The financial planning industry is only getting more competitive. With a 30% projected growth of financial advisors in the US from 2014 to 2024, it’s important you take the proper measures to make your firm stand out. Each year prospects will have more options in who to choose to partner with for their financial planning services, so how do you make sure your firm is on their radar?
The first and most important step to converting potential clients is simply showing up in their online search results. This enables prospects to easily find your firm among the many other financial advisors out there. Additionally, this gives you the opportunity to make a great first impression through your website. As algorithms for search engines continue to evolve, header tags have been a consistently important piece to having your business appear on the first page results in search engines. Using keywords in tags, especially header tags is something we do consistently due to the significant role header tags play in SEO.
Heading tags are a leading factor in SEO ranking and are predicted to be long-living influential factors to ranking in search engines. In fact, a search ranking factor survey from Moz stated that the importance of tags (included in “Page-Level Keyword & Content-Based Metrics”) is the third-most influential ranking factor group. Using keywords in headers play a large role in what search engines understand your website and webpages consist of when deciding what information to show in search results. 80% of the first-page search results in Google use an h1 header tag, yet most businesses are using them incorrectly or not at all.
Today we’re starting at square one to bring you everything you need to know about how to use header tags to improve your local search engine ranking. Luckily, once you’re armed with a little bit of knowledge of how header tags work the Twenty Over Ten platform makes it easy to update them on your website.
What is HTML?
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It can sound scary but it is just the plain text used to describe a web page.
What are Header or Heading Tags?
An HTML tag is a fragment of code that communicates to the web browser how to display content. Tags can be used to display various types of information. The tag <body> defines the body paragraph of copy on your website. The tag <img> communicates to the web browser to display an image. There are many different tags, but today we’re going to dive into heading tags.
What is an h1 Tag?
There are six different heading HTML tags: <h1>, <h2>, and so on to <h6>. The h1 tag is considered the most important tag in a search engine’s ranking, and it appears as the largest heading on web pages. The h6 tag, in comparison, is considered the least important and is formatted to be the smallest heading on the page.
Each page of your website only needs one h1 tag. Because of the logical priority of an h1 tag, there is no need or reason to use more than a single h1 tag on any given page of your website. Search engines will crawl multiple h1 tags on a page but more often than not, your focus will be placed on one keyword. However, if your focus is spread across more keywords and multiple h1 tags, this SEO influence could be weaker than the power of a single h1 tag.
Twenty Over Ten client, Arazon Financial Group, LLC uses header tags on their services page with the phrase, “A complete approach to wealth management,” which makes it very easy for search engines to crawl this and understand exactly what page is about.
Why Should I Use Header Tags?
Google and other search engines WANT you to use h1 tags. Why? So their crawlers can learn and understand what your web page is all about! This is how search engines reflect the best results when someone is searching for keywords. To help your business show up in these results, be sure to use keywords in your h1 tags. However, make sure your keyword use is natural and not stuffed into h1 tags.
How Should I Use Header Tags on my Website?
Your h1 tag should describe what the page or blog post is about in a nutshell. The h1 tag gives the reader a strong sense of what he or she is going to read. When the heading tags, body text, and URL match up with similar information, not only is this helpful for visitors but this also plays a role in boosting your local search rankings.
We recommend keeping your h1 tags to between 20-60 characters for optimal SEO performance. It’s also important to make all of your h1 tags unique, accurate and descriptive. Tags such as “About” or “About Us” are hardly engaging so try using tags like “About Our Financial Planning Firm.”
In the above image, you can clearly see on the homepage of Twenty Over Ten client, Trisuli Financial Advising that their firm has military roots. When you read the about section about Owner, Scott Vance, you see that once he retired from the army, he started working in financial advising. This h1 tag did it’s job very well.
How Can I Optimize my Header Tags?
Google’s Venice update, states that “localized organic results on broad search queries.” Meaning, if you put a location in front of a keyword, Google will prioritize showing your result over a similar web page that doesn’t have the location in front of that particular keyword.
The most advantageous way RIAs can use h1 tags is to optimize them for local searches only. By using a location in h1 tags, your website’s and web page’s SEO ranking for that location rise. Even if your firm conducts business nationally or internationally, concentrating on growing your local search and local prospects can greatly progress your overall financial advising business. Competing with the advisors in your local area is a much more attainable goal than competing with every advisor in the country or world.
How Can I Edit my Header Tags in the Twenty Over Ten WYSIWYG?
Updating your header tags aren’t hard to implement yourself and usually don’t require a programmer to intervene. The Twenty Over Ten platform makes it easy to change your heading tags. With our in-line editor, you can very easily change text from an h1 tag to body text. Check out our step-by-step tutorial to learn more about how to edit your header tags.
The Twenty Over Ten WYSIWYG makes it easy to edit header tags and apply different header styles.
Step 1:
Go to an editable location on the desired page (do this by clicking directly within your website preview). Editable content will be labeled with ‘click to edit’ when you hover over it.
Step 2: Adding or editing page content
Click anywhere in the editable area to make your edits and additions. You have the ability to add text and add the necessary formats, horizontal rules, quotes, tables, images, files, buttons, videos, and forms.
Step 3: changing styles
When you click within the editable area (or highlight elements that you want to style) a menu will appear giving you all available options and styles. For example, you can add text and format it as a headline.
Step 4: saving changes
Important Once you have the desired styles applied click ‘Save Changes’ in the bottom right-hand corner to apply the styles.
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