You’ve probably heard of SEO, but you might not fully grasp its potential impact on your finance company’s success. Your potential clients are searching for financial advice, investment opportunities, or mortgage options online, so you want to ensure it’s your website that shows up before your competitors.
In this post, we’ll go over the nitty-gritty of SEO for financial advisors and the various strategies that can take your website to the first page of the search engine, including keyword research, content creation, and website optimization.
Before we jump into the list, be sure to watch our insightful webinar on outranking industry giants with the help of SEO:
What Is SEO for Financial Advisors?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy that increases a website’s visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. For financial advisors, this means ensuring your site appears at the top of search results when people look for financial advice or related services online.
Ideally, you’d want your potential clients to find you easily when they search for terms like “retirement planning”, “investment advice,” or “financial planning.” SEO for financial advisors helps with this when you optimize various parts of your website. This includes using relevant keywords (the words people are likely to type into a search engine) throughout your site, creating high-quality content that answers common financial questions, and ensuring your site is fast and mobile-friendly.
SEO for finance advisors is not just about attracting more visitors to your site; it’s about bringing in the right kind of visitors—those looking for the services you offer and are likely to become your clients.
To maximize your website’s potential, it’s crucial to focus not only on on-page strategies but also on effective off-page SEO services, which can significantly enhance your site’s authority and visibility.
Importance of SEO for Finance Advisors
A financial advisory service needs to ensure SEO practices are incorporated heavily into its digital marketing campaign. Implementation of high-level and quality SEO techniques offers the following benefits:
- Improved Public Image: It’s common for users to stick to the first few search engine results pages (SERPs) when searching for something. In fact, less than 1% of searchers click on the second page of Google results. [1] Using SEO techniques to help you appear higher on SERPs will boost your company’s credibility by increasing its visibility in the public eye.
- Puts You Ahead of Competitors: If your website is optimized properly for search engines, you’re likely to rank higher than your competitors who are not putting as much effort, giving you an edge in the market.
- More Conversions with Lesser Spending: SEO for financial advisors is a cost-effective way to attract organic traffic to your site and potentially close more sales, saving you money in the long run. Paid ads work better than SEO in the short run because they aggressively promote your website. However, they cost way more money and are not a passive solution.
- Long-Term Results: Unlike paid ads, SEO results are long-lasting. Once you achieve a high ranking, maintaining it requires less effort, providing ongoing visibility and traffic to your site.
Utilization of SEO techniques, on the other hand, brings in organic traffic from people actively looking for services or products your firm offers. Its ability to attract your target audience leads to more conversions in the long run than paid ads. SEO statistics by Forbes revealed that organic clicks accounted for 45.1% of all search result clicks in 2022[2]. This means users are more likely to trust organic search results than those from other sources, such as paid ads.
Paid ads may get you more traffic, but they are short-lived; they survive only as long as you keep investing in them. SEO for financial advisors will fetch the most organic results, potentially resulting in higher revenues.
SEO for Financial Advisors: 8 Effective Strategies
Let’s begin by going over the eight strategies of SEO for financial advisors:
1. Keyword Research
The most effective way to get a relevant audience to engage with your website is to perform keyword research and find out what your target audience searches for. To put it simply, keyword research is the process of finding the exact terms your potential clients use when looking for financial guidance. For example, if a person searches for “how to save for a down payment,” that is a keyword.
Google[3] says that you should include the exact keywords in your content as users’ search queries because it sends a signal that your website contains relevant information. Using the right keywords gives your webpage a fighting chance to appear higher in SERPs. Not to mention, it’s also an integral part of SEO for financial advisors.
To further enhance your site’s performance, it’s essential to focus on optimizing individual pages for search engines. Implementing advanced on-page SEO services can significantly improve your site’s rankings and ensure it is fully optimized for both content and technical elements.
However, it’s important to remember that there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing.” Not using your keywords smartly and simply jamming them inside low-quality articles won’t get you much. Stuffing keywords damages your content’s quality and credibility and can also get your site penalized by search engines.
So, how do you nail keyword research? There are several ways to go about it, but your best bet is to use a tool. Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs are amazing tools that help massively while performing SEO for financial advisors, as they allow you to discover relevant keywords and show you the search volume and competition level.
Ideally, you’d want to target one primary keyword you NEED to rank for and several secondary keywords you WANT to rank for. They must have low competition but a high search volume. To make it a tad bit easier, you should look for a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords. An example of a short-tail keyword is “financial advisor,” while an example of a long-tail keyword is “financial advice for retired seniors with low income.”
One of the many benefits of using keyword research tools like Ahrefs is the fact that you can look at the keywords your competitors are ranking for and then use them on your content, so most of your work is cut out.
2. High-Quality Content Creation
A core element of any marketing campaign is creating high-quality content. Valuable, informational, or even good-to-read content is extremely useful when performing SEO for financial advisors, as it improves your overall performance on search engines.
The digital landscape is vast, and paid ads alone won’t cut it. It is necessary to use blogs, social media posts, videos, and podcasts to advertise your brand as much as possible. There are several benefits of creating top-shelf content:
- Builds reputation: Providing your audience with useful, accurate, and reliable information about finance is a good practice that boosts brand image.
- Gets you in the public eye: Pushing out top-tier content with proper SEO techniques increases your visibility in search engine results, ranking your website higher on SERPs.
- Encourages long-term relationships: Offering high-quality content to your audience that educates them, addresses their pain points, and assists them in making a wise decision automatically builds a sense of trust and encourages a customer to develop long-term relationships with your company.
So, what kind of content should you create? Being a finance company, you must aim to connect with your audience and show off your expertise. Blog posts that offer tips and advice are a great start if you’re unsure of where to set your foot in. For example, you could drop some lesser-known budgeting tips or write about how people can save for retirement.
Educational and in-depth guides on complex topics like investing, retirement planning, or tax saving strategies can also help you provide valuable information to your audience.
Once you’ve covered some of the usual topics, you can branch out to success stories, case studies, and testimonials to build credibility by showing real-world results of your services.
Creating engaging content for a financial company website doesn’t have to be rocket science. Focus on providing value (and possibly something new), and always remember to keep it real and relatable–just like chatting with a friend over coffee.
You can also consider collaborating with a SaaS Content Marketing Agency. Ig can streamline your content creation process, ensuring you consistently produce high-quality, informative content that resonates with your target audience and enhances your online presence.
3. Quality Backlinks
Think Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing, which is what backlinks are, in a nutshell. It is a “thumbs up” from one website to another. When Website A adds a link to Website B in its content, it creates a backlink. In this case, Website B benefits from “ranking juices” from Website A.
Having a quality backlink from an authoritative and respected website also signals trustworthiness and credibility in the eyes of search engines. Bing, Google, and other search engines use backlinks to rank your website’s relevance and credibility. Building trust in the online space should be a top priority when performing SEO for financial advisors.
Here are the key reasons why you should not overlook quality backlinks:
- Builds trust and reliability
- Helps you crawl up the rankings and appear higher in SERPs
- Brings in more organic traffic
- Opens up opportunities for networking and partnerships
But how do you build backlinks? There are plenty of ways, but two of the easiest are guest blogging and utilizing HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Guest blogging is basically researching relevant blogs in your niche, reaching out to them, and writing a piece of content for them in exchange for a link back to your website. Most blog owners would be happy to do this swap.
On the other hand, HARO is a service that connects journalists with sources who can provide credible information for their articles. Once you register for it, you’ll receive emails regularly based on your set preferences, containing queries that match your expertise. You can answer those queries, and if it gets selected, it’ll be published on the source, and you’ll get a link back for your answer. Easy work!
NOTE: Remember, quality over quantity; always. A single-quality backlink is far better than multiple backlinks from bad sources. If you’ve hired a SaaS link building agency, ensure you only receive quality link building services from them.
4. Website Optimization
To enrich the user experience (UX), a company must perform website optimization. Optimization of your website involves improving numerous aspects. Here’s a table that illustrates some ways you can enhance your website:
| Web Accessibility | Every company should design its website to be accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. By making your websites accessible to all, you stand right on the ethical side and open up the business to all.Some ways to make your website more accessible include providing video captions, audio transcripts, and alt attributes for images. You also need to ensure your HTML structure uses proper tags, such as <header> and <nav>, for screen readers to understand the content and structure of your website. |
| Speed | Time is money; if your website is too slow to load, you will likely lose potential customers. Fast-loading websites are essential for delivering an enjoyable UX. In fact, the speed at which a webpage loads is a major factor in search engine rankings.Some ways to increase the speed of your website include compressing and resizing images to reduce file size, enabling caching to store static resources, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a distributed group that delivers your content across multiple servers worldwide to reduce latency and improve load times. |
| Usability | You need to prioritize making your website’s design as user-friendly as possible. An intuitive navigation setup helps users find the information they’re searching for, improving the user’s overall experience on your webpage.Some ways to improve your website usability include ensuring a straightforward navigation structure that allows users to find information easily. Use consistent menus and description labels.Moreover, your website must have readable typography, so choose fonts that are easy to read and aren’t too big or small. You must also ensure your website is mobile-friendly, has a consistent user interface, and adjusts seamlessly to different devices. |
5. Meta Descriptions
Simply put, that small gray text under a link, when you search for something is called a meta description. Essentially, it is a summary of your webpage. It describes the contents of the page in 160 characters or less.
The success of a meta description is measured by the click-through rate (CTR) it achieves. Here are a few things to keep in mind while crafting click-worthy meta descriptions for your financial company website:
- Being informative rather than “salesy” is always the right way to go
- Create different meta descriptions for all your webpage
- Keep the character mark under 160
- Aim to include your primary keyword
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Use active voice and make it actionable
- Ensure it matches the content of the page
- Keep updating your meta descriptions
6. Social Media
In modern times, your reputation on social media counts almost equally to that in the real world. For any company to succeed, they must maintain their social media presence. Let’s cover why it is crucial:
- Online Presence Builds Trust: A brand with no social media presence tends to hang in a state of limbo where most potential clients turn away from them due to a lack of visibility. For a finance advisor, your online presence will build trust in your current and future clients. Sharing content on social media, such as articles, valuable tips, blogs, and answering FAQs, humanizes your brand and reinforces credibility.
- Regular Updates: Social media does a great job of marketing. You can use it to announce any recent changes to your policies, upcoming deals, major changes, or any other announcements that you wish to make.
- Marketing: There are several ways of marketing yourself on social media platforms that are considerably cheaper than traditional ads. One such example is influencer collaborations within your niche. It can help spread the word about your business and potentially give you more customers who’d be willing to spend big bucks since their favorite social media influencer recommended it. These collaborations can be arranged through product exchanges, commission-based deals, or upfront payments.
Pro Tip: Use social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to plan and automate your posts. Consistency is key to maintaining an active social presence.
7. SEO Analytics
After you’ve developed your SEO strategy and started working on it, it’s time to talk numbers. Here are some analytics you can use to track your progress:
- Keyword Ranking: Your keyword ranking is the position at which your website shows up on SERPs for specific keywords or phrases, and it is one of the go-to metrics for measuring your success. You can use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to set keyword tracking.
- Engagement Rate: Understanding engagement analytics is a great way to measure the quality of your website’s SEO content. Metrics like bounce rate, click-through rates, and time-per-page are super helpful. Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you identify this.
- Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is yet another fantastic indicator of whether your SEO strategy is working. If you’ve noticed a surge in sales, downloads, and sign-ups, you can conclude it’s working. If the results aren’t as desired, you can look at the data for areas for improvement. You can compare the number of conversions with the traffic that you are getting to identify the conversion rate.
- Backlinks: You must track backlinks, as these heavily affect your search engine visibility. The aim is to get a backlink from a reputed source: quality over quantity.
While there are many specialized tools to track these key metrics, you simply cannot go wrong with Google Analytics. Once you enable it, you’ll be able to take a deeper look into your website’s analytics and track various areas that aren’t limited to the above metrics, such as user behavior and page views.
8. Implement Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of microdata. In simple terms, it’s a code that you add to your website to help search engines better understand your content. It allows search engines to display your content in a richer, more informative way, often referred to as rich snippets.
Rich snippets can include additional information such as star ratings, specifications, event details, and business information directly in the search results, making your listing more attractive and potentially increasing your click-through rate (CTR). It can be seen just below the meta description.
Your first step towards implementing it should be to identify relevant Schema types. Schema.org offers a wide variety of schema types you can use to mark up different types of content. For financial advisors, some useful types include:
- Local Business: This is for your business information, including address, phone number, and operating hours.
- Person: This is for highlighting individual advisors and their credentials.
- Service: For detailing the services you offer, such as retirement planning, investment advice, etc.
- Article: For blog posts and articles, provide structured information about the content.
- FAQ: For pages with frequently asked questions.
Next, you’re required to add the structured data to your website, which can be done using JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) – the method that Google prefers.
You can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to create the JSON-LD code. Select the type of data you want to mark up, enter your webpage URL, tag the relevant parts of your content, and voila!
You must insert the code into the HTML of your web pages, typically in the <head> section or just before the closing </body> tag. Once you’ve done that, you can enhance the listings with rich snippets, which can display various elements useful for any business.
Pro Tip: Regularly update and expand your schema markup as your business grows and your content evolves. This continuous improvement ensures that your site remains competitive and attractive in search results.
Leveraging SEO Tools for Financial Advisors
Before starting your SEO journey, it is essential to formulate a plan. Knowing where you stand is necessary to determine what content should be created, kept, updated, or deleted.
SEO tools can be crucial to finding the best keywords, improving your current SEO strategy, building links, and optimizing your on-page content. Here’s a table that illustrates popular SEO tools for financial advisors and what they’re useful for:
| Tool | Primary Function | Key Features | Pricing | Best For | |
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Google Keyword Planner | Keyword Research | Discover new keywords, search volume, and competition data. | Free | Finding keyword opportunities |
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Ahrefs | Complete SEO Analysis | Keyword research, backlink analysis, site audit, rank tracking, content explorer. | Starts at $99/month | In-depth competitor analysis and link-building |
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Google Analytics | Website Traffic Analysis | Tracks and reports website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. | Free | Understanding user interactions and traffic sources |
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Screaming Frog | Website Crawler | Crawls websites to identify SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, and redirects. | Free (Limited) / £149/year | Technical SEO audits |
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Google Search Console | Search Performance Monitoring | Monitor site performance in Google Search, fix issues, submit sitemaps, and check backlinks. | Free | Monitoring and maintaining site presence in search results |
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AnswerThePublic | Content Ideas Generation | Visualizes search questions and suggests content ideas based on real user queries. | Free / $99/month (Pro) | Generating content ideas and understanding user intent |
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Surfer SEO | Content Optimization | Content editor, SERP analyzer, keyword research, content planning. | Starts at $59/month | Creating SEO-optimized content |
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BuzzSumo | Content Research and Social Media Monitoring | Analyzes content performance, identifies influencers, and tracks brand mentions. | Free (Limited) / $99/month | Content marketing and social media strategy |
Local SEO for Financial Advisors: A Closer Look
Local SEO optimizes a website to appear higher on SERPs for a particular geographical location. For example, “Best Finance Companies in New York” is an example of a local search where local SEO for financial advisors comes in handy.
Most people want to do business with a local firm, especially concerning their finances. And with the growth of GPS-enabled smartphones, local businesses are now front and center in mobile search results. In other words, if you want to grow your business, local search optimization is a golden opportunity you can’t afford to miss.
Local SEO services for financial advisors should be carefully considered, and putting it into action can bring many benefits:
- Brings in Targeted Traffic: Since local SEO for financial advisors focuses on attracting traffic from specific geographic areas, it creates a targeted approach that reduces wasted efforts on irrelevant traffic and improves the efficiency of your marketing efforts. It’s like casting a fishing net exactly where you know the fish are swimming.
- Gives You a Competitive Advantage: Implementing local SEO strategies can give you a competitive edge over businesses that have not optimized for local search, helping you stand out and attract more customers.
- Increases Local Trust: Appearing in a local area’s search not only builds trust in the minds of the local population but also fuels word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. Appearing in local searches creates a positive psychological effect in your potential customers’ minds because people are more likely to trust a business nearby rather than one based thousands of miles away.
- Becomes a Cost-Effective Solution: Local SEO for financial advisors is much more pocket-friendly than traditional or worldwide SEO and tends to yield a higher return on investment (ROI). The reason for this is simple: your resources aren’t spread out to areas that don’t benefit you. Instead, you’re investing all your time and money to target customers who are already looking for your services.
We discussed the importance of local SEO for financial advisors above, but adding to it, a must-have tool for financial advisors is Google Business Profile. This is a free online platform by Google that allows local businesses to set up and manage their online presence by adding contact information, details about your business, operational hours, location, photos, and content.
It specializes in search results from your local area and hugely benefits any successful local SEO campaign because it provides your potential customers with a means of contacting you and moving things forward. It specializes in search results from your local area and hugely benefits any successful local SEO campaign because it provides your potential customers with a means of contacting you and moving things forward. Leveraging white label local SEO services can further enhance these efforts, ensuring that your local search optimization is handled by experts, thereby maximizing visibility and engagement.
How NUOPTIMA Can Help Increase Your Finance Company Visibility Online
Our experts at NUOPTIMA constantly research and figure out ways to improve the SEO of websites for more visibility. We understand that knowing how to choose an SEO company is crucial for financial advisors who want to achieve top search rankings. We know how to bring your website to the top of SERPs and keep it there by following the latest and most effective SEO strategies. This ensures your finance company receives the results it deserves. Here are some of the many things we do:
- We look at the competition in your market domain and pick up on the techniques utilized to match, if not outperform, them.
- We provide SEO keyword research services to determine the best keywords relevant to your industry. Once the best keywords are mined out, they can be used in your blog posts or throughout your website to reach the target audience.
- We track what’s working and what’s not so we can stick to the most effective strategies and get more done in less time.
- We ensure your website follows the guidelines set by search engines when optimizing your content for SEO. Ignoring these can negatively affect your website. Thankfully, a good SEO company for financial advisors pays attention to them, and we’re one of them.
- We regularly audit your website to find areas for improvement and fix issues. This also means thoroughly analyzing the on-site optimization, bugs, keywords, and content to ensure the best practices are followed.
One of our standout SEO clients is The Happiest Hour, a platform that connects users with pub events and offers throughout Australia. Their traffic has been on a decline ever since the global pandemic, so they reached out to NUOPTIMA for assistance. Fast forward to the results, they had a 324.31% increase in conversions, a 78.54% rise in organic traffic, and a 169% boost in top-ranking keywords. Here’s how we did it:
- Redirects: Implemented 301 redirects for secure, unified URLs, boosting SEO and user trust;
- Sitemap: Optimized by removing invalid URLs and integrating orphan pages, enhancing site crawling;
- Site Architecture & UX: Improved navigation and CTAs, leading to higher user engagement;
- Keyword Research: Created a targeted content strategy for better visibility;
- Meta Tags: Optimized titles and descriptions, increasing CTR;
- H1 Tags: Corrected headers for better SEO;
- 404 Errors: Fixed missing content and redirects, reducing ranking losses;
SEO for financial advisors isn’t a piece of cake; it takes considerable, consistent hard work. However, you don’t necessarily have to take the onus on you – you can let NUOPTIMA take care of it. This way, you do not fall behind on the marketing front, nor do you spend too much time on it. Book a free call to learn how we can drastically improve your website’s SEO.
Closing Thoughts
It’s safe to say that nailing the “SEO for financial advisors” game is crucial if you want to set a strong foot in the online space. By focusing on keyword research, creating high-quality content, and optimizing for both on-page and off-page factors, you can significantly improve your search engine rankings.
Ready to elevate your finance company’s digital presence? Our team of experts at NUOPTIMA will tailor a strategy that meets your unique needs and delivers measurable results. Get in touch today and start your journey to SEO success!
FAQ
While there are multiple ways to create a winning strategy concerning SEO for financial advisors, the most effective approach is to start with keyword research. This will help you determine what your target audience is searching for, ultimately helping you create helpful content around it. Based on the research, you’d be able to connect the dots to other areas, such as competitor analysis. For example, when you land a profitable keyword that’s not a “mountain climb” to rank for, you can search for it and analyze the top results. Most websites on the first page are your direct competitors, so you must strive to create something better than what they offer.
Financial advisors can boost their SEO efforts with content marketing by creating helpful, keyword-rich blog posts. Focus on common financial questions and issues to attract organic traffic. Keep your content fresh, add attractive visuals, such as infographics, and share across social media to increase your visibility and establish your expertise.
SEO for financial advisors isn’t very different from any other niche. You should be on the right track as long as you follow the tips mentioned in this post. You should also consider hiring an SEO agency like NUOPTIMA that thoroughly understands your goals and outlines a clear action plan to rank higher on the search engines. We do all the heavy lifting for you!
