For advisers, appearing on Google for local financial advice searches doesn’t need to be complicated or technical and could be an important channel for new enquiries. Here are six fairly easy tweaks to help.
1 - Register for Google My Business
Google My Business is the new home for Google Places information, which controls how you appear on Google Maps. This information is also used by Google to decide whether you should feature in some local searches, so ensuring your basic registration is complete is important. Go to google.co.uk/business to start the process.
2 - Complete your Google My Business listing
Expert research estimates that around 15% of local search performance is dictated by the information you include on your Google My Business listing. Once registered, head to your page and try to get the progress bar to 100% by adding things like hours, photographs you want to appear in search and other useful information.
3 - Review your website copy
If you describe yourself only as a ‘financial planner’ or ‘financial planning’ firm on your website then you could be missing out on inclusion in the results for people searching for ‘financial advice’. Whilst the positioning and branding of your firm is important, don’t reduce your chances of generating new enquiries: try to include both phrases somewhere on the site if you can.
4 - Talk about location
If you can have a page - or just an occasional blog post - about something happening in the local area then you will increase the references to your target location substantially, which should help with search. How about an article talking about local business success? Or issues that will affect the local economy? There should be local topics everywhere waiting for your expert financial comment.
5 - Check site wide issues; landing pages, load speed, mobile-friendly
There are plenty of site-wide issues that can affect local search performance but here are three quick ones to check. Local landing pages - particularly important if you have multiple offices. Do you have a page for each office, as well as an overall contact page? If they are all only on one page, how is Google meant to tell where you are based and which page to serve to searchers? Load speed - use Page Speed Insights to check your site’s speed. Anything in the 70-100 range is fine. Anything below that needs some work. Mobile-friendly - Google likes responsive websites (sites that change size depending on the device they are being displayed on) and dislikes sites with no mobile solution present at all. Which is your site and, if it’s the wrong one, can you change it?
6 - The (slightly) technical stuff - Meta data and more
If you have some experience with websites then you may well be able to change your meta data: data passed to Google which doesn’t necessarily show on your website. Adding your location and ‘financial adviser’ or ‘financial planner’ (or both!) to your meta description and meta title can really help. If you have a Wordpress website, consider installing an SEO plugin, which makes implementing these changes much easier, or speak to your web developer about adding the plugin and making the changes.
