Financial advisors often get new clients via word of mouth, but there are other ways to expand your base of customers. For instance, getting your website in front of people who don’t know you is a productive way to expand your potential client base. But are you passing up valuable business by not optimizing your website for search engines?

According to separate studies published by specialist website Search Engine Watch, the top search result in Google can get anywhere between 18% and 35% of clicks. Getting some of that web traffic could give you a whole new stream of business leads. There are other search engines, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Bing, but Google Inc.’s namesake service commands two-thirds of the market for search engine queries.

Optimizing a website to get good search rankings is a difficult task because Google is constantly revising its indexing and page-ranking algorithms. Google issues about nine updates each week to its algorithms; and while the firm publishes guidelines for webmasters, the intricacies of its ranking mechanism are still largely opaque. This means that some of the metrics that people used to rely on when working out how well Google would rank a website are now less significant.

For example, Google had said as early as 2008 that PageRank, the scoring mechanism originally introduced by Google co-founder Larry Page, was part of a much larger system _ and had less importance than it had had in the past. Still, many people rely too heavily on this mechanism.

But then, there are many illinformed people trying to optimize websites for searches. Many rely on spammy, underhanded techniques to make their websites stand out in search results. These “blackhat” search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners attempt to game the system by finding loopholes in the algorithms that search engines use to evaluate content.

In the early days of the Internet, “keyword stuffing” was a popular blackhat SEO tool. SEO experts would take the keywords for which they wished to rank, and would stuff them madly into their website content. One very early technique involved repeating the same keywords and phrases many times over, using text that was coloured the same as the web page background. Search engines are now wise to keyword stuffing.

Similarly, “backlinking” was a scurrilous, if effective technique. Google likes it when lots of websites include hyperlinks to a particular web page because that shows that the web page is popular. However, blackhats have abused this by creating hundreds of websites solely for the purpose of linking to each other. These link farms have created problems for Google, which is committed to the quality of its backlinks.

The punishment for blackhat SEO is simple _ and severe: websites get “sandboxed.” That means Google effectively “de-indexes” the offending website so that it won’t show up in search results. So, although blackhat SEO can result in some short-term gains, it isn’t sustainable and can have damaging long-term effects.

In contrast, “whitehat” SEO, in which people play by the rules, is a far better long-term proposition _ especially for financial advisors, who are concerned with building a trusted brand.

Understanding how to optimize your website for search engines is an exercise in empathy. An advisor must guess what his or her audience might search for and then create a list of those phrases. This is what’s known as “keyword research,” and it should be the basis for any SEO campaign.

Much will depend on your specific niche. If you focus on wealth management, for example, your search terms will be different than someone who specializes in estate planning or U.S. investments.

Also think about your locale. Someone in Vancouver looking for an insurance broker might well type in his or her locale. Or he or she may include “B.C.” or “Surrey” in his or her search.

You must remember that other websites will be trying to reach the top of the search engine results using those same keywords. From this point, you can use keyword analysis tools to work out how competitive your selected phrases are and how many people search for them. Google has its own tool (see story above), but there are more accurate versions. You then can create a list of your chosen phrases and structure the content of your website around them.

To make responsible SEO work, though, you have to understand what makes a search engine tick. For instance, what is Google looking for? Google’s SEO algorithms are a closely guarded secret, but we know some basic things about what Google looks for. We can divide these into two areas: the authority of the website address (domain) being used and what is on the website.

Domain authority rests on the age of the web domain in question. Including your targeted keywords in the URL can also increase authority, which is why websites with oft-searched terms (such as diamonds. com) can fetch high prices on the domain resale market.

Google indexes a website using software “robots” that read millions of web pages each day. For a robot to index a website well, the robot has to be able to read the website. Making sure that menus are represented by text rather than images or elaborate Flash animations can help, as can including a website map that tells the robot where to go. (These must be coded in a special language called XML.)

Other acceptable strategies include using a phrase with your desired keywords in particular HTML tags on your website. The H tags (H1, H2 and so on) represent headings and subheadings on your website _ and putting in important topics and phrases describing your website will help an SEO robot understand what your website is about.

All of this will help to improve your SEO rankings, but it won’t eliminate the need for the most important element of all: good, solid content. Good writing is vital for any website, and you would do well to concentrate much of your time on generating informative, entertaining content that answers real-world questions, as this will help keep traffic flowing to the website.

“Thin” websites with just a couple of web pages often don’t rank well. Rich websites with many pages, each with a modest amount of content reflecting specific keywords, will help get your website up there. Providing information about each of your services on a different page can help, and using a blog framework such as WordPress is another way to create more pages for your website while keeping your audience engaged with a constant stream of new material. Of course, this means you have to write it.

This emphasis on good, solid content rather than gaming the system will become more important as social media takes prevalence over SEO. Although SEO can still yield results, recent updates from Google are finding new ways to work out which websites are really appealing to people. Updates to Google’s algorithms, called Panda and Penguin, are designed to penalize websites that overdo SEO; rather, the algorithms seem to favour websites with quality content that do well in the realm of social media. So, user engagement is the new PageRank.

Once your SEO strategy is up and running and your website is beginning to hit the top search results, you can move on to the next step: converting those online visits into relationships _ and, hopefully, sales. For financial advisors who court a conservative client base and go through a relatively slow sales cycle, this involves a mature approach to email list management and regular follow-throughs that stretch far beyond the initial SEO stage.

Get it right, and your business could skyrocket.

SEO tools and resources

Here are some online tools that can help you make informed decisions during your SEO process:

GOOGLE WEBMASTER GUIDELINES.

These guidelines will help webmasters design their websites to be indexable by Google.

http://bit.ly/RbT4xh

GOOGLE ADWORDS KEYWORD TOOL.

Sign up for a Google Adwords account, then use the keywords analysis tool on the Adwords website to research likely keywords that you could adopt for your own website. http://bit.ly/TpKN7W

SEO DOCTOR

This extension for the Firefox browser will provide a report on any web page you visit, scoring its performance on some key elements of SEO.

http://bit.ly/Qny7gK

© 2012 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.