Creating & Maintaining Blog Categories to Increase Traffic to Your Advisor Website

Time and time again, we talk about the importance of blogging and creating killer content. If you put in the effort, then don’t you want to ensure that the content your creating can be easily found? That’s where the importance of creating categories comes in!

What are Blog Categories?

What’s a category you might ask? That’s a good question! A blog category is simply a topic that you address on your blog. Your category list is basically like a table of contents for your blog. Categories are typically fairly broad in nature but they should also encompass more specific topics. In the financial services industry, the most common blog categories we see are “retirement,” “investing,” “saving,” and “education.”

Below you can see that Twenty Over Ten client, Interlock Financial has included the categories:

• College Planning
• Insights
• Investment
• Retirement Funding
• Something New

They have used the categories that you see on many advisoru sites but included “Insights” and “Something New.” They only recently started blogging but have already created content consistently for the month of March, however, when they add more blogs to their page, visitors who know what they are looking for will be easily able to find the correct topic.

Adding and Maintaining Blog Categories to Drive SEO:

First things first, what is the importance of creating blog categories? You may think that it’s just something a little extra, but think again. If you aren’t repurposing and linking back and archiving and categorizing your content, then someone is not going to stay on your website searching through old content!  According to HubSpot, 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website, so you need to make your content count!

Simple Navigation And Usability

Nobody wants to stumble through a “clunky” website. Period. When someone lands on your site, it’s important that they can navigate through it easily without too many pages. At Twenty Over Ten, we recommend that users should be able to get to any page on your website in 5 clicks. Even though there is often so much information to include, what is most important? You don’t need to include EVERYTHING on your site, so shorten the bios if necessary and cut out the “fluff.” Short and sweet is always the best approach.

The same rings true for blogs. Make sure people can easily navigate through your blog by incorporating clear, easy-to-find category pages of the topics that you blog about the most often. If someone is new to your website, you need to ensure they find the newest content, but also be able to simply type in keywords to find any topic of their choice. Additionally, they need to be able to reread old content quickly and easily!

Increase SEO

When creating categories, not only does this make it easier for the reader to navigate and digest, but it always helps to increase your SEO by helping out the search engines, such as Google, because they will be able to crawl your website and process keywords and rank your site higher. With that in mind, what are the two things that you need to remember?

Don’t compete with your own content

This is a simple mistake, but it happens when you blog in a certain niche. If you are optimizing a blog and repurposing it, chances are that you will probably use a similar keyword in more than one of your blogs. If you create a strong structure, then this will help you to keep track of words that you may have used when optimizing and updating blogs.

Rank with your category pages

If you create category pages and optimize them well and link them to similar topics, then this will help to increase your rankings, as well. This also helps with the problem we mentioned earlier, of competing with your own content.

How to Best Manage Your Blog Structure

The longer that you write your blogs, then the harder you will have to work to maintain the categories. There will be more content, so more categories will be necessary to keep everything in working order. When you start your blog, keep this in mind, because if you don’t create categories from the start, then this will just make it harder down the road to organize everything!

Evaluate Your Categories

As your blog continues to grow, it’s likely that you’re probably blogging about one particular topic, especially working in the field of finance. So, you should really evaluate your categories every few months, and see if one particular blog topic is growing faster than the others. If some parts of your blog are growing much faster than other parts, you could divide such a category into two separate categories. Something to make sure is that no category is more than twice the size of any of the other categories. It’s best to have them more evenly spread out if you can.

Adding Categories And Tags

We have already suggested that you need to link back to older blogs with similar content, but as you create more and more content, it can get harder to keep track!

How do you remedy this? You can create subcategories and create more structure. This makes it a lot easier for search engines to understand your site and read it! When there are fewer posts within each group, then this increases the chances that every blog will get a link at some point! This really helps to make sure that none of the blogs get “lost.”

We’ve mentioned the categories, but what is a tag? They should be the keywords that are related to your blog post because they will help search engines to find your content. They can make sure that a post gets enough links, however, make sure you don’t create too many of them! Each tag group should have at least three posts. It’s all about refining though, so be sure that you check in on the tags on a regular basis.

Don’t Forget Pagination

Pagination is simply an ordinal numbering of pages, and it is usually located at the top or bottom of the site pages. In most cases, it is used for main pages and partitions. Another way to describe it is a way of dividing web content into discrete pages, which helps to present the content to the reader in a way that is more easily digestible and remembered.

In the below image, you can simply see that pagination just makes it much easier to get from the first page to the last page, rather than have to click through each one! Using something like this in your blog section when you have many pages makes it much easier for the user to scroll through and find what they are looking for.

Why might you want to include this in your blog section? People don’t want to click through pages and pages. This makes it much easier to find what they are looking for!

Rather than clicking through page after page, you can add a numbered pagination, such as “linking,” for instance on the first, second, third, etc. you can reduce the number of clicks dramatically. Pagination will allow your users to click through your archive in a simple way and jumping through numerous blog pages at once! Remember, it’s all about simplicity and making the navigation easy.

In addition to a slew of other blog feed settings the Twenty Over Ten platform makes it easy for advisors to choose their pagination type – traditional or “load more.”

Lose The Outdated Content

Even though we have discussed the importance of repurposing content and reusing your old work, if something just simply is no longer relevant, then it’s okay to delete it! Get rid of the outdated content to make room for fresher blog posts with updated keywords and strong content. Be careful though, deleting pages could lead to 404 errors or dead links so be sure you’re setting up 301 redirects if you are completely removing a blog post.

How to Create & Maintain Blog Categories With Twenty Over Ten:

At Twenty Over Ten, we strive to not only create stunning, compliant advisor websites but we want to make everything as simple as possible for our users and help them achieve business success. In order to help your site rank higher in search engines and create a more pleasing user experience, any user on the Twenty Over Ten platform can easily add categories to their blog pages. To do this, simply follow the steps below:

Step 1: Log in to your Twenty Over Ten account. Access our login page directly here.

Step 2: To add more categories for your blog posts you need to first access the Page Settings window. Hover over the page that contains your blog. Two icons will appear for ‘Post Settings’ (a capital ‘A’) and ‘Page Settings’ (a cog icon). Click on the cog icon.

Step 3:  The Page Settings window will appear. Scroll down until you see Categories. To add a new category click on the text box, type in your new category, and click enter.

Step 4:  If you would like to remove a category, you can click on the ‘x’ button next to the category you wish to delete. A confirmation window will pop up. Click Confirm.

Step 5: Once you are finished adding categories click Save.

Adding Categories to your Blog Post

Log into your Twenty Over Ten account.

Step 1: Open the “Manage Posts” window.

Step 2: To add a blog post click on the ‘Add New Post’ in the top right.

Or to edit existing blog posts click on the post you would like to edit.

Step 3: Adding Categories: Categories are a way of categorizing posts. Click from the categories you’ve entered to add them to an individual post, or click the ‘x’ to remove any category for a post.

Not seeing the category you want? You can add new categories via your Page Settings panel.

Step 4: Save Changes

How to Easily Choose and Name Categories:

This should break it down very easily so that you can add categories without a problem when using the Twenty Over Ten platform!

Choosing Categories:

While we pre-populate some categories, you can also customize your own categories, which we highly encourage! With everything you already have going, you may need a little help choosing your categories. Start by doing just a few simple things:

• Ask questions about your blog, such as what is the theme and is there a niche?
• Let your readers help you decide! Check your analytics to see which posts have the most traffic.
• Figure out which sub-topics need their own categories.
• Go through what has worked well for you in the past.

Naming Categories:

Once you create the category, how do you name them?

• Pick a name that your readers will “get.”
• Choose keywords when naming a category.
• Consistency is key! If you use lowercase in one of the category names, then keep it that way across the board!

4 Advisor Website Examples Using Blog Categories:

At Twenty Over Ten, we get the opportunity to work with so many great advisors and we can’t get enough of the content that they create! Here are some examples of advisor blogs that are taking unique approaches to their blogs and really crushing the category game.

1. Granite Bridge Wealth Management

Based out of New Jersey, Granite Bridge Wealth Management focuses on investment management, insurance planning and financial planning with plans unique to each individual client. They include blog posts that will offer tips and assistance to their niche and have utilized a drop-down menu on their blog section to filter the posts.

Once visitors have clicked on the “Filter Posts” section, they can then choose between:

• College Planning
• Insights
• Investment
• Retirement Funding

When advisors use filters, their readers can more easily find what they are looking for which speeds up the process and boosts the overall user-experience.

2. Crest Wealth Advisors

Crest Wealth Advisors is located in Annapolis, Maryland and serves successful professionals who are working on building a promising career and those that are looking to transition towards retirement. These are two very different stages in someone’s career, however, they both need intricate planning and Crest Wealth Advisors is here to help with that.

They are very consistent in how often they blog, as they generally post 1-2 times per week, which can lead to a lot of blogs to sort through eventually. They do a great job of categorizing their blog topics, making it much simpler for clients and prospects to find specific topics that they want to check out.

From college planning, retirement funding and firm updates, they cover a range of topics that are neatly broken down into categories, much it much easier for visitors, as well as helps search engines to boost SEO!

3. Boulder Wealth Advisors

Boulder Wealth Advisors is an advisory firm based out of Boulder, Colorado. They just recently started to blog but have done so consistently since February. As they consistently continue to do this, the topics and categories will be incredibly beneficial when it comes to finding what you want.

With all of the differing needs that clients seek financial advisors for, it’s important to cover topics that will help out each individual, no matter where the financial path has led them!

4. Saza Wealth Partners

Saza Wealth Partners is an advisory firm offering advice and solutions to small business owners and High-Net-Worth executives based on their unique situations. They are based out of Denver, Colorado and have been consistently blogging since December now.

Like the other advisory firms, Saza Wealth Partners has a wide range of categories for their blogs that include topics such as:

• Investing
• Retirement
• Small Business
• Planning
• Tax
• Saza News

They make it simple for the user and the search engine, proving the categorizing of the blog section to be very useful!

Key Takeaways:

Whether you are starting fresh with your blog section or you need a do-over, don’t forget to include categories! As we mentioned, it not only makes life much easier for the user but also for search engines to help your website to rank higher. So, what are you waiting for? Keep producing awesome content with these tips and advisor examples!