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This episode is sponsored by Calibrate iq. First, a disclaimer. In the interest of being transparent, I created Calibrate iq. It's my app and I built it because I wasn't satisfied with any of the other risk tolerance tools on the market. I found that other tools didn't work the way I wanted them to. They focus too much on risk preference rather than time horizon. They're clunky and overcomplicated, and they're too expensive for what they do. And they aren't user friendly for clients. I designed Calibrate IQ to be simple, easy to use and low cost. It lets you send a single magic link to any client you want to survey. Clients fill out a simple survey that takes less than two minutes. Once that's done, you can automatically generate an investment policy statement instantly and deliver a beautiful branded report to the client. It lets you customize reports with your logo and brand colors, and you can even add your own custom investment preferences to the questionnaire. If you're tired of expensive risk tolerance tools that overthink the process, try CalibrateIQ. It's $9 a month with a seven day free trial. Give it a try at CalibrateIQ app again. That's CalibrateIQ app. Hey everyone. Welcome to Opposite Impact, where we discuss operations and marketing for independent financial advisors building a lifestyle practice. I'm your host, Michael Reynolds and today's topic is how financial advisors can win the AI search era. I think you probably already know this AI search is becoming more and more popular and more prevalent. Consumers don't just go to Google and Bing, other search engines alone. They also go to ChatGPT, they go to Perplexity, they go to Gemini, they go to Claude, they go to other AI tools when they're searching for both financial information and specifically looking for financial advisors. And so a lot of us are rightly getting more interested in how to get found and be more optimized for AI searches. So I'm going to go through a few kind of top tactics, kind of the major things you can do to kind of position your website and your brand for AI searches. And I want to preface this by saying there are some unique things that are AI specific, but I also see a lot of advisors getting hung up on thinking that everything has changed and that search is dead and that AI is the only thing to worry about. And they're very focused on this perceived massive change. And I want to say this, many of the exact same techniques that are good for search engine optimization are also very Good for AI search. So some things have changed, but some things have stayed the same. And so the things I've talked about in previous episodes that are related to search engine optimization are very applicable to AI search and are very cross platform, so to speak. So things like picking the right focus term, updating your title and H1 tags as anchor points, making sure that your content is focused on the thing you do, where you're located, if you're locally focused, the niche you're in, if you have a niche, specific topics you have expertise on, the structure of your site, inbound links, PR mentions, schema, all these sorts of things that are good for search engine optimization are also good for AI search Site speed. A good example. The faster your website, the better it's going to be indexed by search tools and AI tools. So a lot of these things are cross platform. So I don't want you to think we are throwing SEO out the window, but it does make sense to potentially enhance some of the work you're doing to be targeted toward AI searches in addition to search engine optimization. And that can only help you. So we're going to talk today a little bit about some of the tactics you can use to make sure you're well set up for AI searches like chatgpt and perplexity, etc. So let's talk about first the answer first kind of architecture. AI searches are really built on answering questions. A lot of the stuff that gets plugged into AI searches are just simple questions. AI models break down these user prompts into queries that search all this information they have and they want to provide some sort of answer. And so one of the best ways you can feed that that feature of AI tools is with FAQs. If there's one thing I always tell advisors to start doing right away to be more optimized for AI searches, it's FAQs. So FAQs are frequently asked questions. And I love this because FAQs used to be very popular back when the web started becoming a thing, when websites were new, when the Internet was new. Back in the 90s, literally. My first company was a website design business I launched in 1996. So that's how that tells you about how long I've been in the business. As you may know, I'm a career changer. My previous company was a marketing agency and so I started that agency in 1996 when the Web was becoming a thing. And websites looked terrible back then. They had all sorts of animations and horrible colors and they were awful. And they featured Frequently asked questions a lot and it was a popular thing. It's like you went to a website and the frequently asked questions told you all about the business and what they do, and it was just a thing. And then they went away. FAQs fell out of fashion for a long time. And now recently, FAQs have become much more popular. They've enjoyed a resurgence because they are so friendly to AI searches. So a Frequently Asked Questions is simply a section where you have some questions that you think your audience might be asking and then you provide the answer right there. They're incredibly useful. I'm not sure why they ever went away. But anyway, AI tools love FAQs. So where do FAQs live? A lot of different places. One of my favorite places to put FAQs is at the end of blog posts. So if you're writing a blog post and you finish the blog post, it has a nice conclusion at the end. I always love to put a frequently asked question section with maybe five to seven questions and answers about that topic. Not only is it good for the reader because they can have nice summary of some of the questions they may have, but AI tools love this. They pick it up, they index it, and that kind of feeds their data set of stuff they can serve up to users. That's one place you can put it. Another place you can put it is on actual just regular pages of your website. So if you have a services page, put an FAQ section about the service you provide. If you have a fees page, I'm a big advocate of putting your fees on your website. As a financial advisor, I think that's really helpful. So put a frequently Asked questions section under your fees page to describe some of the questions people might have about your fee structure. If you have an investment philosophy page, like a lot of us do on our advisory websites, put a whole FAQ section about your investment philosophy. Put those FAQs wherever they're appropriate. And that really helps AI tools index the information you provide and make it more likely potentially that they're going to serve up that information to the consumer searching. So FAQs are one of the number one, probably the number one thing I say advisors, hey, how do I get better at being found on AI? I'm like, do FAQs just start with that? It's really helpful. Next, let's talk about just speaking the language of AI. So this is where it's really helpful to use schema markup. So schema has been around for a while and it's helpful For SEO as well, it's one of those things that's cross platform. So search engines use schema to get a sense of what your site's about. Tells search engines and AI exactly what you do. Things like your geographic location, your credentials, compliance details, stuff like that verifies your site. FAQ pages can also have schema, and it also helps establish authority. So within your schema code that you can put on your website, it also helps reinforce the EAT principle. EAT is an acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. And this is an informal jargon term that marketing pros use to describe an aspect of how search engines and AI tools index and rank your site in terms of how authoritative it is. So what it looks like is when you are publishing a blog post, be sure that you're linking the article's author schema to an advisor's credentials, their cfp, their credentials, cpa, cfa, stuff like that. Any kind of credential tied to that content is going to increase its authoritativeness in the eyes of robots, basically, search engines and AI tools. And that proves that there is actual expertise behind the content. So bottom line, install schema code on your website that basically gives a basic description of what you're all about and add that schema to things like author profiles and specific content on your site where appropriate. Bottom line is, if none of that makes any sense, talk to your web person, they can help you. Or a really simple quick nugget out of this is make sure that you apply your author profile to everything you write. So if you write blog posts on your website, you at the end make sure you put your name with the credentials after it, your photo, a short bio. So the end of every one of my blog posts on my advisor website, I put my photo and credentials and bio with my CFP there and that ties my credentials to that content. Really useful. All right, so another thing you can do is citations. There's a lot of data showing that AI engines are significantly more likely to cite and linked to sources that feature unique data and proof behind the claims they make. And so hard statistics are really helpful. So for example, instead of writing, many people struggle with retirement savings. Instead, try writing something like, according to recent Federal Reserve data, 45% of Americans feel behind on retirement. So AI really likes to quote hard data. Also name your entity. Don't write in vague first person plurals like we believe in passive investing. AI might not always connect the dots there. So instead write at your firm name. So for me, I would say at Elevation Financial, our investment Committee utilizes a passive index strategy so you state your brand clearly so the AI associates the expertise with you and your brand. Also, LLMs love to synthesize options, so if you write articles like Schwab vs Fidelity for high Net Worth Custody and Advisors Breakdown, that's a clickbaity title, I know, but it works. So when a consumer asks AI to compare options, your article is more likely to become one of the baseline sources or the baseline source when someone's asking that question. So again, AI tools love to love comparison data. Also, let's talk about just some technical housekeeping. So you want to make sure your site is technically sound when it comes to being indexed. So one thing to check is your robots txt file. Some web developers or security plugins automatically block AI scrapers, so ensure that bots like GPT Bot, Perplexity Bot, Google Extend, all those are allowed to crawl your public content to make sure they aren't blocked. Also, this is an argument that I make a lot of times when I'm helping advisors with websites Keep your site simple. AI crawlers love to read raw HTML. Complex JavaScript can sometimes get in the way and cause problems. So if your best content is hidden behind interactive animated sliders or clickable calculator tabs or lots of fancy accordion stuff, that might sometimes be problematic for AI tools to see it. And so I'm a big advocate of just keeping everything simple, plain text out there, no fancy effects, and make it really easy to index. As a side note, this stuff also kind of slows down your site sometimes. A lot of advisors I work with want to put a like a background video on the header of their website and it looks cool, but it can really slow down your site. So all this stuff, the cooler it looks, sometimes the worse it is for the user experience and the robot experience. So keep stuff simple, keep it really easy to read, avoid the temptation to put things inside of fancy animations or sliders or things like that. Also, along with this, freshness is important AI models have recency bias like many humans do. If your estate planning guide hasn't been updated in two years, AI search traffic can see that and will flag it as less relevant. So you want to treat the core pages of your site and the core resources you have as living documents. So you want to update those numbers and refresh the content frequently. I would say don't let it go more than a few months without some sort of update. That's going to help maintain the freshness of the content, which will help AI search, give it more Relevance. So all this to say, is this actually going to help bring traffic to your website? Is this going to actually help you get clients? I don't know. Maybe. The short answer is maybe. We never know. We can't just determine a guarantee here any more than we can guarantee a rate of return on a Roth ira. It's just a lot of unknowns, but we do live in a zero click world. Now, zero click is a sensationalist term that describes the concept that in the olden days, back when I was doing inbound marketing, you could put a blog out there and then you could have somebody click on the blog and put a resource on there. Someone could download a resource, put their email address in, and then you could drip campaign them back to your website and they eventually reach out and become a client. That was a sequential way of an inbound funnel working that is just out the window these days. The zero click world means that people don't often or don't click on links as much to go to websites anymore. They read stuff directly inside social networks, they read stuff inside AI searches, they read stuff inside communities. Sometimes they do click and go to websites, but they don't do that as much anymore. And so it becomes really important to optimize your content for the environment it's in at the time. And how does this translate to potential business for your firm? So AI search engines drive hyper qualified low funnel traffic. So what that means is if a user reads an AI generated wealth plan and clicks on your specific citation link, they aren't just browsing, they're actually interested in the expertise behind it. And so generally we see that often clicks from AI searches are pretty qualified as opposed to just random traffic. So that's a nice thing. So here's what's helpful. These inline citations can be your best friends. So engines like Perplexity and Google Generative Experience place clickable numbered footnotes directly next to the text. So a consumer does a search, they get the generated response back and they will often click the links that are supplemental to verify the information, the tax rules or to see who the expert is behind it. And so that's where you can get a lot of your traction by traffic from those citations that support the experience. We're getting used to AI and users aren't dumb. They know that AI can hallucinate, they know that AI isn't perfect. And so they will get the basic feedback first and then if they're serious, they will click on the citations, they will go to the website and they will potentially go to your blog post that feeds the actual information delivered by Gemini, whoever it is, and so that puts them squarely on your website on your brand. Also, AI does suggest follow ups. There's a loop where it'll suggest follow ups to keep the conversation going. So an AI might suggest, hey, would you like to see Elevation Financials checklist for Roth conversions? And then it creates a high converting direct traffic link to my website's landing page on that topic. So AI does often help users find you just by suggesting they go deeper. So these things can be helpful. Additionally, the more information you're feeding AI and the more relevant your brand becomes, the more likely you are to potentially be served up. When someone's legitimately directly looking for an advisor, I've had many cases where consumers have searched, hey, I'm looking for a financial advisor that specializes in socially responsible investing. And the AI tools will give them my website because they've already indexed all the stuff I've written on SRI and esg. So by already being there and being an authority in terms of my brand presence, AI tools already have me at the top of the list. So I want to stress with all this though that it is very difficult to get definitive measurements. It's not quite the same as search engine optimization. So with SEO I can pull up any number of tools and I can see exactly where I rank or where you rank in search. I can see if you're on page one for this term and I can see what the trend looks like and I can pretty much give you a sense of how much traffic you're going to get from that search term. AI tools are much more of a black box. I think it's getting better and I think it will continue getting better. But for now, any person or tool that tries to promise you they can find exactly how you rank on AI, it's smoke and mirrors. It's very difficult to see how you quote rank because there's not really a rank. AI tools are so personalized and so environment specific that I would never tell someone that there is any kind of rank they have on AI. It's more about how often your brand gets served up and your content gets served up in the mix in different types of searches and queries and environments. So ranking is not the same. It's not really a thing with AI, at least today. So don't get so hung up on AI rankings or traffic. It's more about often. It's like an old fashioned approach of brand pr, going back to PR and brand. That's where we are with AI right now and it's helpful. So, so keep that in mind as you're optimizing for both SEO and for AI. So if you Again, AI search isn't replacing SEO, it's evolving it and complementing it. And so it's not quite the same as it was before when it comes to getting traffic and clicks. Those are still relevant, but there's a lot more to it and it's got a lot more complicated. So those are a few things you can do to be ready for AI search and those should help you improve your visibility when it comes to consumer searching for stuff you do and stuff we do as advisors in AI. All right, hope that's helpful. If you want to reach out, you can find me on my Advisor Consulting website, which is michaelreynolds.com, i've got a ton of free stuff there for you, a way to ask me questions for free through voice memos if you want some help. Always happy to chat. And my private community, which is growing every day, and we have a ton of great resources and sessions and events in there as well to help you out. All right, thanks for joining me today. Have a great day. See you next time. Sat.