These days, all businesses need good web traffic. This is true whether your business is online or offline. Though Delray Beach SEO is my specialty, I’ve offered SEO services to a variety of industries, in a variety of areas. In the ‘SEO For…’ Series, I explain how SEO works for different industries.

What Makes Financial SEO Different

Business websites serve two different purposes:

1. To get attention in search engines and on other websites, thus bringing potential customers to your website (where they can then be converted into actual customers).
2. To act as a sort of virtual brochure. The website shows that you’re no fly-by-night. It serves as a visual signal that you know what you’re doing. That you’re trustworthy.

Every industry weighs these two needs differently.

Restaurants, for instance, are going to want to appear trustworthy. But that’s not really the main concern of the website. Instead the website is more important for getting people’s attention, because bad service at a restaurant has less potential for negative consequences than, say, a bad experience with a doctor.

Financial websites are the exact opposite. They belong to a category that Google refers to as “Your Money or Your Life.”

You Have to Be An Expert Advisor

Your Money or Your Life websites value trustworthiness above all else. While you’re using the same SEO tactics that other industries use — Link Building, keyword optimization, technical planning and the rest — the motive behind these tactics is different.

In order to make your Financial SEO work, you have to convince Google you’re an expert. After all, you’re suggesting people put their money into your hands. Money it took them years, if not decades, to save up.

Google’s goal is to make people happy. And people who lose money because they listened to half-baked advice from a webpage they found on Google? They’re not very happy.

So you want to get people’s attention, sure. But once you’ve gotten their attention, everybody needs to see that you’re the best at what you do.

Building Trust

Here are some of the best ways to do that:

Make Your ‘About’ Section As Clear as Possible

On your About page, you want to explain your services clearly. Are you a mortgage broker?  Money manager? Self-finance guru? Get as specific as possible, both so that you rank for keywords and so that people know what they’re getting. List any relevant degrees you’ve gotten. If you’ve been in business for awhile, emphasize that.

Chase the Valuable Links

Any trustworthy link is a good link. But for financial advisors, some links are better than others. In particular I’d focus on getting a Better Business Bureau page. BBB links are very authoritative, and they’re understood as such by the majority of the population. The fact that they also have reviews means that you should also gain some social capital, so long as your customers are happy.

Content, Content, Content

Ultimately, SEO for Financial Advisors is all about the content. Google wants to see that Your Money or Your Life pages are constantly getting updated, so you want a blog. But that blog also needs to be written authoritatively. The information has to be good because your subject is important. But even little things have to be good too, for the sake of building trust. If your grammar is off, people will doubt your intelligence. Shoddy imagery will put them on edge.

Financial Advisor SEO is Tricky

As you can probably tell, this sort of SEO takes a lot of finesse. You have to put a lot of work into your site, because Google has even higher standards than normal with financial sites.

Want to make sure your site is as good as it needs to be? Contact me here.