SEO for Financial Advisors: 6 Tips You Should Know
The world of SEO is always evolving. As a financial advisor, it’s hard to keep up with the latest SEO best practices, or even be on top of fundamental SEO issues.
It’s understandable though. Your primary focus should always be your clients and you shouldn’t be worrying too much about search rankings.
But if you feel like your website is struggling to get traffic and is generally not very effective at generating new leads, you should at least have a basic understanding of SEO.
Let’s take a look at a couple of SEO tactics that the professionals use to boost traffic.
Keyword Research
A huge aspect of SEO deals with keywords and keyword research. You can start by making a list of target keywords that you want to rank higher for. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find out how much competition there is for each keyword and how many people actually search for them.
If the difficulty of the keyword is high due to too much competition, look for new long-tail keywords that are easier to rank for. Long-tail keywords and keyphrases mix in more specific yet relevant search terms with the main target keyword. If you can provide great content that addresses these long-tail keywords, you can capture a small subsection of your target audience much easier.
Optimizing On-Page SEO
On-page or on-site SEO refers to the technical aspects of your website that search engines use to understand what your site is all about. Search engines crawl all the pages on the site to index your titles, URLs, headings, web copy, links, meta tags, and images, so you have to make sure that these are all properly optimized. Otherwise, you’re throwing away lots of potential traffic that could have come your way.
Link-Building and Backlinks
Search engines rank pages higher if they consider it as a legitimate source and if it’s relevant to the search. A new website will not have much value in the eyes of search engines even if it offers outstanding content.
An effective workaround to this common issue is by soliciting already established sites to add links to your site. You can reach out to bloggers and online media outlets and ask them to link to your website in a guest post or a press release. You can also submit your website info to websites that just have directory listings. When search engines crawl those established external sites and see a link to your page, it will have a better understanding of what your site is about and it also increases your site’s relevance.
Local SEO
Search engines display search results from pages based all over the world. But they also try their best to match people’s search queries with businesses and websites that are local to the area. It’s much easier to rank higher on local search results since you’re not competing with the entire world.
To have a better chance at showing up on local searches, you should have your firm’s name, address, and phone number on every page of your site. You can easily take care of this by including the information in the footer of your website.
You should also include location-specific keywords, like your city or town, in your web copy and content. This way, if someone happens to type in ‘financial planner’ plus ‘your city’, there’s a better chance that your home page or one of your pages will be displayed in the first search results.
Lower Bounce Rates
Lowering your bounce rate is closely related to optimizing on-page SEO. Search engines can track if people don’t spend much time on your site and just quickly exit out of your page. Bounce rate is the term used for this particular metric.
Most people will just move on to the next search result if your page doesn’t load instantly. This could be caused by images that are too large or unoptimized code. You’re basically wasting valuable clicks to your site if you don’t address these issues.
Optimizing for both desktop and mobile users is also crucial. You have to make sure your page looks good and is easy to use no matter what device or browser your visitors are using. If your page layout doesn’t look good on one device, people won’t bother checking out the other sections of your site.
Of course, people will only stay on your site if they think your content is valuable. So you have to make sure the content you’re offering is relevant, accurate, and easy to digest.
Give People What They Want
When dealing with SEO, it’s easy to over prioritize the needs of search engines over what your target audience is looking for. Search engines have made lots of advances over the years and have gotten better at filtering out websites that aren’t useful from their search results—but they’re still far from perfect. Gone are the days when all you had to do was dump a bunch of keywords on a page along with content that barely made any sense.
If your content provides value to the reader, the clicks will come naturally. When search engines detect that more and more people are clicking on your links, your site will eventually move up the search rankings. Good content also makes your site more resilient over time even after search engine algorithms get updated.
In Conclusion
Coming up with a good SEO strategy takes a lot of analysis, planning, and plain old hard work. Hopefully, the tips we’ve mentioned can give you a better idea of how to approach any SEO or site traffic issues you may have now or in the future.