mobile responsive, so it’s critical that you double check your site. Go to responsivedesignchecker.com to find out now.
Updating Your Title Tags
After your homepage, your title tags are the most important place to put your keywords. They’re the words that show up at the top of your browser and in search results.
Update your title tags via your website editor or ask your website developer to include your keywords in your title tags. To get step-by-step directions for updating your site, register for this free SEO webinar now.
Each page of your site should have a different title tag that includes your targeted keywords and the main services you offer.
Here are some examples of good title tags:
Homepage: Independent Financial Advisor Serving Teachers in South Texas
Retirement Planning Page: Retirement Planning for Teachers in South Texas
Optimizing Your Meta Descriptions
The last step of on-site SEO is to optimize your meta descriptions, the short description that displays below your title tags within search results. This area is what searchers use to decide whether they’re going to click on your site, so it’s critically important.
Perfect meta descriptions should be:
- Less than 320 characters
- Unique for each page
- Include a Description of the Page
- Feature Your keywords
- Include a Call to action!
Update your homepage and at least your top 5 most visited pages. Here is an example of a great meta description:
As an independent financial advisor in Austin, Texas, I specialist in retirement planning. Sign up now for your free retirement readiness review!
How To Improve Your Website’s Off-Site SEO
If you’ve completed the steps to improve your website’s on-site SEO, that’s half the battle. The next step has to do with the local search ecosystem and your local listings.
What Google Business Profile Means For Your SEO
Watch this short video to find out why Google Business Profile is the most underrated tool that financial advisors have for SEO.
By claiming your Google Business Profile Page, you’ll appear on the right hand side of search results for your firm, along with your logo, photos, business hours, phone number, and more. In their never ending quest to own as much of the Internet as possible, Google incentivizes businesses to register with Google Business Profile by giving preferential SEO treatment to firms who have claimed their page.
Your Google Maps Listing
Your Google Maps listing is verified via U.S. Mail through your Google Business Profile Page. Once verified, it will display your firm on a map via a Google search and also when someone searches for you using the Google Map app on their phone. In addition to giving your site SEO “credit,” this can make it easy for clients and prospects to get directions to your office.
How To Learn More
Most advisors stick their head in the sand when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), so I applaud you for reading this far. If you’d like to learn more about how to harness the power of SEO, join me for a free webinar today.
In this 30-minute video presentation, we’ll review:
- What is SEO and why does it matter for advisors?
- Demystifying how SEO really works
- How can you tell if your website needs help?
- 11 steps you can do today to get more traffic
- Your guide to do it yourself for free!
- Your free SEO Audit Report
Space is limited, so join us now to qualify for the free offer to save $100 on your SEO or download your checklist to do your own SEO for free!
SEO For Financial Advisors: Where to get help?
If you’re looking for help with your website’s SEO, we have a package designed to take care of the most important SEO work for a one-time fee of $975. You can save $100 if you act now by clicking this link.
What’s Included In Our SEO Package?
We’ve identified the most important updates to make both on-site and off-site to help you rank for specific local keywords. By making the most impactful changes to your site, we are able to deliver maximum impact for a single one-time fee, instead of charging high monthly fees like many SEO companies.
Our 10-step process for SEO for financial advisors includes:
- Google Business Profile Listing optimization
- Optimizing photos with geolocation to include with GBP and Bing
- Connecting Google Search Console and submit sitemaps to check for errors and facilitate crawling
- Conducting research on relevant keywords
- Website title optimization and meta-description optimization
- Optimizing homepage copy to leverage SEO best practices for target keywords
- Optimizing copy for two selected services keywords
- Integrating Google Maps into your site
- Adding local citations
- Adding Schema Markup to optimize your site for local searches
What To Expect
The work included in our SEO Package takes about 30 days to complete. We’ll watch the results happen in real time when the work is complete, we’ll deliver a report showcasing the work that’s been done and your updated online presence.
As Google indexes the citations we’ve built for your site, you’ll begin to see an increase in organic search traffic to your website. We expect to see at least a 20% increase in local search traffic within 45 days. Most of our clients receive new leads from their website within 2-3 months as a result of the SEO Package. The increased website traffic will increase over time into the future, without any additional costs. Get started and save $100 now!