Why Financial Advisors Need Local SEO

Local SEO is essential for all companies that conduct any sort of business face to face with customers either at an office, a store, or any physical location. Of course, this applies to financial advisors, financial planners, and wealth management firms where you’re always meeting with clients.

Local SEO makes it easier for clients to know where you’re located and how to contact you by phone when they look up your name. It also increases your company’s visibility when people search for similar businesses or type in keywords used in your industry while they’re in your general area.

Almost half of the world’s Internet usage is done through mobile devices. Smartphones and mobile Internet usage have simply become part of people’s daily lives. And when it comes to SEO, search engines can easily identify where you’re located and serve up relevant pages from related businesses around the area. If you don’t have a local SEO strategy, your competitors are going to get those clicks. 

Aside from these obvious benefits, there are many other key advantages to actively managing your local SEO strategy. Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the more important ones.

Increase Brand Awareness

In order to get more people to visit your page, your pages need to show up higher on search results. But it goes without saying that competing with other financial websites worldwide or even nationwide is an extremely difficult task – even for experienced SEO professionals. 

When you narrow down your SEO efforts to target your local area, you’ll dramatically reduce the number of companies and firms you’ll need to compete with. You’ll also get better results from your target keywords. This increases your chances of showing in the first few search results pages. 

When people in your area see more of your pages showing up in their quest to find financial planning information, awareness for your brand will go up. You’ll also get more visits from people who haven’t even heard of your company before, but are actively looking for local financial advisors.

Better Brand Image

Search engines will display local business pages whenever it’s relevant to a search query. If your local business information is incomplete or not up-to-date, it creates the impression that you’re not staying on top of your game.

As a financial advisor, displaying trustworthiness and creating positive impressions are key to your business growth. You need to make sure that the basic information about your business such as its name, address and phone number are easily accessible to show potential clients that you’re always available to discuss plans and options. Otherwise, people might see you as someone who is difficult to get a hold of, or even a shady fly-by-night operation.

Your Google My Business page also gives people a better idea of how your firm is run. If you actively manage your business profile, you can add hours of operation, answer Q&As, and respond to reviews. It’s also a great place to showcase pictures of your physical location and offices.

Put simply, local SEO lets you improve your clients’ user experience at every point of their customer journey.

More High Quality Leads

You’re more likely to do business with people in your local market than someone who’s hundreds of miles away. So it makes sense to focus your SEO efforts locally first and maximize the potential of your local market before you try to rank for competitive keywords on a larger scale.

Here are a few key stats from Google that show who local search is extremely effective at driving up conversion rates:

• 88% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a related store within a week.
• 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day.
• 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase.

As you can see, people who search locally are quite motivated to do business with someone who’s nearby – and they’re not going to waste much time in doing so.

Overhauling your local SEO strategy will give you results in a short amount of time. It not only improves your visibility in your local market, but will also improve the user experience for existing and potential clients..