For many financial service providers, local SEO remains vitally important. While not every situation requires physical meetings, many clients still prefer the trust and personalization that human contact brings which is one of the reasons why local SEO for financial planners is important.
Competitive firms understand the value of local SEO which is why some rank locally even when they don’t have a location there. The fact remains that the majority of clients still search locally.
This explains why today’s firms understand the importance of becoming known in the community as the authority in the sector. Any firm that isn’t found among the top local results on google will be missing thousands of visitors, leads, and new clients because most searches are locally based even if a physical appointment is replaced with virtual means like camera or phone conversations.
According to numerous data collecting websites like statista.com, Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining over 90% of all searches done online. Multiple studies show that 75% of these searches never go past the first page of search results.
If you aren’t among the top results on the first page of Google, you’ll be largely invisible to prospects looking for you. This means that all the traffic and leads will go to competitors who are.
How Can a Financial Advisor Dominate Local Search?
As a Financial Advisor, how do you optimize your business to get the most out of Google search for local search? There are many things to look at, but in this post, we’d be looking at what really matters for local ranking.
What are the things that really move the needle? We won’t be talking about hundreds of factors that impact local SEO but the ones that really matter.
Optimize for Google Map Pack
In google search, there is something called Google Maps pack, which displays the top three local results from a search. If you want to get the majority of the leads coming from Google, it’s highly recommended that you work towards getting ranked in these top three search results.
How do we get found on the first page of google and the top three search results? That’s what we are here to discuss.
In fact, there are a number of factors but the most important ones are listed in the graph below.
Local Pack/Finder Ranking Factors
Localized Organic Ranking Factors
On these graphs, we see GMB optimization, citation building, website on-page optimization, and link building as being very important to local search whether it be google my business or regular local organic search results.
Get Citations and links from Local websites
In the graph above we see that links account for around 15% of the weight, your website holds in local search. We also see that citations account for about 7%. Together, these account for about 22% of your clout on google.
We group these two together because the citations that you build on local directory websites like bing, Facebook, and Yelp are often viewed as links in google’s algorithm.
You should conduct competitive industry research and make sure you are listed on the top 30 directory citation sites to gain the best recognition from google.
Verify Your GMB Listing and Do Basic GMB Optimization
Among all these directory citations, guess which directory citation is most important in google’s eyes. That’s right, their own. If you want to get ranked and have a chance of beating your competition, you must optimize your GMB account fully.
This includes a number of factors that we can’t cover fully for the purposes of this article, but a few things to do are as follows; make sure to have proper primary and secondary business categories, list the best title for your business, get lots of relevant reviews, and optimize all sections of GMB including.
Make sure the address on your GMB is exactly the same one that you put across all directory citations and websites. Even small differences in your address can negatively affect your rankings.
Conduct Proper On-site SEO
After you have optimized your NAP citations and GMB(google my business) you need to make sure your website is optimized for the strategic keyword search terms. Although your website doesn’t need to have hundreds of pages of content to rank, you do need to have individual target pages fully optimized for each relevant keyword you are trying to rank for.
For example, if you are located in San Francisco, you will want to have individual pages targeting specific keyword phrases such as San Francisco financial planner, San Francisco cfp, San Francisco certified financial planner, San Francisco financial consultant, best financial planner in San Francisco, Wealth manager in San Francisco, etc.
The list goes on and with proper keyword research, you will be able to decide which keywords to focus on initially as you evaluate the competition and ranking difficulty.
Putting it all together
Once you have built top NAP citations and links, optimized your GMB, and built target pages to get ranked for specific keywords on Google, you can be sure you are starting on a great base to beat most of your local competitors.
Doing these things is important because each of these components boosts the other.
NAP directory citations– Serve as valuable links for your site in the eyes of Google and simultaneously boost your local rankings and relevance in google at the local level.
Google my business optimization– A fully optimized GMB and website work together to increase the authority your hold on google. With strategic optimization of the two together, they significantly increase your search engine authority on the local level.
Your website– When your website is properly optimized with landing pages targeting specific keywords you can become more relevant in search engines for both local and organic keywords.
You can grow your authority for a wide variety of relevant keywords both organically and locally with regular content creation, linking, and search engine optimization techniques.
To obtain great local rankings, we don’t need to spend much time getting good results. With a good approach, this can be done in a matter of months. It’s when you start trying to get ranked multiple keywords and for surrounding cities or larger regions that it becomes more comprehensive.
Generally, getting in the top three results should be the goal if you want to be competitive at a local level.
Getting the business
As you know, online marketing isn’t the ”end all be all” for the success of your business. This is because getting the click over your competitors is only the first step to a sale and a customer. In reality, clicks mean nothing if they don’t turn into paying clients and customers.
The reality looks something like this:
- Prospect finds your site- (search engine optimization and getting found)
- The prospect clicks to visit your GMB and website- (google my business fully setup)
- Prospect is convinced that what you offer is valuable for them- (your offer and unique selling proposition)
- Prospect completes your call to action- (ie. free consultation appointment)
- Prospect gains value from appointment and builds trust- (sales system and training)
- The prospect becomes a customer- (gets involved with your products and services)
- The prospect becomes a long term client
We have mapped out the steps to emphasize the importance of having a call to action and offer on your website.
The cold hard truth is that if your website doesn’t generate leads that turn into clients then all the search engine optimization in the world won’t help you. Having traffic isn’t the only requirement because if you don’t have a convincing offer, you could be ranked number one for all keywords in the world and never make a single sale.
This is exactly why we specialize in working with certified financial planners. By staying focused, we can help you along each step of the way. Our Local SEO Service for Financial Advisor will work with your vision and marketing to integrate into systems.
