How To Get Clients as a Financial Advisor
Overview
A retirement planning firm in Southern California had built a great practice.
Hundreds of clients. Ambitious employees. Trusting relationships all around.
The only problem was marketing. Too much was going out the door at every tactic.
Google Ads were being run with high costs per click. Facebook Ads were being run to promote attendance at retirement planning events. Email marketing was being used to reach new, existing, and prospective clients.
But, the thing that was working best to get clients was SEO (search engine optimization).
Challenge
Financial advisors base their business off of trust.
That’s why SEO works too. Users trust search results.
This is demonstrated when a user searchers for a retirement planner online. 89% of the time a user will scroll right past the “sponsored” results and go to the organic results. Why? Because users trust those results more than a retirement planner paying $25 / click to get your attention.
The challenge becomes, how do you get a financial advisory firm, or retirement planner, to rank organically for key terms when there is so much regulation and competition?
Solution
Our financial advisor clients were looking to get new clients. We thought that SEO would be the best way to do that.
We devised a strategy that would help raise online visibility in both Google My Business profiles and organic search results.
For the Google My Business profile, we deployed a Local SEO plan for financial services.
To rank organically, we created a series of financial services blog ideas to help with first page rankings.
Then, we supported the plans through some tactical promotion efforts.
Result
After several months of generating Google Reviews, publishing content, and promoting that content – we began to see improvements!
Some of the results included:
- 68% increase in “financial advisor” related impressions to the Google My Business profile
- First page ranking for several terms, including “retirement calculator”
- 50% reduction in paid advertising budget, due to increase in organic search rankings
- 25% increase in inbound inquiries for new clients
The last bullet point is the most important. Did our SEO efforts generate new business? Yes.
Probably the best thing about this effort was the clarity on marketing efforts going forward. Many financial advisors try to do “everything.” Paid ads. Social. Email. Events. SEO.
When you find something that drives clients, just focus on that. And for our retirement planning client, the thing that worked was SEO.
