SEO for Financial Advisory Firms

PSM Provides SEO for Financial Advisors

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is an incredibly important process that allows potential clients and referral sources to discover your website through online search engines. While you may not be looking for new clients to come directly from your website, you definitely want to ensure that the prospective new clients that your existing clients send to you can find you online. You may also have referral sources such as CPAs and Attorneys who want to refer clients to you but they need to be able to find your website online as well. In order for prospective new clients to find your website online, it’s essential that each page of your website is optimized to increase its likelihood of being clicked on. Search engines like Google, Safari, and Yahoo rely on complex algorithms to determine 1) what content is on a page, and 2) how relevant that content is to potential visitors. Your “search rank” is determined from that data.

Search Engine Optimization is incredibly complex to truly master. Google is continuously releasing new best practices, which are often tough to keep up with. Why spend your time trying to master the newest algorithm updates when you could be working with a team of SEO experts who know the intricacies of the financial industry?

On-Site SEO for CPAs and Advisors

PSM’s team of SEO experts will work with your firm to analyze your current SEO strategy (if you have one) and make a proactive plan for improvement. We typically do four things with every webpage we optimize:

Page Title – The title of any web page should be between 50 and 60 characters. It should be descriptive, cogent, inviting, and enticing to potential customers.

Meta Description – When you search for something on Google, you know how there’s a little snippet of preview text that appears under the page title? That’s called a meta description. We help financial advisory firms draft custom meta descriptions that will help get your page noticed.

Determine a Keyword – Each page on your website should have a unique keyword that helps Google determine the topic of that page.

Page Content – Believe it or not, but every single page on your website should have a minimum of 500-800 words of content. Although that may sound a bit verbose, we promise it’s not too bad. The page content should include your keyword in the body of the text and included in headings 1-3.

The Importance of SEO for Financial Advisors

SEO for financial advisory firms of any type, whether we’re talking about a financial advisory practice, a Registered Investment Advisory (RIA) firm or a financial planning firm, is absolutely crucial. SEO is what helps bring new clients in the door as well as helping the many referrals that are made find you when searching for you on Google.

Building Your SEO Authority

Professionals in the SEO industry often throw around the term “search authority.” What they are referring to here is the idea that websites with strong SEO have more “authority” in the eyes of Google. You could be the most seasoned CPA in the world, but if your website only has 200 words of content, Google doesn’t care. Content is king when it comes to strong SEO.

A best practice in terms of SEO for accountants and financial advisors is to update your website often and add new content regularly. First, focus on getting those 300-500 words of text on every page of your site (yes…even the Contact Us page). From there, your efforts should focus on how to regularly add new content your clients will find engaging. Usually, this comes down to blog posts. Although blogging gets a bad reputation in the financial services industry because of a misconception that it’s a waste of time, we beg to differ. Blogging is one of the best ways of keeping your SEO authority healthy and engaging potential clients. Blogs shouldn’t be dry recitations of the latest tax code updates, rather, they should be personal messages that speak to the fears, hopes, and dreams of your clientele.

Looking for an SEO Expert for Your Financial Advisory firm?

PSM Marketing provides access to top-of-the-line SEO experts who specialize in the financial services industry. Your firm’s website’s SEO is too important to be sidelined. Contact the marketing team at PSM to learn how SEO could help your firm.

Measuring SEO ROI for Financial Advisory Firms

Financial professionals are no strangers to backing up their claims with hard data. The good news about SEO is that it’s pretty simple to track. Google has a suite of tools designed to monitor and track website analytics. Our SEO team begins every project by setting up a Google Analytics account. This account allows us to track essential metrics such as:

Number of Users – This one is pretty self-explanatory…it tells us how many users visited your website during a given timeframe.

Unique Visitors – Google allows us to track the number of unique visitors to your site, which means visitors who have never been there before.

Page Views – How many times visitors viewed a webpage. Google Analytics is also helpful in breaking down which pages are attracting more traffic than others and shows you a complete list of your site’s pages.

Average Duration – This metric helps determine how much time the average user is spending on your website. Are they staying for more than 5 minutes? If so, it probably means you have really engaging content that pulls your audience in.

Kristy L. Gusick is Leading the Charge

PSM Partner, Kristy L. Gusick, has over 25 years of experience working in financial services marketing. Kristy knows the financial industry inside out and will expertly guide you through the complex process of developing your firm’s SEO strategy. We know SEO sounds daunting, which is why the experts at PSM have dedicated themselves to understanding the fine details of your practice and creating a tailored SEO plan just for you.