5 SEO tips for financial advisers

Here are some great tips that will help your website rise to the top of the heap in Search Engine Optimization:

As a creator of financial websites I am often asked, “What SEO can I do myself as a financial adviser?”
Here are some great tips that will help your website rise to the top of the heap in Search Engine Optimization:
1. Create Keyword-Rich Content
The secret to SEO is learning to use keywords, or the words that people will type into search engines to find you. As you are writing your content, be sure to use relevant keywords throughout your page. Here are some examples of keywords that relate to this post: SEO, financial, advisors, keywords, headers, links, FMG, and Faulkner. Try a few searches yourself, and you’ll quickly learn to identify keywords.
2. Have Keywords in the First Few Lines of Your Page
A search engine scans a page’s content from top to bottom, and tends to give more ranking weight to the first few lines than to the lines at the very bottom of the page. Be sure to include your highest-favored keywords in those first two or three lines.
3. Use Keyword-rich Page Titles and Section Headers
Page titles are the text that shows up in the tabs at the top of your browser, and are also the first line that shows in search results. Having SEO keywords in the page title helps increase a page’s ranking.
Headers are a way of categorizing or showing relationships in your content, and thus showing levels of importance to readers and search engines. For instance, your page should begin with a Header 1 full of keywords. Then add keyword-rich secondary headers throughout your page, and search engines will love you.
For example, on our FMG website we want to attract professionals who are looking to upgrade their marketing tools. So we made sure that our homepage headline contained our most important keywords: “Marketing Tools for Financial Advisors.” It’s simple, straightforward, and SEO smart.
4. Update Your Content Regularly
Search engines look for fresh content on websites; they view websites as ever-changing and growing, not static and stagnant. Regularly updated websites tend to get higher ranking because of this. Such activities as writing a blog and adding new articles and videos regularly will keep your site front and center on the search engine radar.
5. Use Internal and External Links
An internal link is a link on your page from another page from within your site, and external links, or back links, are when another site links to your web page from their content. Back links can be difficult, as you don’t normally have control about whether another site links to your page. However, one way of creating back links is through making comments on other people’s sites or forums and adding a link back to your page.
When someone is searching for a financial professional, you’d like to be the person they find, right? By implementing these SEO tips you will potentially increase your rankings and, as a result, bring more traffic to your site, and more clients into your office.
Craig Faulkner is CEO of FMG Suite, offering a complete inbound marketing solution for financial professionals, from websites to email newsletters to a customized mobile app. You can also follow him @fmgsuite on Twitter.