10 Tips to Optimize your Advisor Website: Part 1

Investopedia, Fidelity, Investment Quorum and Streamline Financial Services. What do these financial advisory sites have in common? A strong optimization and lead generation strategy.

As a Financial Advisor, you want your website to be optimized for search engines so that you can be easily found by prospects. The last thing you want is to spend hours on end creating website content only for it to go unnoticed.

Here are 10 ways to optimize your website’s content using SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

Add Call-to–Actions (CTAs)

A CTA is a button, link, or text that can be used to collect important information from prospects and aid in converting them into warm leads or clients. Some effective CTA’s include:

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CTAs aim to push your prospects to share their information with you. This way, you are able to directly communicate with them. For better results, make sure your CTA stands out. Quicksprout does a great job with this with their large and colourful buttons below:

Use Headlines

Headlines are your attention grabber. If your headlines are ordinary and don’t spark curiosity, then it is likely that traffic may be steered away, right to another Advisor website. The key is to use adjectives, numbers, and make bold statements. “10 reasons to retire right now.”

Use a Meta Description

Headlines grab your audience’s attention while meta descriptions give your prospects more insights into what your webpage is all about. They provide a concise preview of a website page’s content, and are used on search engine result pages.

Meta descriptions must be short, unique and relevant. It is beneficial to include custom meta descriptions that instills curiosity in your audience, convincing them to click on your website in their search results.

Choose Keywords wisely

As a Financial Advisor, using relevant keywords is vital to driving your target audience to your website. These keywords should not be general, broad, misleading or overused. You should use specific keywords, and use them in as many ways as possible, when relevant. Some great areas to use your keywords would be:

Title tags
Sub-headers
Links
Alternate texts (images)
Content

The use of relevant keywords can assist in increasing Google’s ranking when they assess your website. Use keywords appropriately and don’t overuse them as Google may penalize you for “keyword stuffing,” which may decrease your ranking. Keyword stuffing refers to when websites cram as many words as possible into a webpage’s text without intent to provide useful information to the reader.

5. Optimize Images by using ALT tags

Researchers found that coloured visuals increase a person’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80% (Xerox). Using images will enhance a viewer’s experience on your website and make your pages look more appealing. With this in mind, it is vital to include alternative text tags, also known as an ALT tag. These tags are used on images with no links to provide information about the image when a viewer hovers their cursor over it. The tags help increase your SEO, overall search ranking and makes your website more accessible.

As Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s Web spam team once said, “SEO is like a resume. You polish it so you have your best foot forward.”

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For more ways to optimize your Financial Advisor website for search engines, check out part 2 of the series.