Blogging with the overarching purpose of connecting your financial advisory firm with new prospects has quickly become a critical art form that is being practiced by more financial advisors. Provide informative content laden with keywords, key phrases, and local information and your blog will prove to be a central component of your inbound marketing effort.
However, if you are like many financial advisors, you may not know where to start. Or, you are tied down providing information and services to current clients.
Let’s take a look at the best approach that ensures the time and effort you are able to invest in your financial advisor blog will produce meaningful connections with your target audience(s).
Embrace the Opportunity to Blog
Many financial advisors fail to blog because they assume their writing skills are not up to par. However, the little-known truth is blogging is more about providing informative content geared toward search engine optimization than writing like a skilled, published author. Even if you are strictly a numbers person, your insight can still be valuable that benefits hundreds or thousands of investors..
If you genuinely detest writing, consider outsourcing the work to a digital marketing agency that can write, edit, and optimize the content for you. The agency’s role is to get more visitors to your website so it can convert them into qualified leads. Above all, financial advisor blog content should be viewed as an opportunity to expand your reach in a way that builds your credibility as a knowledgeable expert in your field.
The Best Financial Advisor Blogs are Written Specifically for a Target Audience
Your financial advisory firm’s blog should be geared toward those who can benefit from your value offering as opposed to industry colleagues. Keep this target audience in mind when crafting your blog posts. This is your opportunity to address your audience’s pain points and provide details about a solution that describes the merits of your financial advisory firm’s value proposition and you will gradually expand your audience and improve your results.
Tailor your blog content to those who can benefit from your services and you will find they respond positively to your words by visiting your website, checking out your social media profiles, and reaching out directly to your office to learn more about your services.
Clarity and Cogency
Most people will read 500-1,000 words of a blog post and begin to lose interest. In fact, some people simply scan through content as quickly as possible, attempting to get the drift of the blog post without investing too much time. Present information in a clear and concise manner and your message will make the intended impact.
Alternatively, if you were to invest your time creating blog posts that have several thousand words, you would find few people make it to the end, instead opting to divert their attention to another internet opportunity to learn more about specific financial topics and professionals. The goal is for your content to be short enough that it is not difficult to make it to the call-to-action at the end of the piece. Keep it short, simple, and to-the-point and your audience will respond by reaching out to your financial advisory firm for more information.
Write With a Purpose
It is a mistake to generate blog posts simply to add content to your blog. Though frequent posting is important for search engine optimization (SEO), this does not excuse posting a blog about any old topic simply to shift attention to your blog. The moral of this story is to blog with a purpose. Think about the problems and concerns of your target audience and create blog content with that information in mind.
The overarching purpose of blog posts is to convince the readers to heed your call-to-action through savvy financial advisor digital marketing. It will also help to add social share options to your blog posts so readers can post your blog entries to their own social media platforms. Take the extra step of adding a blog subscription in the call-to-action and your subscriber base will gradually expand.
Every Blog Post Should Have an SEO Focus
If your blog posts do not contain strategic keywords, key phrases, and local information, it will prove difficult for the content to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Do some research to identify the keywords optimal for your online content. Use H1/H2 title tags, include a meta-description, and be mindful of your keyword saturation rate, also referred to as the keyword density rate.
The optimal keyword density rate is between 0.5% and 2%. Adhere to this keyword density rate and your financial advisor blog posts will stand a much better chance of ranking high on the SERPs when your target audience searches for those specific words and phrases.
Including backlinks to your financial advisory firm’s website also helps improve your SEO. Including such internal links signifies to Google and other search engines that your online content is important. Mix in a few external links and Google’s crawl of your site to properly assign link value will prove that much more beneficial. Just be sure the links you add are to related websites.
SEO extends to the use of alt tags. Such tags should be added to all pictures and graphics used on your website. Fail to include alt tags and the pictures and graphics you add to your blog might not show up in image searches. Alt text bolsters your financial advisor blog’s message, enhances its findability on the web, and ultimately boosts your SEO.
In particular, Google Places emphasizes alt text so be sure it describes exactly what the image is really all about and how it pertains to the rest of the text in your blog post.
Focus on Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that holds the same value across posterity and will continue to generate traffic far into the future. In fact, some evergreen content generates more traffic down the line than when it was initially published. This type of content is valuable as it works on your behalf well after you publish your blog posts. Evergreen content enhances your SEO push, steering traffic to your financial advisory firm’s website for years or even decades to come.
Evergreen content is truly timeless, meaning it will continue to help your site rank highly on the SERPs as time progresses. So don’t write time-sensitive financial advisor blog content that won’t prove valuable to your target audience down the line. Write truly timeless content that will improve informative today, tomorrow, and years down the line and your evergreen blog posts will give your financial advisory firm a much-needed SEO boost.
