It would be nice if simply building a high-quality financial advisor website were enough to get in front of the right audience. In today’s competitive digital environment, it takes a multi-pronged and multi-channel approach to your financial advisor's digital marketing strategy to increase your financial advisor website's visibility. Here are 5 ways to increase the visibility of your financial advisor website.
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1. Content Quality and Diversification
Google plays a huge role in determining which websites and content are “visible” online. This doesn’t mean literally visible — anyone is able to get to you for financial advisor website by entering the URL. But not being “seen” by Google is close to not being online at all. That’s because as the global leader for all things search, Google makes the rules when it comes to what content appears in searches — and what doesn’t.
To be on the winning side of this divide, it comes down to content. Google’s top priority is to deliver the most accurate and relevant search results possible. And to make the cut, your financial advisor website needs to be validated or indexed by Google. The indexing process involves Googlebots scanning your financial advisor content and looking for any red flags that would indicate less than optimal content.
This could be fraudulent websites, all AI-generated content, or anything else that Google determines is not accurate or relevant. Conversely, these Googlebots are also looking for green flags, such as high-quality financial advisor content that is original, relevant and timely. To stay on track with content updates, a best practice is to create a content calendar in advance as your guide.
Additionally, diversifying content is a great way to boost the visibility of your quality financial advisor content. This can be achieved by forming relationships with relevant industry partners and cross promoting each other’s content. This can result in quality backlinks to your financial advisor website and boost credibility and SEO.
2. A Seamless User Experience
One of the keys to increasing your financial advisor website's visibility is by making the experience as seamless as possible, no matter when or how they access it. While many users are reaching for mobile devices to conduct their searches, that doesn’t mean they abandon the desktop experience altogether.
The user experience on your financial advisor website should be a positive one, no matter the device. The current prevailing approach is to create a mobile-first experience and then scale for other environments. This helps optimize the content to be viewed on smaller screens such as smartphones and tablets, while also allowing it to be scaled up to larger devices such as desktop computers.
Other ways to streamline the user experience on your financial advisor website include simple navigation menus, clear CTAs, and fast loading times. Pro tip: unnecessarily large images are often one of the biggest culprits of slow websites. If your financial advisor website could (and should!) be faster, this is a great place to start optimizing to speed things up.
3. Cohesive Branding
While harder to quantify, branding is a vital element of your financial advisory firm’s online presence and overall website visibility. And branding includes so much more than just a logo and font. Branding should encompass a holistic approach to all your financial advisor communications, both on and offline.
This includes, but is not limited to, colors, fonts, images and/or image filters, tone, and even specific words and phrases. By creating a strong branding strategy, it becomes easier for prospects to become familiar with your brand over time. Branding can also convey consistency, which can easily be associated with being reliable and trustworthy.
4. Adding Paid/Promotional Content to the Mix
Once all the above steps have been taken, this is the point where some financial advisory firms want to go a step further to increase the visibility of their website. By utilizing paid content, you’re essentially paying to increase your financial advisor website's visibility, and in less time.
There are many ways to implement paid promotional efforts into your financial advisor digital marketing strategy, from simple Google search and display ads to programmatic platforms that automate advertising across the internet. However, it’s recommended to start small and slow to learn the ins and outs of paid promotion, channel by channel. Also, it’s important to maintain your efforts to organically gain visibility for your financial advisor website while also utilizing paid content. This will help strengthen the result of both efforts.
5. Accurate Measurement and Goal Setting
As with any new endeavor, where to start is dependent on where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you would like to be. After all, it’s hard to know if you won the race when there’s no visible finish line. And while any digital effort, by definition, is cyclical and therefore never-ending, there are still ways to measure performance and benchmarks.
There is a plethora of online analytics platforms available for financial advisors, beginning with Google Analytics which is free all the way up to proprietary enterprise platforms offering more robust tools. Ultimately, it’s up to your financial advisory firm’s individual needs as well as resources to decide which way to go. The important thing is to start measuring and goal-setting as soon as possible.
Utilizing the above strategies, you could start increasing the visibility of your financial advisor website right away. However, that can be easier said than done. While important, gaining visibility for your financial advisor website may simply be something you or your staff don’t have the time to take on. And if not now, then when?
This is where it ends for many financial advisory firms when it comes to increasing the visibility of their websites, and the search rankings show it. Instead of letting your website’s visibility dwindle, bring in reinforcements in the form of a digital marketing partner. Whether jumping in for a single project or serving as an extension of your team, qualified digital experts are ready to help.
