Ready to grow your book of business? With SEO for financial advisors, you can reach more people. Many are searching for your services, but they find other advisors. How can you boost your rankings and rise to the top?

To start, let’s look at types of marketing for financial advisors. Then you’ll find out why SEO is a top marketing strategy. For a TLDR; it helps you reach new clients, build trust, and control your brand.

When people think of a financial advisor in your area, your name should be top of mind. You should show up on the first page of Google’s search results. To find out how to do this, we’ll dive into SEO strategies you can use starting today.

SEO for Financial Advisors: Marketing to Build Trust and Clients

Before diving into the SEO strategies, let’s look at different types of marketing. These can all be useful channels for you to acquire clients and improve communications.

Marketing for Financial Advisors: Top 6 Types

Here’s a list of the top marketing for financial advisors.

• Referrals and Word of Mouth
• Paid Advertising
• Search Engine Optimization
• Email Newsletter
• Social Media
• YouTube and Video

Here’s a breakdown of the cost, effort, and payoff time for these types of marketing.

The best sources are referrals and word of mouth. But that takes time to build your network. And no matter how far along, you can pay for leads. However, it’s expensive to set up campaigns and keep them running. Also, the cost of advertising continues to climb.

On top of that, paid ads miss most of your potential clients. With ads, you’ll see “sponsored” or other required disclaimers. And people are learning to avoid ads, with up to 94% of people skipping paid results. Instead, they click on the organic search results.

This is where the best SEO for financial advisors comes into play. With a few great SEO articles, Google will show your site first in the organic listings. You can target keywords based on your city and state. Instead of forcing ads in front of people, they’ll naturally come to you.

Below, you’ll find out how to write great SEO articles for financial advisors. Although, you might consider buying articles from an SEO expert (see offers here). And even better, a writer who knows both SEO and the financial world...

SEO Expert for Financial Advisors

My name is Brian Kehm. I double majored in Finance and Accounting, as well as passed the three CFA exams. It took some time, but I made it through all 6,000 pages of the base study material.

This is what sets me apart from 99% of SEO agencies. They don’t have great writers that know both finance and SEO marketing. They don’t understand fiduciary responsibility, along with legal wording that’s specific to the industry.

I worked for a huge investment newsletter company. I’ve written articles for email lists with over 500,000 subscribers. And in my last three years, I built an SEO department from scratch.

With managing a team of financial writers, I grew one site over 100X. It climbed above 1,000,000 monthly views. To say the least, I’ve gotten to test and see what works with an SEO content strategy.

You can use the same techniques to improve your brand and bring in new clients. It’s also best to start with the low hanging fruit. Who doesn’t want the best bang for your buck? And for most financial advisors, this means targeting local SEO keywords.

Before diving into keyword strategies, here are some useful website notes.

Websites for Financial Advisors: Keep it Simple

Are you with a larger financial company that provides a website? Great... and if not, it doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg. I built this website from scratch. I optimized it for SEO and it’s simple by design. I paid roughly $10 for the first year and the cost shouldn’t climb much in the years ahead.

Most people haven’t built and hosted websites for over 15 years. So, I admit I have a leg up with domain expertise. However, you can easily find a plug-and-play hosting provider. To register a domain and host for your first year, you shouldn’t pay more than $100. Many website builders - Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc. - charge a higher premium. And they can be harder to use compared to free platforms like WordPress. They also come with annoying cross-selling and up-selling... Be wary as they try locking you in with switching costs.

WordPress is free and most hosting providers have an easy set up process. Also, it’s generally best to avoid paid add ons. Stick to the free themes and plugins with great reviews and update history. Maybe I’ll share some guides on this down the road, but back to SEO for financial advisors...

Local SEO for Financial Advisors: The Best SEO Keywords

Let’s use the city of Sioux Falls as an example. People looking for a financial advisor search “financial advisor sioux falls” roughly 320 times a month. These would be great primary keywords to target in an article.

The people searching this are looking to find an advisor. There’s high buyer intent (potential clients). On top of that, we can capture even more searchers by adding secondary keywords. One SEO article could rank for related keywords that include:

• South Dakota
• Investment Advisor`
• RIA
• Wealth Management
• Fiduciary
• Financial Planner

This could push the total monthly search above 1,000. Depending on the keyword competition, one or a few articles might work best.

One of the best ways to find financial advisor keywords is going straight to the source. I’ve used lots of expensive SEO software, but Google autocomplete is the most up-to-date and accurate.

Google has done an excellent job finding what people are searching for. You can start with one or two keywords. From there, you’ll see longer tail keywords that Google finds to be the most useful.

On top of that, there’s another technique to find the best keywords for financial advisors. You can use an asterisk before keywords. This changes the drop down suggestions to show common words before.

You can also use the asterisk between words. Trying a few different combos should give you a good list of keywords. Entering the searches is vital as well. It’s a key step to see what Google is serving up on the first page for each query.

With some searches, Google might have determined searcher intent is different than what you assume. To rank for those keywords, you’ll need to match the content. Also, is Google showing those exact keywords in the results, or synonyms? Best to use what Google is more likely to show to searchers.

SEO Keywords for Financial Advisors: Beyond Local Search

Once you have local SEO articles, it’s good to add more content. This helps show Google that you’re an expert in investing and financial planning. Google takes time to understand your expertise and topics.

For example, if a pet food website published an article on contributing to a 401K, it wouldn’t rank well. Google gives topical authority to sites over time. There are roughly 200 different factors to determine what Google ranks. But content and topics are some of the most important.

Here are some categories to find the SEO keywords for financial advisors.

• Financial Literacy
• How to Guides
• Reviews and Client Testimonials

Creating this supporting content can help show Google (and searchers) that you’re a financial expert. The goal is to make the articles the most useful possible. Deliver as much value up front for readers.

You can also organize articles into trending and evergreen. Trending covers news-worthy topics, while evergreen contain timeless insight. For example, an article on Roth vs. Traditional contributions.

For an evergreen article, you might want a list of common questions (FAQ). If you write it once, you can keep sending it out to help your clients. Instead of answering the same investing questions 100 times, one top-notch article can do it for you. Also, this might not directly target SEO keywords, but it can help support your other content with internal links.

With SEO for financial advisors, you can also target keywords to control your brand. As you grow, people will search your name and reviews. It’s good to monitor your Google Business Profile. But on top of that, review articles can help as well.

Primary Keywords: “[Name/Financial Advisor] Reviews”

This might include a list of your services, and even more useful, testimonials. It’s good to collect and feature real client reviews. In marketing speak, it’s social proof. It can do some heavy lifting with getting new clients.

Financial Content Writing: SEO Guide for Advisors

Now that you’re equipped with the best keywords, it’s time to start writing. Or hold your horses! To write an SEO article that ranks, it’s best to do more research first.

Jump back to Google and search your primary keywords...

Look at the top organic results to see what’s working. There’s no need to recreate the wheel. Instead, use them as a guide. You already know that’s what Google determines is useful. You can pull the best sections from those articles to start building your article. Then add even more value.

One great strategy with SEO for financial advisors, mine the comment sections. Look for common questions and missed subtopics. If one person took the time to ask in comments, probably hundreds of other readers had a similar question. And you can add those to your article.

For the next step, I’ll lay out the entire subhead structure. You’ll want to reuse your primary keywords throughout the subheads, and also the secondary keywords. The article should flow logically with the subheads, and fill in the content from there. People often scan to determine what’s worth reading.

You should space the keywords throughout your article. For a visual, I’ll often use Ctrl+F (Command+F on Mac). This should highlight the word and you can quickly see how it’s spaced out and surrounding keywords.

Here's an example with this article...

Marketing CTA and Copywriting

With every article, it’s good to have a Call-to-Action (CTA). For example, push readers to another related article, or have an email signup. The CTA for this article is a push to our SEO writing services. If you don’t want to research and write your own articles, we can do it for you. And even though this is the best SEO guide for financial advisors, it’s just scratching the surface...

Another top factor to improve your SEO articles are readability statistics. It’s counterintuitive, but writing simply is best. Even with an educated audience, writing at a lower grade level will keep them more engaged. It’s best to avoid industry jargon.

Most people want to use big words to sound smart, but this pushes people away. It’s also harder to write complex topics in a simple way. I’ve seen the impact first hand with millions of readers.

When traveling, I’ll still run into doctors, lawyers, and financial advisors that have read articles I’ve published. To reach that scale, we had a rule of writing at or below the 8th grade reading level. When hiring new interns fresh out of school, they’d often be writing at the 11th or 12th grade levels. It’d take time to retrain them on effective writing habits. Here’s a free tool that you can use to improve your writing. Pro tip, it’s good to keep this in mind when writing emails as well.

Now you’re well equipped to start writing SEO content, or feel free to check out our SEO writing services. You can also use AI writing tools, but be careful. Google is finding ways to detect and downrank AI SEO articles. The articles we deliver won’t be flagged for AI content.

SEO Compounds: Investing for Long-Term Growth

Similar to investing, SEO compounds. It takes time for Google to understand your website and serve up your financial articles. Trust is gained in drips, and Google takes a similar approach. To finish the saying...

Trust is gained in drips, and lost in buckets.

For SEO for financial advisors, it’s also best to avoid taking shortcuts. There are lots of SEO strategies that can help today, but hurt tomorrow. Google keeps updating its algorithms to serve up the most useful content to match searchers’ intent.

As mentioned above, look for the low hanging fruit. A few articles targeting local SEO keywords can be a great place to start.

Another huge benefit of SEO is that you own the content. You can continue to repurpose it down the road. And unlike paid ads, SEO content won’t stop bringing in leads when you stop paying.

As trained financial advisors, we know that the best returns come from playing the long-game. And SEO can be a great marketing tool to build your business.

Best of luck building out your financial advisor content. If you have any questions about SEO, feel free to reach out. And not to beat a dead horse, you might be surprised by our SEO writing services.