Financial Advisor: Beginners Guide to Local SEO-Veriday Blog

Local SEO is one of the most important (and free!) online activities that you can do when building an online presence for your business. As a Financial Advisor, it is critical that you are found by your local market. By searching just one phrase, “financial advisors”, Google will output a map with all the local Financial Advisors’ business that have taken the steps to set up their business using online Google tools. Bonus: it shows up at the very top too!

The statistics for local search alone are a reason to put in the effort to improve your local SEO. In Hubspot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics, the numbers reflect how local SEO optimization can give your business an edge:

72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles. (WordStream, 2016)
30% of mobile searches are related to a location. (Google, 2016)
28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (Google, 2016)
Local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within one day. (Google, 2014)
78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases. (Search Engine Land, 2014)

To help you get started on local SEO, we’ve compiled a small beginners guide to help boost your Advisory business online.

Step 1: Get your business onto Google My Business.

What is Google My Business? Google My Business is a service offered by Google that helps connect businesses and organizations to individuals. It provides a consistent user experience across all of Google’s key search related applications and across all devices like smartphones, tablets and desktops.

The “Google My Business” service includes Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Pages. For more information on what each service is, click here.

As for how to get your business onto Google My Business, first verify your business within Google My Business. It may take 1-2 weeks but it will give you access to many more features to help get your business into the forefront.

Simply fill out your information through this service to get your business onto Google. The more information, the better! That way your business is better categorized and appears in more searches. Another important part of Google My Business is to get your business onto Google Maps. For a more in depth look at Google Maps, click here.

Google may be the king of search, but forgetting about other channels can reduce the amount of consumers that can find you. Remember Bing Places for Business!

Step 1.5: Create a Facebook and Yelp page

This is much easier to do and only takes a few minutes to get up and running! Don’t forget to take good photos that show off both the exterior and interior of your business.

Step 2: Include consistent information on Google, Bing, Yelp, and Facebook (and any other channels that I haven’t included)

Much like having your information on as many search engines as possible, having consistent information across the many channels that your business could be on allows all potential customers to reach you effectively. Having different information across these platforms leads to an inconsistent and unprofessional image.

Step 3: Get your customers to leave reviews!

Ask your happy customers to leave reviews – the more real reviews, the better ranking you will get locally. You can do this in many ways, for example, you can include a widget on your website to allow them to submit a review easily.

Getting genuine and consistent reviews helps your business stand out online since it indicates a high quality business. After all, 88% of consumers read reviews to determine the quality of a local business meaning reviews are regarded as highly influential in consumer’s buying decisions.

As a Financial Advisor, many of your previous clients may have come from word of mouth. However, for the digitally savvy generations, being findable online is crucial. These days, only 49% of Millennials trust recommendations from family and friends, but, instead, they trust multiple customer reviews found on the internet. The easier it is to find your local business and see local reviews, the more likely they will be to choose you as a Financial Advisor!