Financial advisory services often find themselves looking into SEO as a growth channel. This makes sense, as you’re building a repeatable scalable asset that you can build up with the business (unlike say paid adverts – which turn off as soon as you stop paying).
Businesses with an established search presence are worth more when it comes to selling it. An SEO profile is an asset, in the literal sense.
I used to run SEO for a large fintech website specialising in data for stock market investors – with over 1 million pages in Google and Bing’s indexes. As finance is a huge and complicated market attracting ambitious minds, it follows that SEO in this area is more competitive than normal.
As always you first need to begin with competitive analysis. For financial advisors in the sense of an IFA, I would expect this to be a localised type of search. Contrast that with FinTech products (like Wise.com) where there is no locality to the search.
You can see that, as with a lot of ‘service’ type of searches, people generally want people local to them, probably as it relates to questions of trust. It is the same with high street solicitors, accountants and consultants, even web designers – even though these activities can in principle be provided from anywhere, the market wants local people.
You can verify this by running a competitive analysis of other firms in your area to see what their SEO strategy has been to date, if they have thought about it. We perform competitive analyses as part of our SEO service.
Taking a randomly selected advisor - Amber River - we can see that they rank for the following terms (among hundreds more):
Their search profile looks like a blend of ‘local searches’ (financial advisor cambridge / manchester, etc) and some topical questions - ‘buying a second home’, 'what does ufpls mean', etc.
Generally you would need to identify a hitlist of keywords to try and rank that are within your competitive range based on your existing website profile, and ensure your website is localised to your area so it is understood by search engine crawlers as local to that area.
You then write content for your site matching the keywords researched, and ensure all pages are optimised – all pretty vanilla steps that I’ve written about elsewhere.
The rest of this note will just look at more specific considerations relevant for financial advisors interested in SEO.
Specific SEO Factors for Financial Advisors
First, as a local type of service, you should claim a Google Business & ensure you appear on maps profile. You can claim a Google Business profile here.
Second, for financial matters, Google’s EAT criteria will apply. In brief, for ‘serious’ matters such as health and finance, Google prioritises more strictly content from writers who are trained in their field (often these are professions with a practicing license). This means it is worth linking to your accreditations via your accreditation provider, as well as any other professional profiles (LinkedIn & Twitter perfectly valid - it all helps).
Third, if your area is one in which there are constantly new developments or news, write about them in a timely way (e.g. budget announcements, change to tax codes, HMRC rules and so on). Search engines are happy to prioritise fresh content relating to timely topics. By performing keyword research, among other methods, you can get a sense of what topics people are researching online or would generally be interested in.
We can help with many of these things – get in contact if you’d like to explore investing in SEO for your business.
