SEO can be a confusing subject for financial advisors. There is a lot of jargon, multiple moving parts and constant technology updates. Here, I look at SEO for Financial Advisors: the basics and bust some common myths about search engine optimisation.
What is SEO?
SEO refers to “search engine optimisation”, which is the practice of using certain tactics to improve your website’s visibility in search engines like Google. The aim is to generate more organic traffic (i.e. not from paid ads) from these channels and gain more leads.
What is SEO for a website?
SEO is, ultimately, about gaining more qualified organic traffic to your website. This means that search engines like Google pay close attention to websites before placing – and ordering – their content before users in search engine results.
Therefore, a big part of financial SEO involves doing regular, “on-site” optimisation to make sure your website is ticking the right boxes for Google. For instance, many years ago website owners used to stuff their blog posts full of keywords. This often used to be effective in getting the attention of Google and Bing, who would then rank the content higher up in search results.
Today, however, this approach harms your SEO and so you need to periodically check your SEO content to make sure it sounds “natural” and is not going to risk a slap on the wrist from Google.
SEO for a website involves multiple activities and efforts including alt tags for images, writing meta descriptions for pages, and providing appropriate links within your website content.
How to get started with SEO
If you have a website for your financial firm, then you could “start” your SEO right away simply by writing a blog. However, you likely want to make sure that any effort you put into your SEO strategy is going to be effective. This is why an SEO plan is helpful.
A good place to start, therefore, is to run an “SEO audit” of your financial website. How is it currently performing? Here, you can check your Google Analytics reports to investigate how much organic traffic you are already getting, and how engaged it is.
Can you identify any trends? In particular, is your organic traffic holding steady over time, rising or decreasing? Also, which pages are these people mostly visiting? It might be that certain blog posts are very popular and driving a lot of traffic.
This investigation can help uncover useful information about how to develop your SEO strategy. For instance, if 50% or more of your organic traffic is being driven by 2 blog posts, then you might want to consider starting a weekly blog to help “diversify”. After all, if a Google update suddenly results in one (or both) of these pages getting pushed down the search engine rankings, your organic traffic is likely to plummet along with it.
I hope that you have found this post on SEO for Financial Advisors: the basics useful.
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