For many financial industry firms, their financial advisor websites have grown and evolved from a small part of their overall marketing strategy to a major component that drives visibility, credibility, and website traffic. Serving as a hub for your online activities, your financial advisor website has never been more important.
However, based on your extraordinary amount of competition, how can your financial advisor website content hope to stand out? While it would be great if simply building a high-quality, relevant, competitive website with relevance was enough to drive traffic to the right websites. Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case.
In the highly competitive digital search space of today, it takes a combination of high-quality content and a strong SEO strategy to see your financial advisor website achieve higher rankings in the search engines.
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Reason #1: Content
While Google is known for its many platforms and services, it is first and foremost a search engine. As such, Google is consistently focused on the delivery of the most accurate and relevant search results in the shortest amount of time.
It all comes down to the quality and relevance of content. If your financial advisor content isn’t optimized for SEO, it won’t be able to compete with the other online content providers, in particular, the content produced by your primary competitors.
How to Fix It:
Start by performing a Google search for the information and topics featured on your financial advisor website and review the top-ranking organic results (i.e., not the “sponsored” listings at the very top, which are paid ads). Then, you should review the current content on these sites. Think of it as market research.
Do you notice anything different about the quality or quantity of their content or perhaps both? How does it compare to the investor content or your financial advisor website? Is the content easy to find on their websites? All of these factors impact the visibility of financial advisor websites on the Internet.
Reason #2: Site Speed and Quality
The digital realm moves at a rapid pace because investors have so many options at their fingertips. The impatient investors will feel most comfortable with the financial advisor websites that meet their expectations for speed, quality, credibility, and transparency.
These “bounces” can also happen when the website isn’t easy to navigate, or the information is not what they are looking for.
All these things can end up creating a bad user experience and damage your financial advisor website’s SEO results.
How to Fix It:
There are many online tools available that will run what is known as a “site speed test.” This test evaluates several factors contributing to the load speed of your financial advisor website and gives it an overall score or grade. Depending on the service provider, you may also get a detailed report that includes a breakdown of what is slowing the page down and even more granular data.
These detailed reports are often part of a paid plan or subscription, but many providers offer free basic site speed tests that can still be very insightful for understanding why your financial advisor website isn’t ranking well.
Reason #3: Not a Mobile First Design
In the early days of mobile technology, it would have been hard to imagine how far smartphones and tablets have come in a relatively short time. And with these advancements have come changes in the way people communicate, work, shop, and manage every other aspect of their lives that requires information, services, and products.
Because of this, websites have had to adapt to display information on different screen sizes and create an appropriate user experience for both those accessing their content from mobile devices, as well as desktops and laptops. This is known as mobile responsive design. And for a time, it was enough. But it’s not enough anymore to build a website with mobile friendly design features. This is an important factor of the online experience, and this can affect your financial advisor website’s search rankings.
How to Fix It:
It’s time to make the move toward a mobile-first design for your financial advisor website. By delivering content in a way that visitors can best experience it, you’re not only helping your visitors but also improving your SEO rankings because you are more user-friendly.
Reason #4: Lack of Credibility and/or Brand Awareness
With recent algorithm updates, Google has made no secret that it wants to keep fraudulent and misleading content out of search results. This makes it more important than ever to ensure your financial advisory firm’s online reputation is a positive one. Additionally, it’s essential to form brand awareness and recognition to help build a positive online reputation.
How to Fix It:
Google wants to find great content just as much as it wants to eradicate the bad. And it wants good websites to be recognized for their high-quality content and credibility. As part of this effort, they have what’s known as E-E-A-T rankings.
These rankings factor in your financial advisor website’s “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness”. A positive E-E-A-T ranking can help boost credibility with Google and thus improve your financial advisor website’s search rankings.
Reason #5: Getting Caught Unprepared
Google makes changes. A lot of changes. And if you’re not factoring in future updates in your financial advisor website SEO strategy, it can cause issues with search rankings almost overnight. Preparation can go a long way toward preventing headaches for your financial advisor website’s search rankings.
How to Fix It:
Without a crystal ball, it’s impossible to know what’s next. And what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. However, the key is to be prepared to pivot your financial advisor website’s SEO plan in case of a big change in Google’s algorithms.
Case in point: in March 2024, Google released a major core update that essentially set the bar for website quality higher than ever before. This had negative consequences for thousands of websites that were not prepared or able to adapt/update quickly. Some other notable past and future changes from Google include Semantic Search, and the forthcoming SGE (Search Generative Experience) update that is currently being tested.
