Financial Advisor Website Copywriting: What to Prepare Before Hiring a Writer
By Dan Stark, AltaStreet
Say the first homepage draft comes back. The sentences are polished, but another advisory firm could publish almost all of them unchanged.
You asked for stronger positioning. You got a more polished version of “comprehensive planning, personalized service and long-term relationships.”
Swapping adjectives won’t tell a prospect whether your firm understands their situation. What’s missing is the work underneath the copy: finding out what makes the firm relevant, what it actually delivers and what it can back up with facts.
That’s what to sort out before you hire a financial advisor website copywriter. The pages are still the writer’s job. Yours is to agree on how the writer will uncover and use that information.
What should you prepare before hiring a website copywriter?
Bring accurate firm information, existing source material, access to the people who know the business and a clear path for decisions and approvals. Cover who you serve, what you do, your service limits and the evidence behind important claims. You don’t need finished page drafts.
A short note, document name or contact is enough to begin. Incomplete entries are expected; they tell the writer what discovery needs to resolve.
A service agreement, current brochure, onboarding checklist or conversation with your operations lead can answer a question without requiring a newly written response.
Start with what you already have and mark anything outdated. Describe inquiries as anonymized themes, and don’t send client account files or identifiable financial details.
You don’t need every positioning decision settled before the first call, either. You do need to say which ones are still open and confirm whether helping you resolve them is part of the assignment.
“We know our clients, but we need help explaining why they choose us” is a reasonable place to start. It also calls for a different engagement than “Our positioning is approved; please edit these five pages.”
Decide what the writer is responsible for
Before you compare fees, separate original writing from editing and content loading. Those are different assignments.
If the project includes discovery and positioning, ask the writer to explain how they’ll review your materials, interview the right people, identify unanswered questions and recommend a message direction before they draft anything.
Then ask what you’ll receive for each named page. Does the scope cover the page’s purpose, headings, body copy, calls to action, search targeting and implementation notes? Are biographies counted separately? Who checks the copy once it’s placed in the design?
“Discovery included” doesn’t tell you enough. Find out who’ll attend, which decisions it will address and what happens afterward.
You supply the facts and access. The writer should do the synthesis and drafting you’re hiring them to do. Spell out that division in the proposal instead of assuming it.
Use this seven-part financial advisor website copywriting brief
Use the sections below to organize what you already have and what needs a conversation. They are a practical briefing tool, not an industry standard or seven writing assignments.
The framework is Fact → Decision → Evidence → Owner: what we know, what needs deciding, what supports a claim and who can answer or approve it.
| Brief section | What your firm can bring | What to ask the writer to handle |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Right-fit clients and triggering situations | Anonymized examples of who contacts you, what’s changed in their lives and what they need help deciding. Note strong fits, conditional fits and work you don’t pursue. | Identify useful patterns and recommend specific audience language, without turning one unusual inquiry into the firm’s entire positioning. |
| 2. Services and limits | Current service descriptions, agreements or your Form ADV brochure where applicable. Identify work you deliver internally, coordinate with others or don’t provide. Include fees or minimums only for approved use. | Reconcile the descriptions and explain them clearly without expanding the firm’s actual service scope. |
| 3. The real client process | A welcome document, process checklist or interview with the person who manages onboarding. Cover the first conversation, initial work, ongoing contact and who does what. | Turn the actual process into a useful sequence. Flag differences between current practice and the process the firm hopes to offer. |
| 4. Meaningful differences and evidence | Proposed distinctions, supporting documents, verified credentials and the person who can confirm each claim. | Challenge vague language, identify the evidence needed and recommend narrower wording when a claim goes beyond its support. |
| 5. Existing material and permissions | Current pages, biographies, presentations, approved materials and brand assets. Note their source, date, accuracy and any known reuse restrictions. | Identify what can be used, what needs updating and which permissions are still unresolved. |
| 6. Page purpose and next step | A preliminary page list and the questions prospects ask before contacting you. An interview can replace a finished sitemap. | Give each page a distinct job, organize its message and recommend a next step suited to the reader. |
| 7. Review and approval responsibilities | Names for business input, factual review, applicable compliance review and final business approval. Say who resolves conflicting feedback. | Build the review sequence, collect consolidated feedback and keep one clearly identified working version. |
As discovery progresses, add a source or contact, an owner and any useful status labels: Existing source, Discuss in interview, Decision needed, Evidence needed, or Not applicable. More than one can apply. These are discussion notes, not prerequisites for the first call.
An unverified fact still needs checking before it becomes a confident statement in the finished copy.
Turn a general description into a specific page direction
Hypothetical example, not an AltaStreet client or case study.
The firm starts with this: “We provide comprehensive retirement planning for successful professionals.”
That names a service and a broad audience. It doesn’t yet explain the situation that would make someone contact this firm.
| Briefing step | Completed example |
|---|---|
| Original input | “Comprehensive retirement planning for successful professionals.” |
| Writer’s follow-up | Which professionals? What decision has become urgent? Which work do you perform, and which work stays with outside tax or legal professionals? |
| Facts to confirm | In this example, the firm provides planning and investment management, including coordination with clients’ tax and legal professionals. It doesn’t prepare tax returns or draft legal documents. |
| Positioning decision | Focus this page on corporate executives roughly three to five years from retirement who are working through pension elections, equity compensation, employer benefits and portfolio decisions. The time range describes this hypothetical audience, not an industry rule. |
| Evidence needed | Current service documents, applicable brochure language, team confirmation of the workflow and a reviewed description of outside-professional coordination. A decision to target executives doesn’t establish an existing track record with them. |
| Owner | A designated partner confirms the audience decision; the service lead verifies the work performed; the firm’s designated reviewer checks the proposed public language. |
| Resulting page direction | Explain the connected retirement decisions facing these executives, the planning and investment work the firm provides, and the responsibilities that remain with tax and legal professionals. |
What comes out is a direction the writer can develop and the firm can review. It isn’t approved advertising copy yet.
The point is to give a suitable prospect enough information to recognize a relevant service, without setting expectations the firm can’t meet.
When reviewing any writer’s samples, ask which reader each page serves, what question it answers and what the writer contributed. Apply the same test to AltaStreet’s website portfolio.
Don’t make the claim stronger than the evidence
Take another hypothetical draft line: “The leading retirement specialist in our market.”
Before anyone refines that sentence, ask what “leading” means, which market it describes and what supports the comparison. Changing “leading” to “trusted” doesn’t answer those questions.
For advisers covered by the SEC investment adviser marketing rule, an advertisement can’t include a material statement of fact unless the adviser has a reasonable basis for believing it can substantiate that statement when the SEC demands it.
For FINRA-member communications, FINRA Rule 2210 requires fair and balanced communications and prohibits false, exaggerated or misleading claims. These are distinct requirements, not one universal “SEC/FINRA” process.
Record each proposed claim, its source, any qualification and the person checking it. This working list supports the firm’s compliance process; it doesn’t replace it.
A writer can help uncover a meaningful difference. They can’t make an unsupported one true.
Name the reviewers before the first draft
Picture three partners reviewing a homepage. One wants business owners at the center. Another wants retirees. The third cuts every sentence that doesn’t cover both. The writer gets back three marked-up files and no agreed decision.
In that hypothetical, the second draft will probably come back broader. Nobody settled the direction, and more synonyms won’t fix that.
Settle the decision path before you spend a revision round on it. Name who recommends the audience and positioning, who decides and how the other partners contribute. The final business approver should resolve conflicting business preferences without overriding factual accuracy or a required compliance review.
Keep those reviews separate. The person checking a biography’s credentials may not be the person approving the homepage’s business emphasis. Neither one automatically replaces the designated compliance reviewer.
If your team is LPL-affiliated or your firm uses another broker-dealer’s process, ask your current firm resources to confirm who owns the submission, which platform constraints apply, how the review is sequenced and what timing to expect. Don’t infer your process from another team’s experience.
Ask the writer how reviewer comments will be handled within the agreed scope. Compliance awareness is useful. A promise of guaranteed approval isn’t.
Put SEO, revisions and handoff into the scope
Even a strong draft needs a clear agreement about what happens around it.
Specify the search work
Ask whether the engagement includes search-intent research, page-level keyword targets, headings, SEO titles, meta descriptions and internal-link recommendations. Then ask separately who implements those recommendations and who evaluates performance.
Name each of those tasks. Don’t let them hide inside “SEO copywriting.” Research, writing, technical implementation and reporting aren’t interchangeable deliverables.
Apply that test to AI-visibility claims, too. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special schema or additional optimization, and following its guidance doesn’t guarantee indexing or display. Ask for the actual deliverables, not an AI label.
Define what a revision includes
Write down the number of review rounds, how feedback gets consolidated and who resolves contradictory comments. Ask how factual corrections, a new business direction and additional pages are handled.
Also establish whether compliance-driven changes after business approval are included. Responding to a reviewer’s qualification is a different job from restarting the website around a new audience. The agreement should say how each is treated.
Agree on ownership and the final handoff
Put the rights your firm receives in the final copy into a signed agreement, including exclusions for third-party or licensed material. Don’t assume possession means permission. Have counsel review the ownership and transfer terms.
For delivery, ask for one approved version with clear page assignments and any included metadata, link destinations and implementation notes. Identify who places it in the site and who checks the rendered result.
During a redesign, coordinate the copy with the website design before you treat either as finished. A paragraph shortened to fit a card shouldn’t quietly lose a qualification. A button label should match the action it opens. Changed wording should go back through the appropriate review path.
Bring the unfinished brief to the first call
You don’t need a completed worksheet to start a conversation. Bring your current website, the useful material you already have and the questions your team hasn’t settled.
Use the call to work out whether you need editing or original writing, and whether discovery and positioning should come first. Get clear on the pages, the people who need to take part and the approval path. Then put the agreed responsibilities into the scope.
Evaluating original website copy for your RIA, independent advisory practice or wealth management team? Book a discovery call with AltaStreet to discuss your writing needs and the right project scope. You don’t need to decide on a full website rebuild before that conversation.
This article provides general project-planning information, not legal advice. Confirm regulatory requirements and contract rights with your firm’s designated professionals.