#FASuccess Ep 390: Helping Prospects Find Their Way To You Online With (Local) SEO, With Brent Carnduff

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Brent Carnduff
• Advisor Rankings
• Kitces Research on How Financial Planners Actually Market Their Services
• Advertising With Testimonials And Endorsements Under The New SEC Marketing Rule
• Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara 
• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Business

Looking for sample client service calendars, marketing plans, and more? Check out our FAS resource page!

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Brent Carnduff, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Brent: Thank you, Michael. Really happy to be here.

Michael: I appreciate you joining us today for an opportunity to get to nerd out a little bit on marketing, which, as many listeners know, I love doing from time to time. So bringing on some folks who are not advisors directly, but consultants, experts that work with advisors. We do that across a number of different topics, but as a little bit of, I guess, a marketing area and a digital marketing area in particular myself, I always appreciate an opportunity to get to nerd out on marketing a little. And particularly today in talking about SEO, or search engine optimization for those who aren't familiar with the label, we'll get more into that in a moment. But this whole idea that there really are people who go to the internet and type out, like, "financial advisor near me" and then pick the advisor that comes up on the Google search and reaches out to them and says they want to do business or at least look at their website and decide if they like what they see and decide to reach out and do business.

And I've talked to so many advisors over the years about that who basically look at me like I have 2 heads or just outright say, "Yeah, I've had a website since 2003. I've never gotten a single client from it." And have to have a slightly awkward conversation of like, well, maybe that's because you're not doing it well. That doesn't necessarily mean no one gets results from Google search. In fact, what we see in our marketing study that we do on the Kitces platform every other year is that we see a lot of advisors who are getting growth from Google and the number is growing. And so I'm really excited today to get to talk and nerd out a little bit on what really is this whole SEO search engine optimization thing? How does it show up for advisors? What are the versions that actually work and do something? Because not everything works for everyone. So just appreciate you joining us today so we get to talk SEO for a little while.

Brent: I'm excited about it, Michael. I hardly ever get to nerd out with others interested in SEO. Usually it's a painful expression I get when I start talking about it. But it's true, people do search on the internet and click on and find providers for all kinds of services, including financial planning. So I think there's a lot of things that people misunderstand when it comes to SEO.

Why SEO Is Valuable For Financial Advisors [05:30]

Michael: You know, just think about it in the context of this digital age that we're in, pretty much any problem that crops up in my life at this point in fairly short order, like, I'm going to pull out my phone and type my problem into Google and let it provide some suggestions, some answers. Sometimes I'm just literally looking for a provider, a good plumber near me or whatever it is. Other times I'm like, okay, I got a problem-problem and I'm looking online to figure out what my problem is and what I'm supposed to do about it in the first place. You know, "I think I have mice in the attic, what should I do?" I'll end up with a bunch of articles that are helpful guides about what to look for that not coincidentally are usually on the website of a pest control company. It says, like, "If you need help with mice in your attic, we have a service for this."

And I've heard so much discussion over the years of, "Well, that doesn't work for financial advisors because I've never gotten the client through my website," that it had bothered me for a long time to say, "Why wouldn't that work for us as well?" Like, really, consumers look for basically everything known to mankind on their smartphones that are accessible for them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days/year because we all have phones within 6 feet of us at all times. Yet somehow magically no one searches for a financial advisor online.

Brent: Right. And we get data on how many searches. It's a little different for financial advisors than a lot of other service providers. Obviously, if somebody's searching for red tennis shoes, they find it, they buy it, they move on. Other service providers, pest control, that's something you need immediately. And so they find you, they click, and the transaction moves forward. Even attorneys, like if I'm in an accident looking for an attorney to help me with that, my sales cycle is pretty pretty short. Financial advisor can be longer and you really kind of divided a little bit there, the difference between local and non-local SEO. If somebody's searching "financial advisor Boston," that's going to be local. Financial advisors typically...those broad terms kind of for a local search should bring up the map pack and stuff like that. And those tend to have a chance to be a little bit shorter sales cycle.

Somebody might be looking for a solution if they're just searching "financial advisor Boston." If they're searching, "How do I set up money to pass along to my grandchildren?" It could be a long... they've got that problem. They may open 6 or 7 different articles and go to different sites, but they are a potential long-term...long-term, they're potentially a client. If you're doing something to bring traffic into the website, so often it'll come and go and you'll never know. Now, one of the first problems I see is most often advisors aren't doing anything to bring traffic to their great website. And a website won't do that by itself. So you need one of the spokes, social media, SEO, paid advertising, something like that. But even once you bring traffic to your website, you've got to be able to capture that traffic, stay in touch with them, drip email out to them so that over time, once they start to realize that it's a bigger issue than they thought or you are someone that can help and they are starting to trust your word a little bit, they can reach out to you when they're ready.

Michael: So recognizing that most advisors do not live the search engine optimization world. And I'm excited nerd out a little, but I don't want to make everybody's eyes totally glaze over. Maybe let's take 1 small step back, Brent, and just can you...like, explain for us collectively, in particular those who may really not have much familiarity, just like, what is SEO? When we talk about search engine optimization, what does that mean? What are we talking about? And how does that show up in the financial advisor world context?

Brent: So whenever somebody goes on to search something, whether it's pest control, financial advisor, red tennis shoes, the results show up on the search page and we usually choose from the 10 links or whatever there are on the first page and continue our search. So search engine optimization is setting up your website, the signals on your website and around your content so that you have a better chance of showing up for that first page for those search results, for the keywords that that are relevant to your business.

Michael: Okay. And I feel like that leads to the next question. So what are consumers actually searching for that gets me clients? Because if they are looking for me and they put "Smith Financial Planning," whatever my firm name is, like, they usually find their way to me already because I'm "Smith Financial Planning". So what are people searching for that we're playing this game? Because I can just give them my business card or the accountant can refer them to me and my website.

Brent: Sure. And so for those of you...and I'm going to age myself here a little bit. Those of you that remember phone books, what you're talking about, Michael, right now is the white pages. I know who I'm looking for. I just have to figure out how to contact them. So what SEO is is the Yellow Pages. I know I need a financial advisor or at least I want to find out if I need a financial advisor. I don't have an advisor that I'm ready to contact right now. I don't have the referral or the accountant or whatever. And so I'm just looking under financial advisors to try to find an advisor sometimes near me, sometimes not. Often it is. But so they're searching for answers to a problem they have or they're searching for a consultant, a financial advisor that can help them provide those answers and they don't have somebody in mind yet. So it helps with discovery.

Michael: And I've long been fascinated by this, just actually playing around in the Google ecosystem and there's a tool out there called Google Keyword Planner where you can actually enter in search terms and it will tell you not only literally how many people search that, the exact thing that you typed, but given Google's slightly creepy nature of figuring out what you meant to be asking when you were asking for it, will give you a couple of dozen other similar and related searches as well, "People who ask this also often ask for..." and can show you what those are. And the thing that has blown me away as long as I've followed this space is that aside from just generic definitional things like literally searching for just the words financial advisor because you're trying to figure out who they are, what it means, what they do, the number one keyword for people looking for something financial advisor-related online is "financial advisor near me." Like, those 4 words. I mean, it is so, so far above anything else, like tens and tens of thousands of searches every month for those 4 words.

And the first time I saw that in the data, I was like, I don't believe that, like come on, we have years of experience in all these specializations and capabilities. Please tell me that the primary way that you choose who's going to manage your life savings is something beyond, like, whether they're geographically convenient to your home or office, wherever you're typing the search to type "financial advisor near me." And then I realized, like, if you look at almost any Find an Advisor search platform, the first criteria that typically comes up when you go to one of those, or CFP boards, Find an Advisor, NAPFA, XYPN, and Garrett, all those tools, like the first thing that people get asked is, where are you? Like, it's geography-based and it just kind of hit me like a lightning bolt to say, oh, okay, so like, the factual reality for most of us as financial advisors is our primary differentiator is our ZIP code, or our street address if you're in a crowded ZIP code, that there's a huge preference for geographic convenience in person. And I mean, that's not news that a lot of clients like to be in person, but I think a lot of us like to think that we grow our businesses for our knowledge and our expertise and our skills and our capabilities. And it's like, or because you just came up in a search for "financial advisor near me" because you're geographically convenient.

Brent: Next door, yeah. Yeah, it's true, and that's really grown over the last few years and every year it grows a little bit more. And we see that, yeah, so people do tend to want to work with an advisor close to them, although we know of virtual advisors that work with clients across the country. Almost every advisor I talk to tells me they want to rank nationally. They want a national audience. And it comes to not wanting to narrow down their target audience to a niche, but we both talk about how important it is to niche down. And the location is one way to develop that niche. Obviously, you're sharing it with everyone else that's in that ZIP code, but it is a way to define yourself. And I think it's probably one of the lower-hanging fruits that advisors are missing. And I think it's going to become more and more important in the future as marketing continues to get more competitive.

Michael: So, can we nerd out on this a moment then?

Brent: Yeah, please.

Leveraging Local SEO For A Geographic-Based Client Niche [15:34]

Michael: If that sounds appealing for someone...look, if you're in the heart of New York City and you're 1 of 27 advisors at your street address because there's that many on the different floors of your 80-story building, this may not be for you. But I mean, I see this crop up for advisors in more rural areas where they really might be the only advisor within 10, 20, 30 miles where they are, at least they're the only advisor that is not an Edward Jones or an Ameriprise office. No offense to those folks. It's like, if you're trying to differentiate and you're the only independent in the area, like, "I'm the only independent in my ZIP code" counts.

Brent: There you are.

Michael: You know, sometimes we're in a denser metropolitan area in the suburbs, but...I know at least I'm here in the Baltimore, Washington metropolitan area and, like, we don't want to go to the other side of the river. If you're on the Maryland side, you don't go to Virginia. If you're on the Virginia side, you don't go to Maryland. Most of us don't like leaving our county or, frankly, our ZIP code because 5 miles could be a 25-minute drive and it's miserable. So even as dense as we are here with the 9 million people in the metropolitan area and a bajillion firms, a lot of firms actually can do really well with local because I really might want to find someone within 3 miles of where I live because anything longer than that is way too much traffic. So for advisors where this has at least has some relevance or opportunity, they already have a lot of local clients, which means they might've been winning on this already, like, how do you do this? How do you actually make sure that when they type "financial advisor near me," you win?

Brent: Yeah. And so now we're talking about local SEO, which is different than organic or non-local SEO. We're talking about how do you get on that page when somebody is searching local for you? It usually includes the maps and stuff like that. Interestingly, or maybe discouragingly, it really depends on your address in a lot of ways. Near me, it turns out is Google...it doesn't matter what keywords you add to your website for near me. I've seen dentists that have named their office near me, Dentist Near Me. And it's come out recently that Google does that totally location-based, so it's actually going to be the advisors that are closest to that person. So it's search-centered, meaning that the search radius is based on wherever the searcher is standing or located.

Michael: So, first note, if you were thinking you're going to be, like, Near Me Financial Advisor and nearmefinancialadvisor.com, not gonna work.

Brent: Nope. It's not going to help.

Michael: Okay. So Google knows where I am because it's creepy and tracking location all the time. So then how does Google know where my advisory firm is to do the match or how to make sure that mine wins over other firms?

Brent: And this is really key that the number one signal for Google Local is your Google Business Profile, that you fill it out accurately and properly, you get...and there's not as much to that as people think there are. It's important you fill it all out so that...Google Business Profile used to be Google My Business, and before that it was something else. I can't remember any longer. But you want to check your category really carefully. You'll have a chance… there's 5, you can pick a primary. Usually I suggest that be financial advisor or financial planner. Additionally, you can choose financial consultant, investment services, and investment company. I think those are the only 5 that apply to financial advisors. So that's an important one. Obviously, your address needs to be there so it knows where to locate you, and Google will require you to verify that. And it used to be a postcard. Many of you have probably gone through that process. Now it's a much more difficult process of requiring you to make a video, and there's information online about how to do that. It's kind of a frustrating thing. Now, as an SEO, I can't help my client do that any longer. They have to actually do the videotape.

Michael: I'm going to presume because people were fraudulently, like, staking competing businesses' Google My Business pages and then taking them.

Brent: Yeah. SEO is kind of the Wild West of marketing. And I've heard it referred to as the dark arts often, and yeah, SEOs find a loophole. There's so many people in the industry that they'll abuse it until Google shuts it down. And so it has been done enough that, yeah, they've made it more difficult to verify it or require, I guess, a more personal contact to verify.

Michael: So how do I just do this? I mean, am I googling, "Set up my Google Business Profile?"

Brent: Yeah. If you just google, "My Google Business Profile..." it'll take you to a page that you can start. The first thing you'll do if you don't have one already, well, you'll put in an address and it may find you, you may already be in there and just not have claimed your listing. And then you'll say, is this you, and you can claim it and start the process. It'll walk you through what steps you need to do. If it doesn't show up yours or shows up a different...somebody else with the same name or a different business or different address, you can then have the opportunity to input a new business and it'll ask your address and name of business and stuff like that. And then it'll walk you through the steps and say, okay, now you need to verify. And then it'll say, this is how you do it. This is the steps we're looking for. They actually send you a QR code that you use to start the video. And the video only goes to Google. It doesn't go on your public profile. It's just for them to verify, but you end up taking, I think it's max 3-minute video, but I've heard that shorter is better, that it gets approved a little easier for some reason. But you're going to show your office, your address, street address, stuff like that.

Michael: They're just literally trying to verify you're an actual human being. You're actually there to a device and log in that they can authenticate as really you. It's not your competitor trying to steal your page so that they can put false information and, like, mislead all your prospects.

Brent: For sure. And it's not allowing me to open offices in L.A., Chicago, New York, and wherever without actually being present there. So I have to make some kind of commitment.

Michael: I was going to ask in that vein, like, what if I'm an advisory firm that has multiple locations or, I started here in the D.C. area, but I have a partner in Philly so now, I'm here in D.C., he's up in Philly, can I have a D.C. address and a Philly address or...?

Brent: Yes. Two separate business profiles. Yeah. So for each location, you want to fill out your own business profile. And so we've gone...I work with an advisor in Southern California and he's got a representative in Montana that works out of her office and so her office, pardon me, her house is her home office, so she can set up a Google Business Profile for that. There's a little box that says, "Do you want your address to be public or not?" when you sign up for Google Business Profile, and you can just check that if you don't want people showing up at your door.

Michael: Okay. But if I check my address is not public, Google still knows where I am when people search "financial advisor near me," like that's kind of the hook of this? So I can keep my address private, but I still get the "near me" geography benefits of this.

Brent: Right. Yep. You want to fill it out. A lot of what you're doing on Google Business Profile, there's a little bit for SEO, a lot of it is for conversion. So once somebody finds your profile, they'll click on your listing rather than all the other listings that are there. So your business description doesn't matter if you have your keywords in that or not, but it is your chance to sell your services, your opportunity to sell them, to click on you. Same with date. I see your opening often left empty, but if you look at search on...if you do a search on Google for financial advisor in your area, quite often underneath the listing, it'll say 10-plus years or 20-plus years. And they're getting that from the date and Google decides to put it up sometimes and not, and I have somebody that's over 20 years and it just shows 10-plus years. But that little extra information can help convince people to click on your business. So I would fill it out completely.

There are a couple other elements that are SEO-based. So, the categories and SEO-based section, your address helps. There's a section where it asks, "Are you wheelchair accessible? Are you a military owned? Are you female owned?" That attributes. If you fill out the attributes, if they apply to you, then you may, if somebody is searching for a military-owned financial advisor, you will show up in search for that. That'll help you.

Michael: You don't even have to say it on your website. You've told Google about it. It's verified it's you. And now you're showing up under that search criteria as well.

Brent: Yep. Yep. Then another place that it helps...and this is still one of those loopholes that Google hasn't closed yet. I see it especially with some of the larger national firms, where you'll see them listed in your neighborhood, it'll say Edward Jones, and then it'll be a dash financial advisor Boston or something like that. So where their name is supposed to be, if you have keywords in your name, like if Michael Kitces Financial Advisor is your official business name, you'll have an advantage over somebody just down the street that doesn't have financial advisor, financial planning, something like that in their name. Now, if you add it, if you just go to your Business Google Profile and at the end of your... let's say you're AdvisorRankings, and at the end of that, I say SEO Boise, that's going to help me in the SEO rankings for Boise. Now, Google does not want you to do that. Right now, all we've seen is them removing it or asking you to remove it. We haven't seen penalties, but theoretically they could be. So I'm not advising everybody to rush out and do that, but it does impact SEO.

Michael: And all this is just built around when someone types this apparently remarkably popular "financial advisor near me" search, like, we want our firm's name to come up at the top of the list or, I guess these days, I think you get these are, like, the little business boxes off to the right. If I actually do a search, that's where they come up. I'm trying to be the business that gets acknowledged or featured off to the right.

Brent: Yeah. And they only show 3 there. They used to show 7. They only show 3 now initially. So it's really pretty valuable real estate. Generally it comes for financial advisors right after the paid ads, so near the top of the page, and placement will change a little bit.

The Benefits Of Client Reviews For A Firm's Search Ranking [26:46]

Brent: The one last place or one last thing that really impacts local from your Google Business Profile, and it's fairly new to the financial world and not available to all financial advisors and not even always accepted whether it's available to any financial advisors, but is our Google reviews. They have a huge impact on local rankings. And I know that makes for a mess of discussions right now, but if you look at cities...I see advisors all the time with 140 Google reviews and I've worked with advisors in a mid-sized town that was like, we're ranking 5th or 6th. We'd optimize them completely. They went out and got reviews and now they're number 1 across all the local search terms.

Michael: Because at the end of the day, people are happier when they go to a well-rated business, which means Google is happier when people engage with a well-rated business. So they're just literally putting advisors that have a whole bunch of rankings above those that have 2 human beings who have engaged with this business. Who knows if they even just only have 2 clients.

Brent: Yeah. And it's not even always a race for... I think more does help, but sometimes you'll see somebody with a lower number of reviews than the next, but it is a positive... Google's business, you always think back to what Google's trying to do, they want searchers to continue to search so they can sell ads. And so they want the best result possible to come up for that searcher. And so they're looking for ways to verify and prove that. And locally, one of the things is reviews and there's been research that shows that people trust reviews as much as they do, referrals from family and friends. And so they do help with local SEO. They also help a lot with conversion. If you're searching for a restaurant and you see one with 2 or 3...or an Airbnb, 2 or 3 reviews and another one is 100 and they're all 5 stars, it makes it pretty easy to make your choice.

Michael: So for advisors that want to pursue this, I mean, just, is that the deal, like, you go claim your Google Business Profile, you make your location clear and then hopefully some opportunities start rolling in?

Brent: Yes. That's the starting point, the tip of local SEO, but that's kind of the minimum you need to do to be able to rank there, depending on your community. And again, you mentioned, I think, talking about different size of communities, if you're in a bigger city, probably reviews are going to become a bigger issue. And it tends to be the first review is, I think, the biggest. It seems like there's a big drop off between 0 reviews and 1 review. They want to see that you're doing business with somebody, I guess.

Michael: Okay. Very cool. And then, and I guess this is a whole domain that has opened up since the SEC marketing rule came out and said, yes, you actually are allowed to have third-party review sites. You're allowed to encourage clients to leave reviews as long as you do it consistently for all of them and don't pick clients and all that. They got to be objective, not "I just went to my top 3 clients." And if you want to actually talk about your reviews on your website, there's some bunch of different additional disclosures, if you're going to market, "I'm a 5-star Google reviewed advisor." But just literally encouraging clients to leave reviews. I've seen advisors do it…the closing message in their annual review email is, "Great to see you at the annual review. If you continue to appreciate our services, it would be great if you could leave us a Google review. Click here to leave the review." And just like it's part of their standard template. So every client gets it. So you can show regulators that every client's getting it and you're doing it consistently and not cherry-picking. And then you can start to accumulate some reviews on a business profile page you've claimed, and then hopefully Google starts sending some interested parties your way.

Brent: Exactly. And, as you said, it doesn't happen without asking people. I mean, advisors once in a while get a review. I come to somebody that hasn't asked for it and they might have one, but typically you have to ask for these reviews and people are used to it. They get review requests from everybody. They understand it's a way to help you grow your business and that it's a necessary part of the economy anymore. And I think the email at the quarter review is a good way to do it. There's actually a link you can go to. If you go to your Google Business Profile on Google, once you set it up, just put your business name in, there's a little place that says "get a review," I think it is, or "ask for a review." Anyway, if you click on that, it'll open up the review box right away. And you just take that link and you can send in the email and then it saves some hassle. Now, one of the issues that comes up with that...well, there's several with the new marketing review. First of all, you've, I'm sure, heard the same arguments I have. Some are saying that it's still not okay for you to get reviews the way they read it or their compliance officers read it. Others feel that it is okay. And then, of course, even if it's okay, that's SEC-mandated. A lot of the states still don't allow that for advisors. So those are...

Michael: Some state-based advisors still have a bigger challenge. If you're in a state that hasn't adopted the SEC marketing rule by default or by proactive action, you're technically still subject to whatever that state's marketing rule has been all along, which may or may not allow something along these lines.

Brent: And you may know more than I, I understand that some of the states have changed over, some are looking at it, but I think there's still quite a few that have not, but...

Michael: There are still a number that have not, some because they're just slow to update rules because they've got a strange rule-making process in that particular state, and a few because there are some state regulators whose views when the SEC pushes the envelope forward is to say, great, let's see how it works out for the SEC over the next couple of years. And if it turns out everything's okay, then we'll allow it in our state. And if it turns out that they missed something or screwed something up or created a new problem, because it turns out sometimes regulation has unintended consequences, we'll let the SEC deal with that and then we'll do it in our state.

Brent: Yeah. And I do hear that too, even from individual advisors, we're going to wait and see. But it puts the state, those state registered advisors at a disadvantage marketing from a local SEO perspective. Until they're allowed to do that, their hands are tied a little bit.

Michael: Particularly because a larger SEC-registered advisor in the same state can do it because they're right up the street. But they're not subject to the state regulator because they're over $100 million and they're SEC registered and the SEC said they can't.

Brent: Right. Yeah.

Understanding The Size Of The Market That Can Be Reached With Local SEO [33:43]

Michael: So, for advisors who are listening and want to try this...I mean, I feel like it's fairly straightforward. You go claim your Google Business Profile, put in the info, do the little verification thing to prove that it's really you and no one's hijacking your site. In theory, you're up and running with that. If you want to go one step further, do a client-wide ask to leave you a review and share some feedback about your services or...for the occasional advisor I know who is, like, concerned about doing that, do a client survey and make sure your clients are really happy. And then if your clients are really happy, do a message to all your clients to ask them to leave a Google review if you just want to set it up first. If you've got high retention rates, you probably don't have a problem here, but to each their own if they want to double-check. So is there anything else for advisors who want to get up and running and try this tactic out?

Brent: Yeah. No, from a straight Google Business Profile, that's really it. One thing to understand, and this is a hard part with Google, it is still searcher-centric when you do local. So it can overlap, but typically you're only going to...unless you're in a small area, you're only going to be able to rank where your ZIP code is and probably only a portion of that ZIP code. Chances are you will not reach the map pack for anything other than just your ZIP code or maybe just over the neighboring one, depending where you're located.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, I was going to ask how broad the search is. Because I'm envisioning someone now that's like, "Oh no, should I have built my office closer to the nicer housing developments? Did I pick the wrong street address where I rent or lease or bought a building?" Like, how finely tuned is the location? How small of a bubble am I creating around my office address? Because I'm going to apparently give Google my actual office address.

Brent: Yeah. Depending on the area and how competitive it is, I'm thinking our grid will be 15 by 2 miles. So probably 30 to 50 miles, maybe if it's not too busy. If you're busy, like I look at downtown, I think it was San Diego, the financial area, they don't go a long ways because they bump up into so much competition all over the place.

Michael: Sure. But I mean, when you're talking about numbers, like it might only be 30 miles and, like, okay, I mean, even the dense D.C. suburbs area, I mean, nobody actually wants...nobody will drive 30 miles for an advisor here. So that feels like a very...a pretty generous geographic window to me.

Brent: And it probably is overly generous. Because when you think...for a city, when you think about, you could...So we have these search grids, we can locate your office and see how far out it goes on the grid and we can extend that far. But if you think like you're in the financial sector of whatever city or downtown where it's busy, even if you're in a suburb that's affluent, that has other advisors nearby, only 3...nearby is impacted by central location of the searcher and only 3 get show up in those top 3 rankings. So you could be ranking, meaning you could be in the top 40, top 60, whatever, but never be seen. So it shortens up quite a bit when you need to be in those top 3.

And I think there's a difference between...so local search, if I'm searching for a financial advisor in Boise and I'm sitting in Boise and I just type "financial advisor," it's going to bring up local search results. If I am sitting in Boise or in Denver and type up "financial advisor Boise," add the city to it, it'll also bring up Boise local results. If I type "financial advisor near me," I think it's going to be more condensed to specifically near me, not just the broader Boise area, even though broader Boise area search still has a location-based factor in it. Closer to me, the better still.

Michael: And I guess that helps emphasize all the more why, yes, like, grabbing your local business profile is a good start, but if you can go 1 step further and start inviting clients to leave reviews and actually get some rankings on your profile as well, just given the fact that so few advisors seem to have done this so far, you probably take one material step further up because you might be 1 of...I mean, if you're in a dense area, you might be 1 of 20 or 30 or 50 or more advisors in the area who are doing business and maybe even have a profile, but you might still be only 1 of 10 or 5 or 3 who has a critical mass of reviews.

Brent: Yeah, right. And then, beyond that, a couple of little things you could do, make sure your address is on your website. If you're trying for local, usually I put it in the footer, so your full address and phone number. We call it NAP, name, address, phone number in the footer, so it appears on every page. It's also helpful to build..Google or local has become more complex. One of the signals that was really simple to do and used to be more effective, it still probably has some impact, but very little, in the industry we call them citations. They're basically business directories. So like Google is the main one, Google Business Profile, you're filling out all your information, but Bing Places, Bing has one, Yelp is a citation. Even your social media, Facebook and stuff like that, are active citations, but there are 100s of little Brownbook and Yellow Pages and things like that. I wouldn't go to all of that.

Michael: You're just trying to be listed in those directories as well. So that if Google is just trying to figure out who's a more legitimate business or not, businesses that appear in multiple sources are probably more legitimate than the ones that only appear 1 place.

Brent: Exactly.

Creating Tailored Content For Better Organic SEO [40:00]

Michael: So you've highlighted a few times that just this discussion is pretty specific to local SEO and just all these people who are either literally searching for "financial advisor near me," or maybe they're searching for financial advisor generically. So what's the other version of SEO that's not local?

Brent: Yeah. So today I'm referring to it as non-local, but we really call it organic. And there's a couple places it comes. It's the blue links that appear below the ads and the local listings, if they're appearing there. So there can be local organic. So, for example, when I said, if you're living on the outskirts of...if you're living in Baltimore and want to show up for Washington, D.C., you could write a great paper addressing how you help people in Washington, D.C. save all their money and have a great retirement. And that possibly could rank not in the map pack, but in the organic listings below for "financial advisor Washington, D.C." So it's a difference.

Now, the other thing you do getting away from local, anytime somebody searches for a solution that's not one of those broad terms...when I say broad terms for local, it's financial advisor, financial planner, wealth management, retirement planning, estate planning. Basically, the main title in the CFP categories, right? When you get away from that, so somebody searching for a niche, they're searching financial advisor for physicians or financial advisor that...what was the one? Chick-fil-A I heard on...

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pandowealth. Daniel Hannoush and team are all in on Chick-fil-A franchisers.

Brent: Yeah. So if they're searching very specifically like that, and there are some markets that...they don't search for every market, but some do that. Then they're not going to be brought to local results. They're going to be brought the top ones that are ranked for...financial advisors that are ranked for serving physicians or musicians or whatever it is. And then the other way is a problem, I have a problem that I want fixed. I'm trying to figure out, how do I set up my estate plan to hand off my wealth to my grandchildren and minimize taxes? So now what's going to happen is those articles are going to appear. It's not going to show a financial advisor in a map. It's going to show articles that address that question. So that's organic SEO.

Michael: So help us understand a little more then what we would be doing to get an outcome like that. If I am financial advisor for physicians or, frankly, most commonly for folks who are listening, financial advisor for retirees would probably be our number one in this context. So what would I be doing if I want to get results, get client opportunities for people searching for that?

Brent: Yeah. So the first thing you have to do is figure out what people are searching for. So the most common thing I hear when I ask potential clients who their target audience is, it is people 5 years away from retirement. Okay. So let's say we target that, which because it's so broad is a very, very difficult niche to hit. That's the client that everybody wants, right? So nobody's searching or very few people are searching 5 years within retirement. So that's not going to work. That's not a keyword.

Michael: It's not that, like, people who are within 5 years of retirement don't use Google. The point is just, like, no one likely really types into Google, "Financial advisor for person who plans to retire in the next 5 years." That might be who you're going for, but no one...I can envision people actually doing, "Financial advisor for physicians," or, "Financial advisor for Chick-fil-A," but no one does, "Financial advisor for people who are planning to retire 5 years from now."

Brent: Exactly. Yes. So you find out what they're searching. So they're more likely searching for... they're getting close to retirement. Their parents are getting older, so they may be looking for inheritance tax on a house. "I've just inherited my dad's house, my parents' house, how do I process that?" So you look for...in those cases, you have to narrow it down to the questions, the problems that they're asking. And then once you know the keyword, and it could be as simple as "financial planner for physicians," you need to dedicate a page, at least a page to that keyword. So if you want to rank for something, at least within the main keyword of "financial planning for physicians," you need to dedicate a page to that and create content around that. Now, one page can rank for many variations of a keyword, hundreds sometimes, financial planner for physicians, financial planner for doctors, financial advisor for medical, whatever.

Michael: Right. Because Google's smart and sometimes figures out you didn't type this word, but we think that's what you meant.

Brent: Yes. Now, just a little note on that. It's getting smarter, but there's still...if you even locally search "financial planner Boston" and "financial advisor Boston," search results are probably different.

Michael: Fair enough, although I feel like some of us would actually say that with pride, like, "Yeah, because financial planning means more than financial advisor." But point well taken. I'm assuming if we go down that logical path, some people are searching for "wealth manager near me," which probably shows up a little bit differently as well. A few people might be doing only "advisor near me," which shows up a little bit differently as well because, like, those aren't just synonyms, they actually imply a slightly different search for a slightly different service.

Brent: Yes, the keyword still matters a little bit because I think partially too Google's got to differentiate. The people that claim themselves as financial advisors were more likely to rank.

Michael: So I want to step back again to this example. So I come up with something they're searching for and I make a page on my website that addresses it, answers the question, talks about it, tackles it. So I kind of get that conceptually. How do I figure out what they're searching for? Like, what are they searching? Like, what am I supposed to make a page on my website about?

Brent: Yeah, that gets more and more difficult now. It used to be kind of typical to hear, "Just write good content, don't worry about...just write good content, you'll come across the topics." And of course you need pages that are going to address that very specific search that you want to be found for, but one of the issues with SEO right now in the financial industry is that it has become so competitive because you've got so many financial advisors writing, RIAs, you've got personal financial blogs, and you've got, of course, the major media companies that cover all the basic stuff that you're trying to outrank, Investopedia and stuff like that. And that's very, very difficult.

So there are things...we do very in-depth keyword research and try to find subjects that will reach your target market, but also that you can rank for. Now, taking that back a little bit, I think if you think about your services, it's a good idea to have content relevant to all your services. So if you're doing retirement income planning...so you've got your retirement income planning page, probably have a retirement planning page that links to the retirement income planning page. And we call it pillars and clusters. You have a pillar content that is the main topic, and cluster content, which is the smaller articles around it. So you've got your retirement planning, retirement income planning. Now, clusters around that, you've got Social Security, you've got retirement savings, you've got other sources of income, taxes, those things. But each of those can be broken down into smaller topics. That's a lot of work, I know.

To find keywords, if you go to something like Google Keyword Planner and type in what you want to do, you can find some things. Then if you search that term, you can see if financial advisors are showing up for that term or if it's all just major media companies, and then it gives you an idea of whether you could possibly rank for it. What you're going to find is you're going to have to go to narrower and narrower and narrower, more specific content to really rank, to be able to rank for the topics you want. Sometimes we use shoulder content. So we want somebody to come in for retirement income planning. It's a really competitive word. We're never going to retire, get that. But we have that page because that's the copy that's going to sell our prospective client when they get there. But we find smaller subtopics to write articles about that we can rank for, bring them in on that subject, then send them over to our retirement income planning page. I might be nerding out too much there.

Serving A Client Niche To Boost SEO [49:38]

Michael: No, it's helpful for context to me. It indirectly highlights how the firms that take a narrower focus. I mean, I feel like for a lot of us, it's terrifying to think about picking some kind of niche or specialization because you're thinking of all the people that you might turn off, you might not connect with and how that narrows you, but from the flip side, I mean, if we want to go back to the example earlier, like if you want to go after Chick-fil-A operators and you become a financial advisor firm for Chick-fil-A, you're probably going to be top 3 in Google because there's just only like 2 or 3 of them that do that. So, granted, you narrowed yourself to a smaller universe, but there are actually a whole lot of Chick-fil-A franchises across the country. That's still a lot of people and you can be top 3 for anybody that searches that just by putting your stake in that ground and then making Google aware that you do that, that gets you 90% of the way there on its own.

Whereas for, like, the average financial advisor, well, I work with small business owners, which includes Chick-fil-A operators, like cool, but no one who's running a Chick-fil-A is searching for financial advisor for business owners because it's too broad and it's not relevant enough for them anyways. Either they're searching for financial advisor for Chick-fil-A operators, or they're just actually looking for tips on how to manage their Chick-fil-A more profitably as a business owner. And they're going to read Chick-fil-A business optimization advice. I don't know what that is or what those things are out there, but we write content on financial advisors, optimizing their businesses, and I can tell you there are definitely financial advisors looking for that. So people do show up for that content. But it'd be like the context that I said, it all starts with picking a thing that's just not crowded in the first place.

Brent: Yes. Thank you. Let me pull back a little bit. You're exactly right. So a niche is really important for SEO for ranking beyond locally. And we have that same discussion. I know that you're very pro-niche and for SEO, you almost have to be. Local can be part of that niche, but secondly, or separately, have another one. It used to be that, financial planning for women was a niche, financial planning for professionals was a niche, business owners. That's no longer enough. You're still in too broad a subject area. You need to pick a specialty, pick a certain hospital, pick Chick-fil-A or another major firm in your area. And the more narrow you get, the better chance you have of reaching that target. And on the plus side, it's, it is a smaller group of people, but I think the same is true of local. If you're finding those people that are searching, "financial planner for Chick-fil-A," you have somebody that's further along the sales cycle, more likely to engage with you than somebody that is just searching generically, generic questions.

Michael: Right. So does that mean, just for advisors who are listening, I guess, how focused do I have to be before this is just not realistically worth my time? I mean, at some point it's just like, or I can go do seminars, or webinars, or build relationships with centers of influence, or all the other things that we do as financial advisors to market. Like, how narrow do I realistically have to be for this to be a good idea for me to spend time on?

Brent: Yeah. That's a good question. And I say all of that with the idea that it's narrowing more. So I still am helping financial advisors get found by physicians, and that's showing enough. But as I see financial advisors hearing more and more often that they need to find a niche, more of them are choosing the same niches, business owners, physicians. And I think those are still reachable now. They're getting more challenging, but...

Michael: I would expect "financial advisor for physicians" is actually probably getting more crowded now.

Brent: Yeah, it is for sure. And so you're going to have to start looking even in more detail. And some of that is go to a specific company. I know an advisor that's doing well SEO-wise and you mentioned webinars. What he's done is done webinars for very specific tech companies and then made that webinar a blog post with content and optimize it and stuff for the keywords that he's talked about. And that's now an SEO document that's ranking for him. But he did how to...something about your RSUs [Restricted Stock Units] for...it was a tech company and it was very, very specific on RSUs and speaking to that tech company, like you do Chick-fil-A. If there's a major company near you, you could start specializing in their retirement plan. And it takes a while to get that.

The narrower you can get, or even if you're going to physicians, have your broad physician page, but start narrowing in, don't expect your page "financial planning for physicians" to bring in all the content and rank where you want to go, but it's your base page. Start with, what do physicians ask about, about their retirement plan? If they own an office, they probably need an exit strategy. They may need succession planning. So succession planning for physicians, exit planning for medical practice owners, stuff like that starts to...

Michael: Yeah, especially if I want to find doctors who are getting ready to sell their medical practice and retire, I can go after "financial advisor for physicians" or I can go with...write an article about how to value your medical practice.

Brent: Exactly, yeah.

Michael: The people who are going to search for "the valuation of a medical practice," like people who are thinking about selling one in the next couple of years.

Brent: Yeah. And then you can see...If you have both, if you have a broad pillar page for "financial planning for physicians," mention that you help physicians with succession planning there, write a big article on how to value your business or your medical practice and link it back to your general sales page, your financial planning page. And the more content you have like that, and the more it's linked together internally, the more Google sees you as an expert rather than just somebody that does offer this, it sees a network of content around helping physicians.

How Long It Takes For An SEO Strategy To Show Results [1:01:06]

Michael: So for advisors that pursue something like this, just as you've been through this with firms where you implement it for them, help us understand, if I go this path, how long does it take before I get to see some results and what kinds of results are realistic to expect, how to anchor my expectations here if I'm thinking about this?

Brent: So with straight local, if you're just looking locally, it can happen a little bit more quickly. If you set up your stuff, now there's always...

Michael: Now, what does more quickly mean? Like, I don't have a context for what not quickly would be.

Brent: Yeah. So if you're trying to do it through a content strategy, more organic, reaching national, reaching your niche, kind of a typical process, it depends on a number of things. First of all, where you're starting, Google wants to know what keywords you're related to financial planning, retirement planning. They then find all those pages that are related to "financial planning Boise," and then they want to order them in perceived authority. And there's a number of authority signals that they use. And then that's how you rank. And so part of it is where you're starting now, have you been existing for a while? Does your website have a number of years on it? Have you been producing content for a while? If so, your authority is probably higher than somebody just starting out. All of that is an advantage, the authority signals. Locally, we've worked with a client in Massachusetts and got them going and they were well-established, they had some content, but they got their first local client relatively quickly, I think it was within 6 weeks, and you can see local change that fast. So I would say within certainly less than 6 months, you'll see kind of where you're going to settle out and if you need to do more, and then it gets a little bit more tricky.

Now, when you're going with content-based, it depends a little bit on content velocity too, the more that you publish, the faster it'll happen. It's got to be quality content, and a long time ago, you could publish all kinds of garbage and get rankings. Google went and very much enforces a high quality level, but the faster you have more high-quality content out, the better it is for you. Typically, I tell our clients to expect between 12 and 18 months, maybe up to 2 years of content, 2 articles a month kind of thing.

Michael: With 2 articles a month. So you're putting out a lot of content.

Brent: Yeah. And that's starting fairly new to it. If you're starting mid, you could probably take a little bit off, but I think a year is...I would be reluctant to predict anything under a year.

Michael: So I'm just struck by this as well. Local, okay, take less than an hour, claim your Google My Business Profile, Google Profile now they've called that, claim my profile, set up my info, do my little video verification, and I might get a client in the next 6 weeks or 6 months. Do it organically and I have to write like 2 articles a month for 2 years to get results. I'm actually very passionate about content-based SEO, so I don't mean to be negative on it, but like, those are really strikingly different parameters around how quickly you may be able to drive results.

Brent: Definitely. Here's the caveat. So even though we optimize a little bit differently, have different steps for local versus organic, ultimately they kind of combine and your authority is going to impact all of it. And your authority is more based on organic activity than local. Other than reviews, reviews is a way to build up authority locally. And authority overall, prior to just a couple of years ago, most authority was gained from backlinks, other sites linking to you. So the newspaper likes your article or some personal financial blogger likes your article, links to it, they have high authority, they link to your page, they share some of their authority. Now, anybody that's creating content is gaining links. You don't even know about it, but they do gain over time. Links aren't quite as strong as they used to be, backlinks aren't. And reviews have given a new sign of authority for local, but still it is hard to build authority without creating content alongside it. So for me, they kind of go hand in hand.

Michael: Yeah. Are there other authority signals emerging that we should be thinking about besides reviews, if you're doing local and backlinks, if you're doing content?

Brent: Not a lot. So thank you, I should clarify that. Links aren't getting less important in authority signal, but overall that signal is mellowing out a little bit to other signals overall in SEO. Links are playing a lesser role. Links are still the number one by far along with reviews on the local side. The age of your website, how often it's being updated helps, the more... Google's trying to get where they can signal the ideas where, even if it's not a backlink, but a mention, let's say you get mentioned in "The Wall Street Journal," they're trying to work towards that. It's not there yet, but there's a hope that they'll bring some of the real-world authority more into the online authority scores.

But backlinks are still the same thing. There's ways to build backlinks. They're really time- or money-intensive, resource intensive. I find now, unless you have, like, a very specific keyword that you've done everything you can, but you absolutely have to rank for it, we can start building backlinks there. But in general, if you're producing good quality content, the backlinks will come with it naturally.

Michael: Because I just know the market I'm going after and I'm writing articles about things that they would care about and be searching for, and that tends to find its way to me anyways.

Brent: Yes. Without your knowing it.

Michael: Well, I always like it when business comes without me knowing it. That sounds lovely. That's great.

How Brent Became An SEO Expert [1:07:36]

Michael: So help us understand your journey, how you came to the point that SEO for financial advisors is your thing that you do.

Brent: Yeah. I was a high school teacher, or pardon me, an elementary school physical education teacher, high school girls basketball coach for about 15 years. And started looking around at…well, I was actually planning for my family, what do I need to do…set up a 529 or at that time was just generic college savings. And I'd always been interested in stocks and investing. As a senior in high school, I remember calling, I was in Canada, a local advisor and asking, "How do you...?" At that time, I knew them as stock investors. "How do you become a stockbroker, investor?" And he said, "Well, the first thing you need to do is have gray hair." And I thought, oh, super. So that was it. I was done with that idea for a long time and moved on and found other things. Anyways, I was reading some article about advisors and I started getting more interested and thinking, is this something I want to do in my next life? And there was a big article, and I can't remember in what newspaper, but it was talking about how there was going to be a shortage of advisors in the future. And I started thinking, this is something I really enjoy. I could do it.

So I went back to school and got my MBA in financial planning, took all the CFP classes. I never took the exam. I was going to become an RIA. And then, along the way, I got involved, with a friend, a little recreational kind of hobby sales site online. I knew nothing about...this would be 2008, 2009, knew nothing about what was going on online, but he kind of came...he knew how to build a website. He said, "I hate marketing, have no interest in it. If you're going to do the marketing, you need to start doing some reading." And I started reading Gary Vaynerchuk had just got a book out, "Crush It!" and all this stuff that was happening online sounded really exciting, really interesting. And I particularly liked SEO. It's very analytical, very strategic, and it was very much the same stuff that brought me into coaching that brought me into SEO. And I've talked about this in other places, but there's very much... there's a strategy, there's research, there's things you have to do, steps you have to do. There are clear winners and losers. There's a scoreboard in Google. And so I really liked the SEO side of it.

And so I started digging more and more into that and thinking this was interesting, and this friend of mine actually got me my first financial client and I was working with him while I was teaching still. And, at that point, when I graduated, it seemed like I was closer. I actually had a couple SEO clients. I really liked both and wasn't sure which way to go, but I looked at financial advisor and I had to take the CFP and then I still needed all the experience requirements and all that stuff. Or on the SEO side, I already had clients. I just needed to walk out on my gym and get going. And so I chose that and I've really enjoyed it. It's been very challenging, Google goes through constant changes. SEO has become more competitive. And I've still dabbled. I thought it was a good combination for me with my background and information and interest in both to work with financial advisors, that seems kind of like a natural fit, and so here I am.

The Services Brent Offers To Advisors [1:11:12]

Michael: So what is the business offering at this point? Like, what do you actually do? What are the services of the firm? What do you charge for doing it?

Brent: Oh yeah. We've broken it up into... we've productized it to make it a little simpler. So we've broken up...we do all the foundational stuff. So we go into a deep dive into an advisor's analytics and their Google search console, and then we have several tools that we use strictly for SEO, kind of figure out where they're at now and what the best strategy going forward. We help in we break them out...the first few months, we break it up into monthly engagements, and so that deep dive is the first month. Second month, depending on priorities, could be local. We'll do everything like go through and check your Google Business Profile, optimize it, build citations for others make sure your website's got everything it needs.

Another month we'll spend on your website as it is, make sure it's technically functioning as it needs to be, because that's part of an SEO thing, speed is an SEO factor. Google wants your website to provide a good user experience. Plus, your service pages need to be optimized for those terms, whether they're going to be local or for physicians or whatever, they need to be optimized. Any existing content you have, at some point, we'll go through that and try to get more from that, and we're really effective at that. So many advisors are producing content are really, really close to having and seeing results. Sometimes we just need to add a couple sections, 500 words here or there and it just totally changes everything.

Michael: What kind of changes, like just what are we doing that's so close to not there?

Brent: Yeah. So Google really likes length, and I think you've figured that out. If anybody's read your articles, you know they like length, they like expertise. And so quite often, and I totally get it, writing is super time-intensive. I love writing. I'm really slow at it. So it takes a lot of time, and business owners, whether financial advisors or SEO companies, we all have other things to do, wear many hats. So it's hard to spend time. It's easier to write that 300 to 500-word article, "4 Tips to Better Retirement." But even if you find a topic that's really more aligned with SEO, more narrow, I guess, or specific, that 300 to 500 words is probably not going to rank. We find we rarely write anything under 2,000 words now. And so quite often that's it. We have tools that show, oh, this article is ranking for all these keywords on the second and third page. And so what do we need to do to move them up? Well, some of it, there's sections that are missing that we have tools that show that other articles that are ranking about this topic also cover this subsection and subsection. So we add those, but quite often it's let's find valuable content, not content for content sake, but there are sections that other people have written about that we have missed. Let's fill in those gaps. And quite often that's all that needs to be done. And they'll start... move from the third page up to the first page.

Michael: Interesting. So typical engagements for you are this, like, multi-month process, 6-month process or something where you just kind of tackle a thing every month over time and make progress?

Brent: Yeah. And the one other thing we do is help create a content calendar. So early on, that's usually one of the first things we do is, if this is your target audience, here are the type of articles you want. And then we write content briefs for them, which is basically an outline of the article that tells them what the title is, what subsection should be. Although they can include others if there's ones that are relevant to their service and then how long the article needs to be if they, if they don't want to write it, we have a whole writing staff that can help with that. But yeah, it's typically the first 6 months and we simply break it up…there needs to be a foundation of stuff for SEO to be successful. And there's enough work there to get it set up that it becomes...part of it is it gives us more time to do the work, but a lot of times it comes down to budget, we can spread that cost over 6 months for the advisor rather than have it all up front or all in the first 2 months. And so we can speed it up. If the advisor would rather spend more each month, we can speed that process up.

And it's always month to month. We don't require a contract. After we finish that 6 months, we typically stay on, not always, but typically stay on a month-to-month retainer helping with content briefs, the outlines, and picking keywords and posting their stuff. And then monitoring, 6 months in, I said we should know whether your optimization for local SEO is working or not. If not, we need to dig in and see what's going on. And so most clients do stay on a year or 2 years. We're happy to...we like to be a partner in that business and as long as they're seeing value, we hope they'll stay with us. But not everyone does, some just get the 6 months in and they feel they have a good feel for it and move on, and that's great too.

Michael: And how do you price engagements like this?

Brent: Yeah. So our basic foundation right now is $1,300 a month. That includes one outline, we don't write any content, that costs extra. And then it drops down. Depending on what level of service they need, it drops down to $850 a month to $1,100 a month after that, $850 with the content brief. The first article, we actually have a really... I'm really proud of our writing process. We've gotten it set where we create some really, really good content. But our first article, because we've already written the brief, we charge $250 for that. After that, each article... that's each month, each article after that month is $500. And we do the content separately as well now, it's kind of a new offering for us.

Michael: Interesting. So I'm thinking about this, like my starting point may be, okay, like, let's spend 6 months, rehab my claim or rehab my local SEO, get this stuff figured out, make sure my website overall is just in a good state to drive some results for this, get some foundation in place, and that's essentially like $7,000 or $8,000, or $1,300 a month for 6 months. And I could either stop there or I can maintain for ongoing monitoring, but I'm sort of inferring if I maintain for ongoing monitoring, it's probably more likely I'm doing the organic content version of SEO than the local SEO, which means I need to be doing content on an ongoing basis, which means now I'm probably working with you on these content services. So that's when I'm talking to you about articles and such. Is that right?

Brent: Yeah. And so about half of our clients write their own articles and we write for about half. And to go up, if you wanted to, so let's say you wanted us to write 1 article a month in SEO, you're looking at about $1,550 a month for the first one and then $1,100 following that. And yeah, it's all month to month, but yeah, that's right about the pricing. And I don't think you should stop after 6 months. Even if you quit working with your company, make sure...like SEO, you have to keep going, otherwise everybody catches up and passes. So if you're comfortable writing and know kind of where we're going, that's great. Just don't think you can do SEO for 6 months and then stop. It just doesn't... it's marketing. You have to continue to market your business forever.

The Value Of Evergreen Content [1:19:13]

Michael: So I guess just in that vein, having done this for so many years now, what do you find most advisors still just miss or misunderstand or don't get when we start talking about the opportunities for SEO for financial advisors?

Brent: Yeah, a lot of it is what to write about, and that's a tough one now. It used to be less difficult as I've said a number of times, but advisors tend to want to write...The articles I see most often are market commentary, which are fine. It's good information. People that visit your site see how you look at the market, see how you do things. For existing clients, that where they get all their information. It's really good for them to see it. It has very little SEO value. Or it might be...a lot of times it's tied to a news event. Okay. Russia has attacked Ukraine, this is what to expect to happen. And so...

Michael: Right. I mean, no matter how genuinely insightful your investment insights are about the war overseas, you're not going to beat CNBC and MarketWatch and all the news sites for anything related to investments and current market news.

Brent: Exactly. And it's very timely, right? Like, even if you were being found, it's only in the news cycle for 2 weeks or whatever, and then like a year later, it has no value to you. So you want to...And the other one I see is, stay in the market-type content. So Russia, "The market just dropped, here's why you need to stay in it." Or "We're expecting a recession, here's why you need to stay in the market." And I understand that because their clients are saying, do I need to get out of the market? But again, that's content written for your client, which is okay. There's other reasons to write other than SEO. But it's not going to help you with SEO.

And then, so the topics, subject areas are becoming more difficult. And honestly, you want to look at evergreen. So evergreen, meaning it lasts a long time. So you find something that people are asking and you try to put a piece that answers that question. And it'll still show up 2 years from now, maybe now you update it every year, and I think that's a good idea because it's becoming so competitive. But it is getting harder to find those subject areas because you do have to be more and more specific.

The other thing I think I really see advisors having problems with that I see, we talk about it, be prepared. It could happen faster, but be prepared for a year-and-a-half, a year to year-and-a-half, whatever. And after 6 months, they'll just find another shiny object and move on. And if you're going to invest in SEO and make it pay off, you really have to have time in the market, right? You have to put the time in the market to make it work. And so don't give up on it too soon.

The Low Point For Brent In Building His Business [1:22:16]

Michael: So what was the low point for you in going the path of trying to build a business doing this for financial advisors?

Brent: I started in 2010, I feel very comfortable in my business right now, but it was a real grind. It started out like most business owners. I knew my service or product, my SEO, and I thought I knew how to run a business. I mean, I had an MBA, I thought, okay, I'm set, I'm ready to go. But I didn't really understand what it meant to be in business. It took me a while to learn. In fact, I eventually went to a coach just a couple years ago, a coach for agencies, and it changed everything. My SEO is getting better every year, but finally it took a coach to help me price my product properly, help me learn to delegate. And those are things I'm still trying to work on. I've delegated some and I realize now one of the things I'm going through now is I need to delegate more.

But low point, it was a real struggle kind of probably 4 or 5 years in, I started out fast and I thought, oh, this is going to grow quick, and then I didn't see any growth. And after a while, it was frustrating and disappointing. I built a very demanding, low-paying job rather than a business that was going to set me free. You see the expectations all around, "Quit your job, start your business, become an entrepreneur, follow your passion." And any of us that have done it, or for most of us that have done it, it's not easy. It's not something somebody should take lightly. There's a lot of struggles.

Michael: I'm struck by what you're describing. I mean, this is in the context of a consulting service to advisors, but to me there's so many parallels literally to what we go through as advisors as well because we're in a service business to our clients too, right. We all underprice when we get going, almost all of us struggle to delegate in various ways because I want my clients served a certain way. That's why I came in this business to do this. So I'm concerned about delegating. I don't want someone else to not serve my clients the way that I believe my clients should be served. Just the parallels are striking, including that if you build your firm and price too low, you fill up your client base to capacity, and then you can't afford to hire anyone because you're not actually charging enough to have financial room to hire. And now you're stuck because you can't grow without hiring and you can't afford to hire to grow.

Brent: Exactly. And it's hard, like you can't afford to go to coaching and you can't… you're kind of stuck in a box. And I finally just said, I have to spend the money and I know at some points you feel like you can't, but it made a world of difference. But it is, it's a cycle and it's really easy to create a very difficult low-paying job. It's harder to create a business.

Michael: And so part of what you have now is going to be the end result of repricing of "Now that I'm actually clear on the value I provide and what a reasonable market rate is, this will let me serve people well and actually grow and run my business."

Brent: Yeah. And I've been able to bring help in. Now, the thing where I'm at now is I've hit that point again. Originally, I think, like most businesses, nobody else can do this as well as me. And so I didn't want to hand anything off. And finally I did hand some stuff off. And now at a point where I'm at the next or even the third level of stuff that I'm protective of. Okay, now I've handed off all the easy stuff, now how do I hand this stuff off? And I still want to be involved. One thing with SEO that I think is different than a lot of marketing companies, I don't believe SEO companies can build to scale, we can't properly service hundreds of clients. There's just no way. So we work with a handful at a time. Right now I think I have 10, usually 10–12 has been typical. I'm hoping to build my roster up to 20 over the next year.

And so it takes a lot of knowledge, but one of the things that's been hugely helpful for me is taking some of that stuff off my desk and giving it to others. I'm trying to move more into the overseeing the strategic part of it, rather than the implementation. And I think that's been huge for me. And it does, you all of a sudden have a little bit extra money to bring in those clients, or to bring in the help that you need. And right now, my help is part-time contractors. People that I've worked with for now a year-and-a-half, but we're working...looking maybe in the fall to bring our first full-time employee in.

Michael: And I guess the nice angle as well, I mean, as you noted, there's a segment of folks that will stay on in the long-term for the support and monitoring, but others, like, they'll come, they'll do their thing, they'll do their rehab, they'll get reoriented, they'll maintain on their own because now they know how to create the content that serves the client base they're looking for and they move on. So presumably you get a pretty steady flow of fresh challenges and cool new advisors to work with because there actually is a healthy rotation that some people will kind of do their thing and graduate and move on.

Brent: Yeah. I suspect it's like advisors. You look for the long-term relationship, but it's not a fit for everyone and you have some attrition. And that's, where I need to be as the head of the business, I need to be out more marketing, facing our perspective clients rather than working hands-on with the clients quite as much, and I think as a business owner, that's where you need to eventually look to get to a little bit.

What Brent Would Tell His Younger Self [1:28:19]

Michael: So anything else you know now about working with advisors in the SEO domain that you wish you knew like 10-plus years ago when you were starting down this path?

Brent: Yeah. So I do think as SEO has changed, I've learned a lot, but I know advisors really look at this. Client services and reporting I always knew was big, it's bigger than I ever expected. It's still something we deal with, reporting each month to make sure that they know that we're doing stuff. And I hear advisors talking all this time. You probably know this because I don't know exactly, something like 85% or 75% of advisors feel that what differentiates them is their customer service. And, of course, that can't be.

Michael: Literally, yeah, like 75% of us cannot have above-average service.

Brent: Right. There's a book, "Unreasonable..." [Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect] on customer service and restaurants, and it was an amazing read and it gives you some ideas of what can be done. Also that low prices bring in often more difficult clients, not that they're more difficult people, but they have a lot riding on that smaller amount of money that they have in there. They're not as patient. And I understand that as a business owner, but I think if you price yourself right, you can avoid some of the difficulties that are brought with lower budgets and higher expectations.

Michael: It's not just that they're price shoppers per se or 'cheap', but just if they're budget constrained, they may be really anxious about getting, like, the most perfect, fast results from these dollars, because if they're that constrained, this might be like a 'Hail Mary' pass for them. And that that's a tough place to be from a service provider perspective.

Brent: It is. It's a lot of pressure for everybody involved, including the owner, but us as well. One thing that I found that kind of prevents us from helping, it goes back to delegating, right? Like, I don't want to delegate my business. And I find where we struggle the most to get results is where advisors want to maintain more control over that element. And I understand that they want a hand in their messaging and stuff like that, but they want to do things the way they have always done it, but they'd like for us to get results with them doing it that way. And it makes it really hard. And I understand that whole thing as a business owner, it's hard to let go of stuff, but, if you're hiring...my hope is if you hire an expert, you'll listen to that expertise. And I know advisors go through that too. I'm sure every one of you has a client that doesn't listen to your advice but comes to you wondering why they're not doing better than they are.

Michael: Yeah. Well, what's the thing, if you keep doing it the way you've always done it, you'll keep getting the results you've always gotten. If you're trying to get some different outcomes, you do have to be prepared for some changes.

Brent: And that's often uncomfortable. Right? Those changes.

Best Practices For Getting Started With SEO [1:31:24]

Michael: So any advice you would give younger and newer advisors if they're getting started today and want to make sure they get off on, like, the right SEO foot for the long run?

Brent: Yeah. Do your local SEO, set it up properly. And then write.I know it's probably easy after this conversation to say, "Okay, I don't know what to write about. I'm going to throw my hands up in the air." We find subjects all the time. We get it with an advisor and go through their content and find subject areas that they're ranking for and bringing a lot of traffic in that we never even thought of. So I recommend that everybody do produce content. I'm a firm believer, like Michael, you are, that the content is valuable. It's helpful in bringing people to your website, but even after they get there, it's helpful in converting them, teaching more about how you look at things. Look at the services you offer and break them down into finer points, write that. Listen to the questions that your clients ask you and write very specific answers about that, but be aware of length. Like, if you're going to write a topic, go search that topic, look at the top 10 articles that are ranking for that already, check what subtopics do they include, how long is that article? And then just start producing content regularly, whether it's once a month, once a week. I know, again, more often better, but it's always how it'll help in the long run, but understand it is a slow process to getting started.

Michael: Yeah. I used to get questions for years as we built our platform like "How do you figure out what to write? How do you come up with this steady stream of topics that you keep putting out on Kitces.com?" And the truth for years and years and years, and basically still, was nothing more than I write articles to answer the questions that people ask me and I rank them by how often I get asked.

Brent: That's great. Yeah. There's a marketer person I've followed since I started, Marcus Sheridan, he wrote a book called "They Ask, You Answer." He was a pool contractor and during the Great Recession, and of course, nobody wanted luxury pools at that time, they had relied completely on paid advertising up to that point. And so he just dug in and learned how to write content and produce videos. And now that's what he does is help other businesses do that. But he basically did the same thing, wrote questions about every question a client asked or customer asked, he would write an article. Now you've got to be worried about length a little bit and stuff like that, but it still is a good starting place, I think, for advisors. And truly, most sites, even the ones that get traffic that I go to, there's just a couple articles...even though they're writing all the time, there's a couple articles bringing in most of the traffic.

Michael: The 80/20 rule holds up pretty much everywhere.

Brent: It does, yep.

What Success Means To Brent [1:34:24]

Michael: So as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success and just one of the themes that comes up is the word success means very different things to different people. So you're now on this wonderful path of building the SEO business for advisors and priced well and delegating and scaling and all the good things that come as the business goes. And so the business seems to be in a great, successful place now. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

Brent: I've always been a person that set goals and kind of pursued those goals, but they were always very much about awards and recognition and as I've gotten older, I've realized that that's changed a little bit. I'm still very goal-oriented, but it's more a feeling of satisfaction. Really within my business now where I take the greatest pride is I know the business is functioning. Now we want to provide a really good service for advisors and work closely with those clients. And it's the same thing in my personal life now. Again, as I'm aging and getting closer to retirement, I just lost my father a year ago, it's about I'm trying to help take care of my mom and I want to make sure she's taken care of. I have a daughter with an autoimmune disease, and I want to make sure that she is well taken care of. My wife is younger than me and I want to make sure if something were to happen to me before her that she's taken care of. So it's kind of more about just being dependable and being there for the people that are depending on me, whether they're in my personal life or in my professional life.

Michael: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Brent, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Brent: Thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure.

Michael: Thank you. Thank you.