SEO For Financial Planners
SEO for financial planners is when a financial planning or services business applies search engine optimization to their businesses website, with the goal of improving their online position for relevant keywords to their industry.
What is SEO for financial planners?
One of the main things a financial planner business can do to improve their SEO is upgrading the content on their website to give their potential clients a better understanding of what their business does, the services they provide and so on. Upgrading the content also helps search engines understand in more detail what the business does, and help improve their position in the SERP accordingly.
Also important for the SEO is having good backlinks done so the financial planning business increases their level of online authority. When doing backlinks, it’s imperative that only high quality, relevant and legitimate backlinks to their website are done.
As a financial planner, some of the first links that you could have done would include local business directories, under the financial planning or financial services sections. These do not provide that much ‘’link juice’’, but it does help Google and other search engines show that the business is linked into the community well.
Other great backlink opportunities for a financial planning business would be ones from universities or other tertiary education organisations. A financial planner that provides work experience opportunities to a university or tertiary education organisational students can ask the education body if they are able to provide a link back to the businesses website from theirs. University and .edu websites can provide very high quality backlinks, which can set a local financial planner apart from their competitors, as it shows that even the universities give this particular business authority on the subject of financial studies.
Why is SEO important for financial planners?
It is a well known fact that The best source of new customers for financial planners is by far referrals from happy clients. The existing happy customer that is referring their friends and family (or business associates) to your financial planning business is literally doing all of the work when in comes to selling your services. Now, what is the next best source of customers? That’s an easy one, SEO.
SEO places your financial planning business in front of potential clients who are actively seeking your services. With advertising on the other hand, people are being bombarded with adverts for your business, when they are busy searching online for other things. This is one of the reasons that SEO for financial planners is extremely important if they want to maintain a healthy client base.
Financial services is also an extremely competitive industry in Australia. With nearly 2 million people in Australia using a financial adviser, there are a lot of financial planners looking to manage the estimated 700 billion dollars these people hold. For example, If a person gets a great ROI on an investment that their financial planner recommended, then there’s a good chance that anytime someone asks them if they know of a good financial planner, they will recommend theirs. This is another reason that SEO is extremely important for financial planners to have good positions in the SERP for relevant keyword searches so they can receive a steady flow of inbound client enquiries.
The Stages of SEO Done For Financial Planners
Doing SEO for a financial planning business can be quite complex, however we have broken it down into 4 main steps. They are as follows:
Website Audit
Before any SEO work can be done, an audit of the financial planning businesses website needs to be done. This audit consists of:
Technical audit: The technical audit will consist of having the website put through a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush, and having technical factors analysed such as H tags, redirects, indexability, link profile and so on to see if there are any technical issues that need to be fixed that will hinder SEO efforts.
On Page Audit: The on page audit consists of analysing the actual content of the website to see if there is enough content to satisfy readers and search engines, analysing the meta descriptions to see if they are attracting potential financial planning clients, title tags, images and more. Basically, the on page audit relates to the parts of the website that potential customers can see.
Determining whether as a financial planning business you are targeting a local or national demographic
Before keywords can be selected for the SEO plan for the financial planning business, it first needs to be determined if it will be locally targeted SEO or national. For example, if the financial planner is in a small town like Cairns QLD, and only services customers in that area, then we know for the next step of planning that the keywords need to include ‘’Cairns’’ in them. However if the financial planning business services the entire country, then the following step is a lot more complex, as there could be many hundreds of keywords used to reach the target demographic.
Choosing appropriate keywords for your financial planning businesses website’s SEO plan
Knowing the target demographic, it’s extremely important that the correct keywords are selected for the financial planners SEO plan. As mentioned before, if the business is servicing a local town such as Cairns, then the keyword selection can be quite simple.
However if there are multiple service areas, such as cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and so on, then multiple landing pages would need to be created, and relevant keywords would be grouped together to be on the same page. This is done so that each landing page can target a certain area, along with smaller suburbs within that area.
For a financial planning business that services multiple capital cities, this is very important as they would want to capture as much organic search traffic as possible, to bring in as many new customers as they can. Below is an example of keywords that would be grouped together on a landing page. For this example, the financial planner has an office in Melbourne, and therefore a landing page has been made for the Melbourne office:
Main Keywords: These are the short tail keywords that are the most broad and relate to the term financial planning business and the main city, Melbourne.
“Financial Planner Melbourne”
“Melbourne Financial Planner”
Secondary Keywords: These keywords relate to the main city Melbourne, financial planner, and also sub services that the firm provides.
“AMP Financial Planner Melbourne”
“Financial Planner for retirees Melbourne”
“Financial Planning Fees Melbourne”
Auxiliary Keywords: These keywords relate to smaller suburbs within the main city of Melbourne that people also search for, that the business services.
“Financial Planner Dandenong”
“Financial Planner Box Hill”
“Financial Planner Brighton”
“Financial Planner Docklands”
By incorporating all of the relevant keywords into the content of the landing page, the financial planning business is essentially telling Google that when people search for a financial planner in all of the areas listed, that it is a good idea to serve the businesses website in the search results.
Listing your financial planning business on Google My Business
It is crucial that all businesses, especially financial planners, list their business on Google My Business. This essentially means that when a person searched for a financial planner in any given city, the business will be displayed on the map section of the search results. This section of the search results is the first thing people see when searching on Google for a financial planner, so if a business can be listen here, they can get a very large amount of traffic.
Being listed correctly in GMB, a financial planner can also be found on Google Maps when searching an area for a financial planner. Also, the existing client reviews are displayed underneath the business name, so potential clients can see instantly if they have good reviews or not.
What other industries apart from financial planning does Extension Group help businesses in Australia with?
Extension Group provide SEO for Australian businesses in virtually all industries. If you have a website and your competitors are ranking higher than you in the SERP, then we can help. Some of the industries that we commonly work with though include (but are not limited to):
Child Care Centres
Restaurants
Ready to take the next step?
Contact Extension Group to have an obligation free analysis of your website, and start the journey to more customers and more sales!
How To Get Started on SEO with Extension Group
We have a simple 4 step process which we go through with our customers to get set up to help with their SEO. First, we will have a quick 5 to 10 minute chat about your business and what you are looking to achieve with SEO. Then, we will work out a strategy to be able to achieve these results for your business. From there, depending on the product that you have chosen with us, we will assist with the following steps whether it be build you a new website or update your existing one, and then finally once you are making money from your SEO, you can decide whether or not you want to stay with us.
For more information, click here to view how our process works.
Our SEO Locations
Wollongong