A comprehensive audit of your financial advisor blog will enhance the content, spurring that much more traffic to the full scope of your online footprint. This spike in online traffic will hopefully increase leads and contacts to your financial advisory firm and subsequent conversions into paying clients.
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There is no reason to be intimidated by the prospect of auditing your blog. This process is not as complex as most financial advisors assume. Once your advisor blog audit is complete, you can sit back and relax knowing your blog will bring that much more traffic to your website, resulting in a meaningful uptick in new leads, contacts, and clients.
Review Your Existing Blog Posts
All too often, financial advisors are in a rush to fill their blog with a steady flow of new articles only to lose sight of the quality of those posts. Take a little bit of time to read through your latest blog entries. Consider whether these posts provide meaningful value to your target audience.
Determine whether the posts are properly aligned with your business model. Think about whether it is possible to enhance the quality of your blog posts to provide your target clients with even more value to develop name recognition, rapport, and a meaningful process for winning their business.
A review of your current blog entries identifies:
- Low-quality posts
- Outdated contests/giveaways
- 4040 error pages
- Service guides/reviews that are no longer relevant
Enhance the quality of your blog content and your rankings on the uber-important search engine results pages (SERPs) will gradually increase. This spike in organic traffic will connect your firm to even more local clients, ultimately helping you improve your bottom line as time progresses.
Tap Into the Power of a Blog Auditing Tool
Make use of a blog auditing tool and this process will prove to be that much easier and faster. There are several blog auditing tools available, including Google Analytics. These tools can save you time and make this complicated project as simple as possible.
Mind Those URLs
Truly comprehensive financial advisor blog audits require the transfer of blog URLs to a spreadsheet for analytical purposes. Your blog’s sitemap conveniently lists the URLs. Once the URLs are added to a spreadsheet, the next step is to catalog them into specific categories such as:
- Date of publication/modification
- Word count
- Author
- Content-type
- Content format
From here, you can shift your focus to data points. The most important data points are:
- The average amount of time spent on each page
- Conversion data
- Inbound links
- The number of comments
- The page bounce rate
- Page title
- Meta description
- Target keywords
Furthermore, Google Analytics will display your metrics such as conversions and bounce rates. Create a column for each data point, input the data and begin the analysis component of your blog audit.
Data Analysis
Comprehensive data analysis provides a clear picture of your blog’s performance. The best way to analyze the data listed above is to rank each with a score. The top-performing metrics are graded with an “A” while the worst-performing ones receive an “F.” Such ratings ultimately reveal how your blog should be improved as time progresses.
As an example, if your blog is receiving considerable traffic yet your posts are not being shared on social media, it is a clue you need to zero in on creating more viral content. If your bounce rate is high, it is a sign you are not providing your audience with material that piques their unique interest. The overarching goal of such an in-depth analysis is to determine if it is prudent to keep specific blog posts, update them with better content or completely eliminate them.
Blog Posts Worth Keeping
Only keep blog posts that have performed well and still prove relevant. Furthermore, this is your opportunity to highlight blog posts that outperform the rest and duplicate their format, features and strategic content approach to subsequent blog posts for optimal reader engagement.
Update and Delete Your Blog Posts as Appropriate
In some cases, simply updating the blog post with relevant content to replace the outdated content will suffice. However, it is inevitable some blog posts will turn out to be duds. Posts that have a comparably high bounce rate, low share rate, and short session duration should be deleted as they won’t help in your overarching goal of converting interested locals into clients who pay their hard-earned money for your financial advisor advice and services.
The “Small Stuff” of Your Blog Posts Matters
The subtleties of your blog posts are particularly important. Though responding to reader comments and questions posted beneath your posts might seem fairly minor, taking the time to interact with your blog readers has the potential to lead to customer acquisition at a comparably low cost. Acquire these customers with timely responses to inquiries and comments and they just might refer your financial advisor services to their friends, co-workers and others.
Do not assume you or your staff caught every single blog comment. There is a good chance you or your staff overlooked numerous comments and questions posted to your blog as the typical workday is quite hectic. Spend the little bit of time necessary to respond to these overlooked questions/comments and the heightened engagement will ameliorate the challenge of customer acquisition.
Review Links and CTAs
Even something as subtle as reviewing the links used in your blog posts to ensure they are still functional, relevant and current will help keep your blog content fresh. Take the extra step of reviewing your blog posts’ calls to action (CTAs). Make sure the phone number, email address and links to online contact forms are functional and accurate. This way, those who find your blog posts through online searches will see updated information that is thorough and accurate in all regards.
