It used to be that if you were a financial advisor, all you needed was a website to have credibility in the marketplace.
But times have changed. It’s not enough just to take up space and prove you exist with a website. Now you need a great (not just good) website. Have you ever found yourself on a website that felt clunky, impersonal, or—even worse—potentially fake? Potential prospects are poking around your site, vetting your credibility, and looking for reasons NOT to hire you.
But there are some proven best practices to follow that never go out of style. After helping more than 300 financial advisors rebrand and rebuild their websites from scratch, here’s what we’ve learned when it comes to making a website that works for you:
Search Engine Optimization
The first thing to realize when building websites for financial advisors is that it’s not just for humans. In order to get your site ranked and appear on the search results page when prospects are looking for your services, you have to fit the mold of what Google and other search engines are looking for.
This endeavor is called search engine optimization, or SEO for short. Consider the exact phrases your prospects are likely Googling—like “financial advisor in [your city].”
Placing this exact phrasing into your content once every few paragraphs communicates to Google that your site is a fit for those search terms. Google places extra emphasis on the content in the headlines as well, so putting your most desired keywords clearly in your headline can help drive high-quality traffic:
Also note that we included the name key-phrase in the subheading right below the headline, giving it an extra boost of SEO juice.
Not all SEO pertains to the visible content of the site either. On a more technical level in the site’s backend, your meta tags and hidden descriptions of each page are weighted for SEO value too.
Leveraging Video
As we focus on websites for financial advisors, the core mission is to build trust and credibility. Prospects aren’t hiring a faceless corporation or buying a one-off product. They’re partnering with you.
That’s why you should take every opportunity to stand out in your own unique way to differentiate yourself from your local competition. And one of the most tried-and-true ways to do this is with an intro video on your home page:
A video is like a digital handshake, letting visitors meet you without the commitment or investment of meeting in person. They’ll size you up and make assessments about the way you carry yourself—and that’s a good thing! You’re conveying personality and expertise, and because most financial advisors wouldn’t dare get in front of a camera for a public appearance, it’s a powerful way to simultaneously convey confidence and competence.
Social Proof
Anyone can write anything on the internet. That’s why it’s so important to not just explain how awesome you are on your site; you should let other people do it for you. (And since the SEC now allows financial advisors to utilize client testimonials, you can.)
Testimonials and case studies are the most widely accepted way to build social proof. Plus, testimonials can get away with conveying gushingly positive assessments of your services, whereas if you just typed it in yourself, you’d seem overly sensational or smug.
Testimonials and case studies are also a great way to “future pace” your visitors. If you have a testimonial that paints a clear progression of a client’s past situation to their goal, your visitors can imagine themselves on the same journey. This pulls them one step closer to reaching out to you directly for a meeting.
Educational Content
The best way to prove you can actually help someone isn’t by telling them you can—it’s by actually doing it. Educational content on websites for financial advisors like blog posts, newsletters, tutorials, or Q&A videos can give visitors the impression that “Wow, this guy really seems to know what he’s talking about…maybe I’ll grab a spot in his calendar.”
The biggest mistake many financial advisors make with their blogs is that they are too cookie-cutter, and therefore too predictable. If your prospect thinks they already know what you’re going to say, they’re not going to bother to read it.
Don’t be afraid to give away real, actionable value in your blogs—even if it stings a little as you feel like you’re giving too much. If your content is not of real value, it’s just literary filler that sits on an abandoned page and never gets read.
Calls to Action
Besides your main headline at the very top of the page, your call to action is the most important piece of text when building websites for financial advisors. It’s the punchline of your persuasion: the action you’ve been buttering up people to take since they landed on your page.
A call to action invites people to reach out, sign up, call now, or learn more. Popularly conveyed as a button on the page, a call to action should be exciting, colorfully contrasting, and feel like a natural progression of consuming information.
You shouldn’t limit yourself to just one call to action, though it’s important not to splinter the attention of your readers and overwhelm them.
Notice how this page has calls to action (or CTAs) to Contact Us as well as Learn More, both featured above the fold in the very first visible screen of the home page:
How to Convey Your Services
You’re already intimately aware of what you do and how you do it, but how do you communicate these points in a way that measurably compels visitors to reach out?
Put yourself in the shoes of a pre-retiree looking for help. Go beyond the cold features of your service and think of the specific benefits your audience wants.
This can be as simple as breaking down your services into silos so the specific groups of people you want to talk to feel personally addressed:
This is a starting point for curiosity, not the final push toward the call to action. From here, it’s important to flesh out subpages that go deeper into the mindsets, challenges, questions, and dreams of your visitors. You want them to know you have a clear view of the problems you can solve:
Building Client-Getting Websites for Financial Advisors: Where to Go From Here
Building a comprehensive website that predictably attracts, educates, and persuades random internet strangers can feel like a daunting task.
At Indigo Marketing Agency, we specialize in helping financial advisors from anywhere in the U.S. start from scratch or revamp their existing sites so they can attract more (and better) leads.
Whether you have an idea of exactly how you want the site to look and function, or if you’re looking for a proven approach to web development that has worked consistently in the past, we’re here to help.
Check out our bespoke website-building service here and explore sites we’ve made for our past clients to get ideas.
And to learn even more about the best practices of putting your best foot forward online, here is some further guidance from the Indigo blog.
Whether you’re still doing your initial brainstorming or just looking for areas to improve on your own site, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Indigo and get a full, complimentary site audit, built to give you point-by-point advice to make your website your #1 tool for welcoming new leads.
Want to speak to a real, live marketing expert about your goals? Contact a team member today!
