Blogging isn’t the only ingredient in a financial adviser’s successful SEO strategy. However, it’s certainly an important part of it.
Regular, original and relevant content is a great way to keep your financial website fresh. It shows search engines like Google that your business alive and active, and that it has value to offer.
Provided you are meeting Google’s ever-changing rules about search engine optimisation (SEO), you stand a good chance of helping your website to rank higher in your target market’s search engine results.
Here at MarketingAdviser, our team specialise in digital marketing and SEO for financial planners, and other small financial services firms. In this article, we’ll be sharing some of the core components we recommend in order to boost your blog’s SEO performance.
We hope you find this content useful. If you would like to find out more or discuss your financial SEO strategy with us, then we invite you to get in touch to arrange a free consultation.
#1 Keyword Targeting
In all likelihood, you won’t want your financial website to appear in every set of search engine results. Rather, you should seek to raise your brand’s presence and profile in relevant Google results, used by your target market. Ideally, you should try to target keywords:
- With a higher level of monthly search volume.
- Which will face less fierce competition from rival websites.
- Which show a higher level of user intent (i.e. the search query suggests they want your help, rather than just information).
You can use a tool like the Google Ads Keyword Planner to get started with drawing up your keyword list.
Once you have a list of 10-20 keywords to target with your content strategy, it’s time to think about some topics for your blogs which could target these keywords.
For instance, if you have “pension planner Lincoln” on your list then it might make sense to devote at least one blog towards that keyword. An example might be a short biographical piece on your website blog, explaining how you came to be a pension planner and how you came to be based in Lincoln.
Try not to target too many keywords in the same blog post. However, it can be a powerful strategy to target multiple keywords which are similar in make-up, which show the same user intent, and which group around a single theme.
#2 Length & Layout
You cannot hope to write a 100-word blog post and expect it to immediately sail to the top of Google search. Financial SEO requires more “meat” than this, which means increasing your word count.
A good guide to aim for is 1,000 words per article. In some cases, you might want to aim for 2,000 words or more. However, the article should not simply be very long just for the sake of it. Your readers will detect that you are straining the subject, and will eventually leave the page in frustration or boredom.
Rather, try to think of as many questions as you can, which your readers are likely to have on the subject in question. See if you can answer them all whilst maintaining flow in the blog post. Cover the topic as comprehensively as you can, offering the reader a good deal of value.
Of course, long-form content poses the danger of overwhelming the reader. So break it up with various devices to make it more digestible. Here are some ideas:
- Use images and bullet points
- Use headings and sub-headings
- Use images, gifs and videos.
- Keep sentences short and easy to understand.
#3 Include the “Technical Financial SEO Bits”
In addition to the above, you will need to ensure that your blog goes through various items on your “on-site SEO checklist”, to make sure it ticks as many of Google’s boxes as possible. In particular:
- Make sure all images (including the featured image) have a strong alt tag.
- Make sure you have a strong, click-inducing title (containing your main target keyword).
- Try to include a keyword in at least one sub-heading.
- Include at least one link to a relevant, primary page on your website.
- Include at least one external link to an authoritative, relevant source.
- Include a meta title and description, so users can quickly see what your post is about when it is previewed in their Google search results.
- Include an effective Call to Action in your copy.
#4 Promotion
Once you’ve gone through all of the above, that’s still not the end of the story. To get the maximum benefit from your blog post for your financial SEO, you’re going to need to promote it.
There are many reasons for this. First of all, more exposure for your blog post means more website footfall. That’s more traffic for Google to analyse and use to determine your relevance to your target market. Second of all, it increases your chances of getting some valuable backlinks to your content.
A backlink is made when another website links to your content, such as the post you published. This opens up the chance of more traffic coming your way, as readers on this third-party website click on the link and then arrive on your website. In addition, in many cases, Google will see backlinks like these as signatures of your content’s authority.
Essentially, Google looks at the link and thinks:
“Wow. Some strong websites are linking to this financial adviser’s blog posts. People must want to read it, so let’s push it higher up in our search engine results.”
There are a number of marketing tactics which you might use to increase your blog post’s exposure:
- Social media promotion (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook etc.)
- Email marketing, inviting people to read your latest article on X topic.
- Direct outreach to third-party websites, asking them to link to your content.
