When building a new finance website, we always encourage clients to add a resource or blog section and start writing content for the site.
Sadly, we often see these blog sections neglected after launch and many clients don’t know where to begin with content marketing.
Whether you are focused on SEO or not, content marketing can support numerous marketing and sales goals.
4 Content Marketing Tips for Advisors
1. Importance of Keyword Research
If one of your goals is to build up rankings on the search engines and improve the domain authority of your site, start with keyword research.
A lot of financial advisors can make the mistake of thinking that SEO is a one-time add on for a website. In truth, if you want to rank for competitive keywords, you need to write content – a lot of content.
Keyword research will guide you on what topics to write articles on and where to put your focus for content marketing. Competitive keyword research can give you insights into what your top competitors are doing and ranking for.
There are various keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs or SEMRush that you can utilize and it’s typically best to work with an expert who can do the research & direct you to the best keywords.
You typically want to find “sweet spot” keywords that have a high volume of searches each month and not extremely competitive. For instance, some basic finance terms may be extremely competitive and you may never be able to outrank the top listings.
2. Long-Form Finance Articles
When searching for certain keywords, you’ll most likely notice that the pages ranking at the top of google searches are very long articles.
Long-form articles are a great tactic for SEO and content marketing because the search engines tend to favor articles that have a very high word count, such as 2,000 to even 4,000 words for competitive keywords.
Not every blog post needs to be this length though. A common content strategy is a hub and spoke model.
With this approach, you’d create 2-3 long-form articles on your site and each one is dedicated to a top keyword or topic. Then you’ll want to write some additional blog posts around 300-500 words that point to the long-form article.
These long-form articles can also be utilized in the sales process and adding value to your existing customers.
3. Content Creation
Long-form articles are just one piece of your content marketing strategy. You’ll typically want to do additional shorter blog posts, off-site articles, and press releases to tackle your goals.
When it comes to writing content, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. The good news is that things are always changing with the economy and in the financial space.
For blog posts, you can curate content by talking about a financial news article that was published on a big content site. You can share a link to the article and discuss the topic. Be careful though to not plagiarize by posting the original source’s content on your own site.
You also don’t want to duplicate any of your own content, so if you’ve published a great article on another content site, you don’t want to put that same piece of content on your own site. The search engines penalize sites for duplicate content.
Video blogs are an easy way to create a huge amount of content easily. A lot of our clients utilize this tactic where they hire a videographer for a few hours, film 20 short videos in the office, and then slowly disperse the content as blog posts.
The important step with video blogs is to always provide a transcription of the video in the blog post, so that you get “credit” for it on the search engines. This can also be helpful for accessibility and users that may prefer to read a transcription.
4. Guest Blogging
Writing content for your own site is only part of the content marketing game. The other part is getting articles published on other sites through guest blogging.
Every industry has some large content sites that publish tons of articles and these sites are always looking for more contributors.
Directory sites are also a great place to look for opportunities, and you can find these sites by searching your industry and your city, such as “investment advisor Los Angeles” and typically the top rankings are directory sites.
Once you’ve identified sites that you’d like to publish on, you’ll need to pitch an article. Each content site is a bit different and some may have a dedicated email address or form submission. To pitch an article, you’ll typically write an email and provide a quick summary of the article in terms of the headline, key points, and why it’s a good fit for the content site’s audience.
Once you are accepted as a guest blogger and the topic is approved, you’ll then write a quality article and make sure to put a link to one of your site’s long-form articles within the piece. These links are extremely valuable from an SEO standpoint. Some content sites are more strict about links, so you’ll need to always be aware of any guest blogging guidelines.
Guest blogging is also a great way to be recognized as a thought leader in the industry and expand your brand’s reach.
If you have any questions on content marketing for financial advisors or creating a high-quality finance website, feel free to contact our team.
