Employing local SEO for financial advisors (and any other type of business) can be very beneficial to rank on Search Engine Results Page (SERP) compared to other off-page SEO practices. This is simply because local SEO allows you to target a smaller user base, local instead of national.

Through local SEO, you can effectively target local audiences near you and drive them to your site. Search engines, like Google, do this when someone types a location-based search query for their search. For example, when a user types “Financial advisor in MD”, Google understands they are looking for local financial advisors in Maryland.

Google will show 3 results on top of the SERP for such a query and a map with pinned locations of all 3 financial advisors’ brick-and-mortar businesses. These coveted top three spots are known as the Google 3 pack and they are derived using local SEO.

You can also get this top spot for your business by employing and improving your local SEO efforts. Below, we have listed what financial advisors can do to dominate local SEO. The first three on this list are basic requirements for a shot at the Google 3 pack spots.

1. Meta Details

Most businesses will overlook the title and meta details because they are not visible components of their websites. In fact, these are crucial for your SEO efforts and you should see them as adverts that attract customers.

Create a unique title and meta description for your website that also features your location for your local SEO efforts.

2. Consistent Online Directories

Google favors businesses that list their name, address and phone number (NAP’s) accurately and consistently over multiple online directories. Financial advisors can use a number of online directories to their advantage including Yellow Pages, Yelp, Mantra and Brightscope.

Just make sure that your details are similar and consistent on every directory. Misspellings, discrepancies and missing information can cause problems and hinder your chances of showing up on the Google’s 3 pack spots.

3. Google My Business

In order to let Google know of your business and its location, you must claim your business on Google My Business (GMB) listings. Give Google additional basic details about your business to rank higher, including your:

· Name, address and phone number (NAP)

· Business hours

· Web address/URL

· Offered services

· Categories

· Pictures and Videos (of your staff, office and business)

4. Quality Link Signals

Once you have the essential 3 steps covered for Google 3 pack, link signals are the most important factor that dictates your ranking on SERP. A high number of inbound links from high-quality domains will help you rank higher, more than anything else.

This may take some time and work to acquire but it is well worth the effort. Try to get as many inbound links from higher domain authorities as possible in order to increase the number of quality link signals and subsequent chances of ranking higher.

5. Get Reviews

When clients write and publish reviews on Google, it is not violating any Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) guidelines or rules against financial advisor reviews. This is mainly because Google owns the review, and the client is the publisher.

You only need to make sure that you are not compensating the client for the review, writing it yourself, editing, suppressing, or responding to any reviews to maintain non-violation of strict SEC rules and regulations. Good Google reviews help increase your local SEO efforts and ranking on SERP.

6. Regularly Create Fresh Content

Blogging and regularly creating new and fresh, relevant content on your website is good for SEO efforts and to attract the right people to your business. Using keywords and optimizing content for publishing online will help Google know you have an active website that it is drawing inbound links.

As always, content is king, and you only want to be publishing quality content with consistency. Regularly publishing at least twice a month is a good start and you can increase the frequency from there.

Conclusion

Dominate your local SEO and you can rise above your competition faster than you ever imagined. Local SEO is crucial for financial advisors and we highly recommend you follow this guide for the best results.

If you need help with your digital marketing, Pendragon Consulting LLC offers the best in content marketing and social media management/marketing.

You can directly get in touch by calling 443-343-2313, or by sending us a secure message via our website.