When advisors start their own business, attracting clients and web traffic becomes a priority. Increasing your profile often means increasing your online presence.
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Every day, hundreds of people search the Internet for a financial planner. They can type “advisor near me” or narrow the search by being more specific.
The challenge for advisors is to increase the odds that a potential client will find them. This involves a deep dive into web analytics and search engine optimization.
For techies, it’s relatively easy to build your website to increase your search rankings. But for many advisors, the process involves a steep learning curve.
“It’s been a huge effort,” said Cecil Staton, a certified financial planner at Arch Financial Planning in Athens, Ga. As he seeks to serve clients across the country, he is particularly keen to strengthen his new company’s web presence.
Staton credits his membership in the XY Planning Network and the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors with helping him gain access to resources that bring more web traffic to his new business. Their online directories of fee-only advisors and other services make startups easier for consumers to find.
“Both have helped boost my local SEO rankings,” he said. Other members have also shared tips to help Staton expand its visibility on the web.
For example, an XYPN member introduced Staton to Wealthtender, a search tool that helps consumers find advisors. For a monthly fee, Wealthtender raises Staton’s digital profile by creating content that highlights her practice, which in turn increases her search rankings.
Digital Web Traffic Tools for DIY Consultants
When starting their own business, many advisors want to control their expenses. Hiring a digital marketing company to create and implement a comprehensive SEO strategy can be expensive.
When Fadi Issa set up in early 2021, he considered hiring experts to drive leads to his website. But he soon changed his mind.
“My biggest mistake, especially from a timing perspective, was trying to find and hire people who could help my website drive traffic by doing more SEO work,” said Issa, who runs. Boardwalk Asset Management in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I realized that a lot of these companies are very expensive and make things that you can learn very quickly.”
Given her lack of experience with website design and digital marketing, Issa raced to catch up on generating web traffic. Researched how to increase online visibility and optimize your digital front to impress website visitors.
He soon identified three questions to guide his efforts: What tools can I use to drive more people to my website? What factors make search engines rank a website higher? How can I track web traffic to my website and user activity once they arrive?
To get started, he learned how to use the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads. He also became familiar with Google Analytics to monitor user behavior on his website.
Simple steps like writing blogs and tagging them with keywords improved their results. Google Search Console allowed you to analyze user activity more closely, comparing the number of impressions (when a visitor sees an ad) to the number of clicks on that ad.
Choose the right keywords for web traffic
Researching which keywords would boost her SEO ranking, then integrating those keywords and phrases into her website (and including them in the headers of each page), also worked well for Issa.
Some lessons took longer to learn, Issa says. For months, he published blogs, but noticed that Google did not add them to its search engine.
“Sometimes Google doesn’t crawl my website, which means my new blogs aren’t searchable,” he said. Eventually, he discovered that he could submit a free request through Google Search Console to index his content so that users could find it more easily.
Some advisors invest in “paid search,” which is paying search engines to advertise their website above others. Advisors who pay to appear at the top of the list report mixed results. And some do-it-yourselfers, like Issa, gain traction organically.
The trick for advisors is to lace their websites with keywords and phrases that match what their target audience might type into a search engine. A common SEO metric is the amount of competition for a specific search term to rank at the top.
Staton works with dentists. He has found that while there is limited search volume for advisors who work with dentists, he also sees an opening to attract more potential clients to his niche.
“Because there’s not a lot of competition, there’s a lot of opportunity to rank for keywords,” Staton said.
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