As a finance professional, you’ve got a head for numbers. If you could see just how much revenue you’re leaving on the table by ignoring SEO, it would make that number-loving head spin.
I’m dead serious. Whether you’re not doing SEO at all or doing it a little (not enough), the amount of opportunity you’re missing out on is STAGGERING.
Just take the search volume — the average number of times people search a keyword in a month — for four basic financial advisor keywords:
I don’t need to tell YOU how to do math. That’s 189,700 people searching on Google for YOUR services. Every single month.
And that’s just four keywords. There are hundreds — potentially thousands — of keywords related to financial services.
Imagine if you ranked for them. Imagine the impact on your business if you had so many leads that you were TURNING DOWN clients.
That’s where financial advisor SEO can take you.
In the article below, I’m going to walk you through exactly how that works by sharing key SEO strategies for financial professionals. And I’m going to convince you to put UppercutSEO in charge of your SEO journey.
Ready? Let’s go.
Most of the financial pros I’ve done SEO for were pretty no-nonsense. So I’m going to assume that’s true of you, too, and skip the nonsense.
With that in mind, let’s dive right in. Here are nine, no-nonsense, actionable strategies to help you win the game of SEO for financial advisors.
This is both an indisputable fact and a sales pitch:
You’re going to need to hire an SEO provider at some point. That is, if you intend to grow your financial advising or planning business.
Why?
Because you DO NOT have the time to do everything it takes to rank well on Google for competitive financial services terms.
Even if you’re just starting out with no clients and all the time in the world, you’re going to market yourself into a problem.
What do I mean by that? I mean that, if you manage to do financial planning SEO right — most people don’t, by the way — you’ll get clients from it.
That means you have less time. And you skip the SEO. Then you go back to square one.
That’s not a scalable cycle.
And it’s why financial advisors like you almost always end up hiring an SEO provider.
But there’s a second problem here: Most SEO providers are professional scam artists.
They’re digital cowboys faking it until they make it (most don’t make it). And they’re not afraid to use your website for practice.
(Doesn’t completely destroy their livelihood if they fail on YOUR site, now does it?)
So, it’s a big problem. But I’ve got great news (and this is the sales pitch part):
UppercutSEO does SEO for financial advisors the right way.
We’re not new at this. Far from it. I’ve been in the SEO industry for more than a decade. And so has almost everyone on my team.
We’ve ranked professional service businesses like yours in the most competitive markets in the world: NYC, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles. You get the idea.
What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to search for an SEO provider. You’ve already found one. The next step is to just reach out.
In the meantime, you may want to try out a couple of SEO tactics so you at least know enough to be dangerous. Keep reading for everything you need to know.
Does Google even know you exist? You need to find out. That’s going to be step one in EVERY financial advisor SEO strategy.
Here’s a quick, non-technical way to figure it out:
If you see results from your site, that’s good. It means Google has found and indexed some of your pages. And it suggests you LIKELY (but not definitely) don’t have an issue with crawling or indexing that would prevent Google from displaying you in search results.
If you DON’T see any results from your site, you’ve got trouble. That could be thanks to one of the following technical SEO problems:
I’m assuming here that you’re NOT national and that you serve a particular city, county, or state. If that’s true, then you need to embrace local SEO.
Local SEO is all about ranking in Google Maps, showing up in regular search results for “local” search queries, and getting your Google Business Profile to display when local people search for financial services.
It all starts with your Google Business Profile:
Specifically, you need to claim it, fill out EVERY piece of information, post on it regularly, get and respond to reviews, and keep all your info up to date.
That’s a start.
Then, you need to target local keywords with your website content. Keywords like:
Do that (and keep at it) and you’ll see your local rankings begin to climb. But make no mistake:
Local SEO is EXTREMELY competitive in the financial services space. You’re fighting an uphill battle here.
Which is why so many people in your position hire a financial services SEO firm.
Backlinks are links on other websites pointing to yours. You need them. And you need more than you think.
Why?
Because you’re in the financial services industry. And that’s one of the most competitive industries in the world for backlinks.
Think about it:
You’ve got TONS of competitors. They’re all getting backlinks.
You’ve got TONS of competitors that are MUCH bigger than you. They’re getting even more backlinks.
Then you have giant financial websites — NerdWallet, Credit Karma, etc. — that are scooping up ALL of the best backlinks.
So, you’re going to need to be pretty aggressive here. This is easily one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive parts of SEO for financial advisors.
Here are some backlink building methods to try:
Those are all unique disciplines that require years of practice and experience before you get good at them. Which is why so many people pay for link building for financial advisors.
Much of SEO comes back to content. Content is what you feed the Google beast to keep it happy (and rewarding you with traffic from potential clients).
So, you’re going to need to create it. And you’re going to need to leverage your financial expertise to do so.
Content breaks down mostly to blog posts and landing pages.
Blog posts are typical web articles attempting to rank for a specific keyword related to financial planning.
Landing pages are sales pages, essentially. They describe and sell your financial planning or advising services.
You need both. And you need to make them great.
Why great?
Because great is what moves the needle with both your potential clients and Google itself.
Your potential clients want a helpful financial professional who knows their stuff. You can convince them YOU are that professional with great content.
Google wants to serve the very best content to its users. That’s its goal, although it often fails. Still, create great content, and you give yourself a MUCH better chance of ranking where you need to to grow your business.
On-page SEO is what you do ON your webpages to make them perform better in search engines.
That includes optimizing:
And much more. It’s a grind, honestly. But you’ve got to do it.
My advice (if you’re not going to hire an agency like UppercutSEO to do it for you):
Make it a routine. Each time you publish a new page or post about some financial services keyword, go and do all the on-page stuff just to make sure it’s done.
Don’t save it for later. Google doesn’t like that.
Speaking of content and on-page SEO, both of those disciplines come down to financial planning services keywords.
In other words:
You’re going to need to FIND keywords related to your business.
Then you’re going to need to create great content targeting each one. Then you’re going to need to optimize all those on-page SEO bells and whistles so that they include and/or target those keywords.
That means putting your keywords in your content, your header tags, title tags, meta descriptions, and so on.
But it’s more than that.
It’s also about addressing search intent. This is easily one of the most important aspects of financial planning SEO.
It’s simple: Search intent is what the Google user intended to see or find when they searched a particular keyword.
If a Google user searches “financial planner miami,” the intent is to find financial planners in Miami.
So, you wouldn’t target that keyword with content titled “Why Hire a Financial Planner in Miami.” Because the user is past the “why” stage and onto the hiring stage.
Of course, search intent can go a lot deeper than that. But you get the idea.
If you already have a website for your financial services business, do yourself a favor and go to PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free page speed measuring tool from Google.
Get the URLs for your homepage and a few other key pages on your site. And enter them into the tool one by one.
You’ll see something like this:
Most people REALLY don’t like what they see there. And for good reason.
Website speed affects not just how your potential clients experience your site, but how GOOGLE views your site.
That means page speed is an important consideration for financial planner SEO.
You’re likely going to need to speed it up. And I’m sorry to say that’s a pretty technical endeavor.
So this is a decision point:
Try to improve your page speed yourself, or contact my team and let us take care of it.
Your call, but I know enough financial professionals to know that you absolutely DO NOT have time for option one.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. It’s a guideline that Google gives to human reviewers of its search results.
They use this framework to judge the quality of search results. And they apply that judgment EXTRA carefully to sites in the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) niches.
Bad news: Those YMYL niches include finance.
That means you need to showcase your E-E-A-T in order to give your content the best chance of dominating in the Google rankings.
How do you do that? Try this:
Free tip: You can’t say your SEO content is financial advice. It’ll get you in trouble.
But I’m pretty comfortable giving you this little financial tip:
If you invest in UppercutSEO’s services, you’re going to rank better. You’re going to get more clients. And you’re likely to see your revenue climb as a result.
Sound good? Good. All you have to do is claim your FREE SEO dashboard or contact me to schedule a meeting.
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