In charge of winning more leads for your wealth management firm? SEO is often the neglected tactic in your toolbox. It's messy. It's a dark art. It's something you've paid an SEO agency for and not seen a lot in return.
The reality though is far different. SEO can provide wealth managers and financial advisors with a steady supply of fresh, qualified leads for a much lower CPA than other forms of advertising. Want to know how you can do this? Then read on. Why though should I be the one to tell you this...
For over a decade now I've worked in SEO and during that time I've worked with a variety of financial service clients, from regional wealth management firms to international finance businesses. Each industry has its own specific SEO nuances (you can see some of the subtleties in my writing on SEO for interior designers, SEO for architects and SEO for luxury brands). The same is true for wealth management firms.
This post isn't just some generic AI bilge telling you to 'add more keywords' or 'build links'. Instead we're really going to get into the weeds with actionable and specific advice that you can do yourself that is tailored to making your wealth management website work harder. Here's what is covered...
WINNING MORE LEADS WITH 1) BUILDING OUT SERVICE AND PEOPLE PAGES
WINNING MORE LEADS WITH 2) CLEANING OUT OUT OLD NEWS AND POSTS
WINNING MORE LEADS WITH 3) ANSWERING KEY QUESTIONS WITH CONTENT MARKETING
WINNING MORE LEADS WITH 4) PROTECTING REPUTATION WITH GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
WINNING MORE LEADS WITH 5) DEMONSTRATING EXPERTISE WITH GOOGLE EEAT
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SEO FOR WEALTH MANAGEMENT WEBSITES
Wealth management firms (and by extension financial advisors) differ to other lead generation businesses.
As well as regular lead generation which would typically take up >90% of time and energy in other lead-gen industries, so much new business is wrapped up in referrals and word of mouth recommendations from current clients. Therefore the website acts as a critical touchpoint before an initial enquiry so brand reputation is crucial.
Both of these can be supported with SEO. Even for firms which don't operate exclusively in the HNW space, the lifetime value of a new client can be huge, so your website needs to be working as hard as possible to bring people in - and win them over.
THE DEMAND FOR WEALTH MANAGEMENT ON GOOGLE
Google Keyword Planner shows us that at on average 1,000 people a month are searching for the exact phrase 'wealth management companies'. That demand has stayed pretty consistent over time with demand neither rising or falling since at least 2021. More widely there are around 19k over non-brand wealth management searches taking place across the UK each month and so could be a lucrative market to be tapping into.
So, if you were to bid on this phrase with Google Ads, the avg. top of range bid costs anywhere between £2.43 and £8.27. Why am I mentioning this? Well, if you know your average conversion rate on your website you can work backwards to calculate your cost per lead. Let's say you have 3% conversion rate and let's use an average top of range bid of £5.35 a click. Cost per enquiry would be £178.33 and so once you've filtered out the customers who become clients that price would only become higher. Maybe SEO can generate those leads for less?
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SEO?
SEO is such a broad term. In reality it covers a whole range of different edits and fixes. Some of them are creative. Others are much more technical. However, all of them work more effectively when you know more about how they interplay with one another.
Getting a handle on the basics is always recommended, so you can start thinking about your wealth management website in a more holistic way. One of the best starting points that I will always recommend people to is Moz's Beginners Guide to SEO. It's a hugely valuable resource that is kept regularly up to date and will explain everything in a clear but granular way. If you've got enough to do though then you can always hire a freelance SEO consultant like myself to get started on it right away. Just get in touch to organise a completely commitment free chat.
THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF SEO
For the purposes of this post here's the different areas of SEO which we will touch on throughout:
ON-SITE SEO | A broad term which covers everything you can normally see on your website such as links, images, the copy and your meta data. All of this can all be tweaked and changed to affect performance in Google results.
OFF-SITE SEO | Everything you can find about your business not on your website. This includes links and other brand mentions which Google can look at as a vote of trust, influencing where a website appears in the results.
TECHNICAL SEO | Everything to do with the code of the website to make sure it loads fast, securely and works in a way which means Google can find, read and index the content of your website.
CONTENT MARKETING | In the world of wealth management, content marketing can include blog content and whitepapers, images and copy which can help bring in additional people to the website and also underpin the foundations of the rest of the website.
LOCAL SEO | This focusses on the optimisation of your Google My Business listing that when someone searches for something with local intent e.g. 'wealth managers manchester', your firm is more likely to appear.
THE 5 KEY AREAS FOR INCREASING WEALTH MANAGEMENT SEO PERFORMANCE
BUILDING OUT SERVICE AND PEOPLE PAGES
BOOSTS LEADS / BOOSTS REPUTATION
It's common in the wealth management world that clean, minimalist websites are what's needed.
While a good aesthetic (and an even better user experience) will certainly help, minimal pages on a website will severely limit chances to rank for multiple different search terms. That can include different services and different people - both of which wealth management firms have in abundance.
BUILDING OUT SERVICE PAGES
Drawing up a list of each and every service you offer and cross-checking this against keyword research tools is the perfect way for mapping out how you can expand your website. Each new keyword and each new page represents a potential entry point for clients to find you via Google for the specialised services you offer.
Let's take a look at a core service of any wealth management company - retirement planning. Some firms will not directly have a page about retirement. It may instead be bundled up with general financial planning. Assuming you do though, what are the additional pages you could create which expand the topic further? Long term care, pensions, legacies, inheritance tax or business succession are all topics that could increase your visibility depending on the size and scope of what you want to achieve. Your website can still have a clean look and feel, but the depth of the information you're able to share can bring in more visitors.
BUILDING OUT PEOPLE PAGES
Focussing on a similar approach, the same strategy of expanding a website can be applied by showcasing the people behind a business.
Having people's names, faces and qualifications adds credibility to a website for anyone who may already visiting the site. However, people will also be making a point of actively searching for wealth managers names. When they search we want the wealth management website to result in the top position, ranking above:
Their LinkedIn profile
Articles they've contributed to
Random people who share the same name
The result? The website positions the team in the best position possible with the most accurate information possible.
NEXT STEPS
Map out the different service offerings your firm sells. Group them together and compare these to your keyword research to see what pages you could create. Looking at websites from other wealth managers can make this process easier to compare website structure.
CLEANING OUT OLD NEWS AND POSTS
BOOSTS LEADS
Ironically, the one area of a wealth management website which does see an expansive amount of content added to it is the news/insights/blog section.
Normally when I'm auditing financial sites they are full of old and out date content. Press releases from events that are long over. Analysis of the Budget from 2016. Announcements of legislative changes which have already been enacted. Hard as though it can be to avoid it, your blog should not become a graveyard to news of yesteryear. And if it is? We need to clean it up.
Why is this important though? If nobody reads old content then why does it matter?
With this we only have one reader in mind: Google.
The search engine will regularly crawl (and re-crawl) content no matter how old it is. And due to a variety of algorithms it can also estimate whether or not this content is 'high quality'. The word high quality is highly subjective and outside the remit of what is being discussed here, but if a large percentage of the content of your site isn't considered high quality, then this can pull down the overall quality of your website as a whole. (Source). As a result, we'd easily expect lower visibility, leading to less traffic and fewer leads.
In some instances of auditing websites I've found that as much as 60% of the total website is old news, but much like an iceberg, most companies don't realise the size and scale of what has been added to a blog as the years go by as it sits there unnoticed.
NEXT STEPS
Depending on the size of the site you manage, this size of this job can vary hugely. It will involve multiple tools including Screaming Frog, Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google's guide to 'quality' content is also a very valuable read.
Combined, you should be able to draw up a list of low performing URLs. From here you can decide wether the content needs to be expanded and edited, removed and redirected or kept as it is. This may be a job for an SEO consultant if you're unsure how to work these tools.
ANSWERING KEY QUESTIONS WITH CONTENT MARKETING
BOOSTS LEADS / BOOSTS REPUTATION
While the focus on new service pages and people pages is to attract searches from commercially minded keywords, content marketing has a huge wealth of often untapped potential for bringing in further leads.
In this context, content marketing is all about answering questions potential clients would be asking - and finance clients will always have a lot of questions.
Done correctly, building out this content on your website has two major advantages:
1) It brings in additional traffic for specific questions, relevant to your clients, for keywords which are often less competitive than commercial keywords
2) Visitors which find your website outside of SEO can be suitably impressed by your knowledge and expertise helping nudge them further into contacting you
The beauty of this type of content marketing is how focussed your can be on answering questions for your target client. HNW individuals aren't going to want to know about getting their first mortgage. They are going to want to know about if SIPPs can buy land.
These questions drive traffic and they drive leads. If the post you write is able to make it as a Featured Snippet on Google, then there's even more eyes on your website.
Naturally though there's some caveats for how to achieve this.
NEXT STEPS
Getting a content marketing campaign off the ground is no easy feat. You will need to use a combination of tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Also Asked to establish a long list of potential topics you could target that are:
Relevant to the business
Have enough search volume to justify writing about them
Are as low competition as possible to ensure you stand the best chance of ranking
You'll also need to ensure that the content is written with best Google EEAT policies in place and is also hosted on a website which already has authority behind it. Google has openly said that it's hard to call a site authoritative if it only has 30 pages of content on it, so it may be worth investing in your wider website before pursuing content marketing.
I've worked on various content marketing campaigns over the years and I feel it's also worth saying that not all of your content will perform well, if at all. If you were to write 50 different articles you'll find there are a few outliers that bring in a significant amount of traffic, a few outliers which do absolutely nothing and the remainder will generally do something but only at scale can it really drive traffic and lead numbers forwards.
PROTECTING REPUTATION WITH GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
BOOSTS REPUTATION
Up until this point we've looked at how a wealth management lead generation works solely as a source of brand new leads. Now we need to look at Google through a different lens. What do we need to optimise for warm leads who find you via word of mouth recommendations and referrals.
Warm leads will be searching for you and they will be using Google to do it. Maybe it's to find your phone number. Maybe it's to see the people behind the business. Chances are though they will be searching for you by name. And when this happens then Google My Business comes into play.
Google My Business is a separate entity to a wealth management website but in my view it has the opportunity to make or break an enquiry before someone has even arrived on the website. Why? The Reviews.
A Google My Business listing appears in two separate ways:
First, your listing appears when you search for a wealth management company geographically such as 'wealth management companies tunbridge wells'. A map with Ads and often 3 organic results beneath will appear (not all results shown in the above screenshot).
Secondly, a listing will appear when you search for a company by name and a panel, normally on the right hand side (when searched on desktop) will appear.
And it's the reviews you see in both of those examples that are important.
When someone searches for your wealth management company, this listing and the connected reviews will be the first thing someone sees. And so many financial services firms are leaving themselves wide open for reputational damage by failing to collect reviews. (To make it very clear, we're talking about collecting 5 star reviews).
Quantum Wealth Planning has approached this correctly with 51 almost 5* reviews. Not only does it look good to a potential clients it actively limits the damage when a negative review comes along. And trust me, you will get a negative review in the future.
Over the years I've seen 1 star reviews for genuinely poor service. But I've also seen them because someone had an axe to grind, someone wanted to cause some mischief and someone intended to 1-star the business next door but somehow ended up reviewing the wrong business. These reviews can be hard to remove and when they are added it can radically bring down your average star rating if you only have a couple of reviews to start with. That means a single 1-star review can ruin your 5-star rating - and everyone who searches for your wealth management firm will see it.
NEXT STEPS
Preventing this can only come from more positive reviews and making this happen requires some effort.
You will need to actively ask clients at the right time and in the right way if they would be happy to leave a review. Not all of them will but even a handful of 5-star reviews can act as a good defence.
Look at the different touchpoints both new and existing clients go through in their communications with you. Where you can add a request for a review into the process?
DEMONSTRATING EXPERTISE WITH GOOGLE EEAT
BOOSTS LEADS / BOOSTS REPUTATION
What has been covered up to this point has focussed very much on specific areas or specific features of any optimised wealth management website. In this final part, we will be looking at Google EEAT - something which can be applied holistically across your website as a whole.
Google EEAT is a framework which looks at Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. While it is not a direct ranking factor when it comes to SEO, the guidelines that it sets out help to steer content in the right direction, benefiting users, which in turn Google should be able to understand, helping your website to become more visible.
So, what does Google look for when it talks about Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness?
The answers are a little vague and sometimes it can be hard to translate it into specific actions you could make to your website. This post on Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content from Google is a good primer. For the in depth information the entire quality rater guidelines are available online here.
When it comes to wealth management websites though, the specific areas I focus on as the essentials include:
All blog posts have an associated author
All authors have dedicated profile page
All profile pages give a clear overview of their relevant qualifications and experience. Plus social profiles.
The sources of statistics and facts are clearly cited and linked to
Blog content is kept up to date if there are changes to rules and regulations affecting the industry
Relevant industry awards and official accreditations are clearly displayed
Do we really need to do this though?
Yes - we do. As well as making common sense to convince new clients to work with you, there's an additional reason though when it comes to Google.
Your Money or Your Life.
An additional component of all things EEAT is another acronym, YMYL - Your Money, Your Life. For websites that fall into these categories (everything from banking and loans to pharmaceuticals and medical information), the bar for good Google EEAT signals is raised that much higher. Naturally, financial advice sits pretty high on this scale so if you intend to rank well on Google, all of these components are essential.
NEXT STEPS
Review your website while asking the questions detailed by Google in their Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content guide. The answers may suprise you.
Should work be required then you may need to involve the expertise of content writers, internal experts, web developers and SEO consultants to develop and implement a plan.
SUMMARY