“Financial Advisor SEO” is a top keyword phrase in our Google Search Console, so how do you ensure that you are optimizing your website so that you are standing out in a field like the financial industry? Find out why SEO matters and how you can better stand out against your competitors.
Why Does SEO For Financial Advisors Matter?
Advisors used to run their businesses on referrals and cold calling but things are changing and people are now going online to look for advisor services. Boosting your online presence and SEO rankings are now doing this through strong inbound marketing tactics and optimizing your advisor website.
Phase 1: Have a Killer Website
A successful SEO strategy at the core begins with a killer website. This is an absolute must in order to rank high in search engines, but what goes into having a killer website? Think about these key features when going through a redesign or a new build project:
1. You want your website to have streamlined navigation.
The structure of your site is incredibly important because if someone lands on your website and has a difficult time navigating your pages, this will greatly diminish the user-experience. When it comes to boosting navigation, there are things to consider, from having the correct amount of options on your website to considering the order of your website.
At Twenty Over Ten, we recommend keeping your main navigation to 5 pages as this helps visitors to hone in on what really matters. An example of 5 pages that you should have are:
- About Us
- Resources
- FAQ Page
- Client Center
- Contact Page
While you can have other pages, this is a great starting point and all of these pages will be useful to visitors plus boost your lead generation. Twenty Over Ten client, Growing Fortunes financial partners, LLC has a succinct website with those 5 pages making for simple navigation.
Additionally, it’s important to remember the order of your website, so put the most important things towards the top and at the end, as research has shown that people are more likely to remember items that are at the beginning and end of a list. Don’t hide the most important information in the middle of your website, especially since many people scan your website.
2. It’s pertinent that your site is mobile-friendly
63% of Google searches were from mobile devices, and that number is going to keep growing, so having a website that is responsive is now a necessity. If your website is not optimized for mobile, then you will lose a lot of potential leads. All of our frameworks are created with a mobile-first approach, and when developing our frameworks, our designers ensure that our users have a seamless experience regardless of the device that a user is on. Through our platform, advisors can choose the framework that best fits their business and leverage it on a desktop, mobile phone, tablet, and any device.
As you can see, Twenty Over Ten client, Juncture Wealth Strategies has a mobile-responsive website and looks great on any device. Navigation should be simple with fast loading time, no matter what device users are searching on.
3. Content Management System – You should be able to make regular updates to your website as needed
It’s crucial that you have full control of the content on your site, so you want to choose a website provider that allows you to edit, add, and remove information from your website easily without the help of a designer. A Twenty Over Ten platform allows for just that.
You want to provide updated content to visitors and search engines, but there are also additional changes that you can make in order to boost your SEO ranking. This includes adding strong keywords throughout the text that cater to your niche, header tags on your site and adding backlinks to other useful pages and blog posts. You can easily add or delete these additions as necessary on your site.
4. Access to Metadata- You should be able to access your site’s metadata easily.
This is going to be key to improving your rankings over time. Metadata provides information about what something is on your website so that search engines can easily crawl your website and figure out what your page or image is about. Using the Twenty Over Ten website, you can easily add meta-data to your webpages by following the steps below.
Log into your Twenty Over Ten account.
STEP 1: Access your “page settings” from your sidebar.
STEP 2: Scroll down until you reach the SEO description box and add your content.
STEP 3: Your metadata should be a short 1-2 sentence description (rich in keywords) of the content appearing on that particular page. After you have added the content of your choice, click the save button.
Phase 2: Create Content
Creating strong content to drive traffic to your website is such an important part of your firm’s inbound marketing strategy. We discuss the importance of creating a blog section for your advisor website to show that you are a thought-leader in the industry and offer useful advice. Additionally, when you create relevant content consistently, Google will reward your website, therefore boosting your SEO rankings.
Twenty Over Ten client, BentOak Capital, does a great job of consistently keeping up with a blog section both timely content, market updates and evergreen blog content that stay relevant for a long time.
In addition to creating blog content, there are other types of content that you can add to your advisor website, such as:
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Case Studies
- White Papers
- Infographics
- And more!
When you are including content in different ways throughout your website, you are offering relevant information in a variety of channels, allowing more people to digest the content in a way that suits them. In fact, video is the #1 type of content consumers like to see from brands on social media, so this is a great way to quickly discuss a topic in a variety of ways to distribute to your audience.
Creating a podcast for your website gives advisors another unique way to market their services, tell their stories, and develop meaningful relationships with leads.
When starting your plan for content creation, some easy steps to take are:
- Define your goals
- Establish and determine your niche
- Create an audience persona
- Audit your content and make sure it’s in line with your goals. Update and change if necessary
- Brainstorm and come up with new ideas
- Create an editorial calendar in order to stay on track and schedule your content
- Create and publish your content
- Manage and measure your content, reassessing where necessary
Phase 3: Promote
You have spent all this time creating strong content, so don’t you want to make sure you get a lot of “legs” out of your work? That’s where promotion comes in! Some ways to do this are through:
Email marketing
With email marketing, you can email prospects your videos, webinar replays, blog content, or anything that can show your value in a newsletter or something like that. For current clients, it’s important that you are sharing this type of useful information with them, to show that you are still keeping up with them and providing them with value even though they are already a client.
At Twenty Over Ten, we send our clients and prospects bi-weekly blog emails where we share some of our favorite blog posts that we feel will provide them with useful information and also newsletters at the start of every month, providing blogs, videos, upcoming webinars and just filling them in on anything important that is happening at our company.
Social Media
Putting your blog content on social media platforms is a great way to get more eyes on your content and share it with a larger audience. Putting your blogs out there also provides an opportunity for other publications or people to reshare your content if they want, opening you up to an even larger set of people. We try to create a blog post every day on our Twenty Over Ten website and Lead Pilot, and we share that information on our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook platforms.
Twenty Over Ten client, Gary L. Watts does a great job of sharing his content and blog posts on his social media platforms as can be seen on his Twitter profile above.
Phase 4: Optimize Content
Once you have the base of your website and your content is ready to go, make sure that you are optimizing everything. Ways to do this are:
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
- Include header tags in your content to make your information more digestible
- Make sure your blog content is optimized with keywords and topics to relate to your niche
When you first start a blogging and content creation strategy, it’s important to get the necessary content on your website. However, as you create more blog posts and content on your website, then it’s important to go back through and optimize your content. Some simple ways to do this are:
- Make sure all of your images have alt tags so that Google can easily crawl your website.
Doublecheck your headers and title tags. - Pay attention to what is trending and put in relevant keywords where they are appropriate.
As you create new content, check older blog posts and see where you can link back to other posts - Create a strong link-building strategy, so go back through every so often and ensure that your links are all working.
- Delete any outdated content where necessary.
Go through periodically and make sure your content is optimized, so that your website has a strong online presence and you are consistently ranking high and driving traffic to your website. At Twenty Over Ten, we optimize blogs every week and republish them so that they show up on your website again.
Key Takeaways
Inbound marketing is the way of the future, especially as we have continued to social distance. We are not able to network and hold in-person meetings like we used to, so attracting prospects online is extremely important. Creating a strong advisor website where you can showcase your firm, your specialties, niche and expertise is important to your marketing and can be done with successful SEO optimization.
Struggling With What Content to Share on Social Media or via Email?
We are offering access to our content for advisors to use via Lead Pilot for 7-days completely free (even on our month to month plans).
About the author
Blair Kelly
Blair is a digital marketing assistant at Twenty Over Ten and has a passion for uncovering what drives online traffic and the highest engagement. She follows more animals on Instagram than humans and her greatest achievement is her daughter, Grey.
