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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 Ops and Impact where we discuss operations and marketing for independent financial advisors building a lifestyle practice. I'm your host Michael Reynolds and and today we're gonna do something a little bit different. Ish, something I think will be fun. We are going to go through insights from a live SEO audit of financial advisor websites. So this is springing off of a session we did in the Ops and Impact community this week. Yesterday, in fact, we went through a one of our impact showcases, which is once a month in the community I do some kind of presentation on a tool or a technology or a tactic or a strategy or something that's just showcasing something that I think would be helpful and interesting and innovative for advisors. So this month, the month of July, we did live SEO audits. I asked for advisors to submit their websites and four advisors submitted websites to review. I was able to get through all of them and I basically put together an audit package with some reports and resources and assets that kind of gave a lot of feedback and ways to improve your search engine optimization and AI which goes with it and an overview kind of slide deck. And we went through the audits in real time and lots of live sessions and had Q and A and it was a lot of fun. We got a lot of great stuff uncovered And I feel it was helpful to a lot of people that were attending and kind of getting some feedback on their websites and just observing other people get their website reviewed also. It gives you some ideas too. So anyways, a fun session. That's the kind of stuff we do in the community. I wanted to bring that to this episode today and take some of the highlights and just kind of talk through some of the useful nuggets that I think could benefit all of you when it comes to reviewing your own websites. I'm going to go through each one. I'm not going to give the names of the firm. I'll talk about the type of firm and kind of the business itself, but I won't give the name of the firm. Not that it's super secret, but I just, I'll just keep it a little bit anonymous. I'm going to go through site by site again. There are four of them I'm going to go through. The first one is a firm. These are all RIAs. And the firm focuses on equity comp. So I had asked, before we did this, I'd asked everybody who submitted a website to give me a little more feedback on how they categorize themselves. And if you've heard my earlier episodes on my three buckets, I always ask advisors, hey, what bucket do you see yourself in? One, are you locally focused? Two, are you nationally focused with a strong niche? Or three, are you nationally focused with no niche? And so I asked advisors to put themselves in one of those buckets. And this particular advisor said he's in bucket number two, the niche being employees with equity comp, but specifically trying to serve people to and through retirement. So he put himself in bucket two, gave me that feedback, and here's the feedback that I gave him as we went through it. So the main issue I found, not the main issue, but one of the first issues I found was there was a little bit of, I want to say conflict, but there were two different markets already defined there in those comments. One is equity compared to and the other was retirement. And I always say retire. Focusing on retirement is not a niche, but it is something people focus on. And so I wanted to pick out what I thought was the true niche out of that. So I picked equity comp because I feel like that's more of a niche than retirement. So I use that as a niche equity comp. And so one of the first things I like to do is just do some technical overview kind of analysis of the site. I'm not going to get too in depth there because a lot of that's more visual and it's hard to really describe of our podcast, but some of the issues that popped up in this case were duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tags. A page was blocked from appearing in search engines. Some of the URLs weren't formatted very well for SEO. So some basic stuff like that to clean up three pages didn't have an H1 hitting. For example, H1s are the the top anchor point of every page. So every page really should have an H1 tag which tells search engines and AI what that page is about. A few things like that every site had those kinds of things. So I'm probably not going to really cover that again. The next thing I like to do is a speed test. I use a site called GT Metrics for a speed test and this site got a B rating. So it wasn't too bad. One of the biggest culprits when it comes to speed and performance is large images. So if you, if you run a speed test, GTMetrix will likely tell you that the problem is a large image that is a few megabytes. Or if you have a video background playing on your site, that could be a culprit. So whenever possible you want to optimize images and video to be a very small file size. Generally you can do that without degrading quality. So if you get that to a smaller file size, your site will likely load faster. And this is important because Google has been admitted long ago that site speed is a ranking factor. And so you want to have a fast, well performing website to make sure you don't get penalized for slow performance because a slow website is a bad user experience and as a result that gives you possibly a negative ranking factor. All right, the most important thing is what I do next, which is what is the focus term for the website. For this particular advisor, I did some keyword research and found quite a few variations of Financial Advisor for equity comp related stuff. And the one I arrived at was Financial Advisor for stock options, which may sound awkward when you first hear this, but stay with me. So when I'm looking for a focus keyword or focus phrase, I'm looking for high volume and low difficulty. I use a tool typically called Ubersuggest and it's a really good way of getting this kind of data. You can use other things like Ahrefs or Semrush or things like that, or even Google's keyword tool. I just like Ubersuggest. Anyway, I found that this particular phrase, financial advisor for stock options got 590 searches a month, and the SEO difficulty out of 100 was 18. So right off the bat I'm like, that is a pretty attainable focus phrase to shoot for. Now. You might be thinking, oh, that sounds a little bit awkward. Like financial advisor for stock options, we want to think about what people actually type in to search. So when someone's going to Google or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever, they're not typing in. I want a fiduciary financial advisor that focuses on equity comp and retirees. Like, they're not phrasing it like that. They're typing something simple like financial advisor for stock options. They're thinking, hey, I've got stock options. I need help. Boom. That's a simple phrase. So we want to try to align our focus term with a phrase that people actually use. And so I came up with a slightly more massaged focus phrase, and that is fiduciary financial advisor for stock options and equity comp Sounds a little bit more natural if you add the fiduciary part and you add the equity comp at the end, but you still get that phrase anchored right there in the middle. So that's the phrase I came up with as a focus term. I like the word fiduciary over fee only because in the echo chamber financial advisor communities, we focus on fee only so much. We argue about fees with each other. We love to argue about fees. Fee only is this thing we just kick around in our echo chamber. But the general public doesn't really latch onto that as much as the word fiduciary. And the search volume research I've done supports this. More people search for fiduciary than for fee only. The consumer, the average consumer is trained to look for a fiduciary. So I generally advise you using the word fiduciary as a descriptor over fee only. So we went with fiduciary financial advisor for stock options and equity comp. So what do you do with that focus phrase? I advise this advisor on his website to update his title Tag and his H1 on the homepage to say just that. On the title tag we put the name of the firm. I typically put a pipe symbol after it. And then I put the phrase fiduciary financial advisor for stock options and equity comp on the homepage in that H1 tag, which is typically going to be the large header text that shows up at the top. Just the phrase fiduciary financial advisor for Stock options and equity comp. The title and the H1 of your homepage are the two most powerful elements of your website. And that's where you want to put that focus phrase. All right, moving on. The next thing we reviewed was website schema. I'm not going to go in depth on schema just because it's hard to really talk through it on a podcast episode. But most websites, all four of these websites had improvement to be made on schema. Schema is basically contextual code in the actual markup of the site that tells search engines, and more importantly these days, AI tools what your site's all about, some context behind it, what your services are, what type of firm you are, where you're located, stuff like that. So a really easy way you can do this is take your website, copy the URL, go to Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, whatever you want. I use Claude and give it a prompt like, hey, please review my website here, take a look at the website schema, let me know what I need to improve and please give me a ready to paste schema file that I can use to add my website schema and then give it more information about your firm. If it doesn't know already, for example, say I'm a financial advisor that focuses on equity computer. Give it a lot of contextual information about your firm and it'll give you a nice report and it'll give you code and you can update your website schema to be properly formatted. Some of the biggest issues I found with schema is that the schema on the site didn't label the firm as a financial advisory firm or providing financial services. It didn't provide CFP credentials. There was a lot of stuff missing there that could be helpful. Okay, all right, next, really quick backlinks. Not much to really say about this other than high quality backlinks still matter. And so most of these sites didn't have a large number of backlinks yet, including this one. One of the, actually, I take that back, this one was one of the better ones. This site did actually have backlinks from some pretty, pretty big sites like cnbc, US News, cnn, Yahoo Finance. So this one actually did a pretty good job. So getting more backlinks from high authority sites like this and is really helpful and helps your rankings in both search and AI respond to those reporter queries about quotes for stories, things like that. Next, quick win that everyone could have benefited from. Here is domain registration. This is arguably not even relevant, but it's so easy to do and it might make a slight difference. So why not do it? Increase domain registration of your site to 10 years. So whatever your domain is something.com, register it for 10 years, which is the maximum. And there is some, I don't want to say evidence, but there is some suggestion that search engines will reward sites with domains that are registered for a long time because it shows longevity. So I say do it next. We cover directories. This particular advisor was in a few directories, but not all they were on wealth tender. They were on fee only network, not on XY or nap. They were on flat fee advisors. They their social profiles were pretty, pretty well put together, but they weren't optimized for any of them. And when I say that one of the simplest things you can do to optimize your site for these profiles is use that focus phrase at the very top of the description or the title or wherever you put it. So I advise this advisor to go to all those directory listings and put fiduciary financial advisor for stock options and equity computer in their profiles in all these directories. So for example, for wealth tender at the very top, the first sentence should be fiduciary financial advisor for stock options and equity comp. I think there's even a headline you can use and put it there. So what that does is that reinforces your brand in all of these areas. So AI and search tools look at all these different profiles and they start to put the pieces together and say, okay, so this advisor is featured here and here and here. And in every single one of those listings that focus phrase appears and that reinforces more heavily what this advisor focuses on and what service they provide. So that's one of the main things you can do as well to really leverage those directories. So be in as many as you can and optimize the profiles. Same with social. So on your Facebook, just that about section, that focus phrase goes there. LinkedIn profile Focus phrase goes to the top of that headline. Alright, so that's the basics again, I'm going pretty quickly and very high level because it's on a podcast episode, we don't want to get too detailed and it's hard to visually show stuff, but that's some of the basic stuff. All right, I'm going to move on to the next advisor. So the next advisor. Let me find the folder here. This one was one of the easier ones because this advisor had a very clear focus. This advisor focused on divorce planning. This advisor let me actually grab the website for the advisor as well. All right, there's a site coming up. So the advisor is a cdfa, focuses exclusively pretty much on divorce planning. So the first thing I did is again, the basic stuff. Do SEO issues. The usual SEO issues were there. Just some technical stuff. Site performance was slow. There's a large image that was a culprit. So look for those large images. Then I looked for keyword opportunities, and I found that there was one focus phrase that got 5,400 searches a month. And the SEO difficulty was only 40 out of 100. And that phrase was Financial advisor for divorce. And again, a theme here you'll start to see is, does that phrase roll off the tongue? Is that phrase inspirational? No, not really. The phrase at the top of the homepage for this advisor site was, hey, here's a couple. They're getting divorce support, confident future. There was phrases like this, very inspirational. And everyone does this. Every advisor website does the same thing. They put something inspirational. Enjoy your future, love the journey, leave a. Like, whatever it is, it's some inspirational thing. But that doesn't tell search engines or AI anything about what you do. Guess what does tell them what you do? The phrase financial advisor for divorce. Because again, we want to think about what do people actually type into these tools to get the information they don't type in? Hey, I'm looking for a CDFA that focuses on couples for divorce. I'm looking for a financial advisor that can help me navigate blah, blah, blah. No, they type in the simplest thing they can type, which is Financial advisor for divorce. So what focus phrase did we come up with? Fiduciary. Financial advisor for divorce. You see a theme here, Pretty simple. Again, I put the word fiduciary in front of it because consumers are trained to look for that. So that kind of just checks the box. And then financial advisor for divorce. So you can probably see where this is going. I advise that this financial advisor put the name of the firm pipe symbol, and then financial advisor for divorce after it. Same thing in that H1. In this case, the advisor website didn't even have an H1. It started with an H2. And so my advice was fix that. Make sure your first line of Text is an H1 tag, which is one of the markup tags in HTML, and make it fiduciary Financial advisor for divorce. Because that tells AI and search engines exactly what you do. And people too. People are going to read that and be able to get it. So that's also good for people. All right, website schema, same thing. There was some stuff missing Go have Claude make you some schema. I also did a competitor analysis on this particular site. Because the niche was so specific, I was able to do it. The good news I told this advisor is that no one else is doing it very well either. So there's a chance to pull ahead and possibly outrank them. Backlinks. Not a lot of backlinks. I told them to get more domain registration. Same thing registered for 10 years and then same thing on the directories. This advisor was not in Wealth Tender but was in pretty much every other directory. But none of them were really optimized. And so I said same thing. Put that focus phrase at the top of your profile and all of the directories. One thing to note is this advisor was in the Napa directory. And say what you want about Napa, but their directory is very highly weighted especially for AI tools. So if you can get in Napa and optimize your directory listing in Napa, that's really beneficial. All right, so that's where we ended up with this advisor. Really strong niche, really good opportunity for keyword volume and low difficulty and a lot of good quick wins that could occur with a few simple changes on this website. All right, let's grab the next one and sorry, I gotta go to my list here. All right, this one was interesting. This is an advisor who focuses on Russian speaking Americans. So this one was a little bit of a shorter one because I'll just kind of cut to the chase. The bottom line is there was really no SEO opportunity for this advisor. And that's okay. Sometimes there's not. And that doesn't mean that you can't have a few basic optimizations that might help and go ahead and do those things. But I wouldn't pursue SEO heavily as a strategy to bank everything on. The reason I said that is because I did a lot of keyword research on things like financial advisor who speaks Russian. Financial advisor for Russian speaking Americans. Financial advisor, Russian speaking. Like all sorts of variations. And it turns out no one is searching for that. No one is searching for a financial advisor that speaks Russian. I'm sure people would like that and they probably need that, but no one's actually searching for it. I don't. I didn't really see a lot of opportunity here. This advisor already had a phrase that made sense. It was retirement planning for Russian speaking Americans, age 50 plus. During the conversation he thought about modifying it a bit to say financial advisor for Russian speaking Americans and drop the age 50 plus just to kind of simplify it. I agreed with that but for the most part there was not really much in terms of SEO. Site speed was good. Schema needed some work, so we did some schema. Not many backlinks at all. So I suggested getting some backlinks from some relevant sites that are kind of complimentary. Some directory listings were there. So anyway, bottom line, this site didn't really have much demand. So the lesson learned here is if your niche is so specific and I guess just so unique that no one's really searching for it, don't let that discourage you. There are other ways that you can run your marketing system. Go ahead and optimize as much as you can because you might get a couple searches, that's fine. But I told this advisor, hey, like networking and showing up in communities is probably going to be your route to getting leads. Be an online or even in person communities where Russian speaking Americans are hanging out, business communities, social communities, online communities, promote referrals more heavily, things like that. So I think old fashioned networking in this case is going to be more helpful to this advisor than search. And now can you also market online? Absolutely. The social media could be a big route to go and lean more heavily into, but relying on search too much could be problematic. All right, let's go to the last one, site number four. This one is also very interesting. This is an advisor who focused on high earning millennials who are longevity and health and wellness focused. Very specific and similar to the last site I had trouble finding search opportunity from just an overarching anchor point standpoint, no one's really going online searching for financial advisor for high earning millennials who are longevity minded. No one's searching for that. Just not happening. So instead I suggested a more satellite based strategy for SEO. One of the things that this advisor told me when they were kind of giving me feedback on their target market is longevity minded health conscious high income millennial families who listen to the Huberman Lab podcast go to farmers markets, are high intent consumers who spend money on out of network healthcare, wellness optimizations and health literature biohacking stuff. There's a lot of interest in these types of topics and so I was able to find a lot of keyword opportunities that point to topics that this audience is likely searching on. So things like are supplements HSA eligible, is the OURA ring HSA eligible, is function health worth it? Stuff like that, early retirement focused things, early retirement, health insurance. So all these were topics that had high demand and moderate to low difficulty, which means you can write content like articles, videos, podcast episodes on those topics and Tie it in with a financial perspective. So my advice for this advisor was start doing more of that. Do continuous research on these topics, write content, speaking to those topics, and then have calls to action that somehow attract people into your ecosystem, whether it's email or social media, whatever, but build an audience based on the interests that your audience has. So that was the main thing. Aside from the usual few technical issues, site speed was great. I actually told him not to change his header tag because it didn't really matter that much. Actually, I take that back. I did say change it to something a little more specific. I said, right now it was an inspirational kind of thing that wasn't really descriptive. I said change it to Fiduciary Financial Advisor for longevity minded health conscious high income millennials. Now is that going to latch on to any kind of search? Not really. There's not volume for that phrase. But what it does is, is when a consumer comes to your website, they can immediately self select in or out. So if a longevity minded, health conscious high income millennial comes to the website and sees that headline, boom, they're locked in, right? They're already thinking, oh, okay, this advisor is speaking to me. And so that already attaches them a little better to the site schema. Needed some work as usual, basic stuff there. Needed more backlinks, domain registration, up to 10 years, the usual stuff. This advisor was in a few directories, but not others. So I advise getting in a few more. But the main thing really that my advice centered around was to write about the topics that your audience cares about and that's how you're going to start reaching them. So that was where we ended up with that site. Interestingly enough, I was a little bit not disappointed, but it would have been nice to have an advisor that focused locally because that's a different way of doing things. Didn't work out this time, but it was totally fine. But there are a few different things I would have recommended for an advisor that focuses locally. Maybe I'll cover that. Actually I covered that in an episode a while back, so you can go back and listen to that. But from an audit standpoint, we haven't done an audit in the community for a locally focused advisor, so maybe in the future. All right, so those are some insights from the SEO audits. I hope I did an okay job of stumbling through it in a voice only way that kind of made sense. But hopefully it gives you some things to think about when you're looking at your own website and what sorts of things you might be able to optimize if you're doing your own kind of self audit as well. All right. As usual, if you want to find me and reach out if you need more help on anything, you can find me on my advisor consulting site, which is michaelreynolds.com ton of free stuff there. So go grab free stuff if you want, including sending me voice memos for questions. That's totally free. Also a bunch of resources there. And my community is there as well. So if you're not a member of the community, feel free to check it out. You can join for 30 days free with no credit card required. And if you want to stick around, you're welcome to. But no pressure. And again, that's MichaelReynolds.com all right, thanks for joining me today. Have a great day. See you next time.