Quality content on your financial advisor website is a high priority if you want to stay relevant in the digital space. Without a solid presence on various channels and platforms, it’s hard to compete with other firms for new clients and maintain current clients. But even with the right content, your financial advisor website won’t do much for your online presence if no one is visiting.
That’s where digital marketing for financial advisors comes into play, specifically SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Optimizing content, keywords and phrases, images, and other aspects of your financial advisor website can help search engines like Google send more visitors looking for content like yours. While there are many aspects of SEO, internal linking is a good place for financial advisors to start.While it may seem self-indulgent to link from your website to other content on your website, it has many benefits for the overall user experience (UX) and SEO. This is known as internal linking. For website visitors, relevant internal links help them navigate your financial advisor website and guide them to the topics they’re most interested in.
For example, suppose someone clicks on your website after searching for “estate planning basics” and ends up on an “Estate Planning” blog post. In that case, they may also seek information on designating beneficiaries. By linking to content about beneficiaries on your financial advisor website, you’re giving them more relevant information while increasing their time on your website.
Read on for internal link strategies and how to incorporate them with your existing content. Your internal links, just like all other content on your financial advisor website, should be:
- Useful
- Relevant
- Balanced
- SEO focused
Start with a good content foundation
Internal linking (and SEO, for that matter) is about getting the right content to the right person at the right time. None of this can be achieved without quality foundational content, sometimes referred to as “cornerstone” or “flagship” content. This content includes the main pages of your site rather than blog posts.
Without this robust and SEO-optimized content as a base for your website, it’s less likely that you’ll end up ranking high enough on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for an internal linking strategy to have much of an impact.
Categorize your content
Start by having an organized content structure. That means all content on individual website pages and your financial advisor blog should be categorized by topic. This can be done in the CMS (Content Management System), where changes to your website are made.
By labeling content by topic (like retirement, market commentary, college, etc.), you can easily link to and from these pages within your financial advisor website.
Link main content in prominent locations
While linking specific content within posts is one aspect of internal linking, it’s also beneficial for SEO to link your main financial advisor content on the home page – preferably at the top within navigation menus. This content should be evergreen, such as the about page, financial advising basics, FAQs, etc.
Balance internal and external links
There’s no question that internal links are essential and even vital to SEO success for websites; however, they shouldn’t be the only types of links. External links are links that send visitors to another website. While sending visitors away from your website may seem counterintuitive, this helps with SEO.
External links should point to trusted content vetted, deemed reliable, and relevant to your financial advisor website visitors. As a bonus, adding external links can help build relationships with partners within the industry, resulting in them adding external links to your website in return. In short, Google likes to see internal links but doesn’t only want to see internal links.
Don’t overdo it
Too much of anything isn’t good, and the same goes for internal links. It’s essential to strike the right balance between offering relevant links to related content and not cluttering your content with so many connections that it’s distracting and hard to read.
Update/add internal links to existing content to newer content
Internal links can (and should) be added or updated as you add new content to your financial advisor website. Adding links to new content within older but still timely content shows Google that you’re consistently producing content and bringing attention to some of your existing content.
Internal links should be relevant
Adding internal links without considering the content is equivalent to keyword stuffing, and Google does not like it. Simply put, don’t just use internal links for the sake of linking. Make sure a link is relevant and will enhance visitors’ experience on your website rather than muddle it with irrelevant links.
Take advantage of your most popular content
If you’re utilizing any tool to monitor your financial advisor website, you already know your most popular content. Using internal linking, you can get even more mileage out of the content you already created with little effort! It’s like they say, “work smarter, not harder.”
Use topic clusters
While this strategy may take a little more time than simply adding links here and there, it’s a solid method of internal linking that can help your visitors get the most out of their experience on your website. This approach is creating content, such as a blog post, built around internal links instead of the other way around. By strategically crafting content that will make room for relevant internal links, you’re grouping “clusters” of content that flow naturally into one another and make for some compelling content that search engines love.
Keep up with SEO trends
As with most things digital, SEO is ever evolving. This means your financial advisor website, content, internal linking, and overall SEO strategy will need to be evaluated regularly to keep up with new trends and best practices. If this sounds like a time commitment you just can’t make, digital marketing for financial advisors is what we provide here at PDM.
USE THIS DEFINITIVE GUIDE FOR FINANCIAL ADVISOR SEO TO GET STARTED.