The Impact of Blogging for Financial Advisors on their Website Traffic

Blogging may seem time consuming, or maybe you worry you don’t have enough to write about. Now you might need to worry if you don’t have a blog. A recent study by HubSpot found that small companies with a blog get 55% more traffic to their website. They also get 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages, which means your site will have more authority with search engines and is more likely to be found. Why are bloggers getting so much more attention? Here are two main reasons.

1. Search Engines will find you. For every blog that you publish, search engines will find a new page and a new set of keywords contained in your blog post title, body copy, and corresponding tags. Basically, having a blog increases your keyword rankings, which makes it easier for search engines to find your site.

These search engines, like Google, use bots to crawl the web and index web sites. If they find new content, the bot comes back more often. As with keywords, search engines like sites with fresh content, and having a blog is an easy way to ensure that your content is regularly updated. You may not even know you’re doing it, but having a blog has helped optimize your site and grow your organic search traffic.

2. Your posts can be shared and linked. People are interested in reading your thoughts, insights and knowledgeable pieces, and if your blog post is really good, they’ll want to share it with others too. Whether they share it on their own web site, or post a link to your blog post on their Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, traffic to your site will increase. If you don’t already, make sure you are posting links to your blog on various social media platforms to start the social sharing process. Once again, the more inbound links you have, the easier it will be for search engines to find you and the higher your site will rank on search page results.

The infographic below (courtesy of Hubspot) shows that once your article has been shared across multiple social networks, these readers will visit your website for more information and eventually convert as potential leads or customers.

Once you’ve got your blog, there are a few crucial things you should keep in mind. As a financial advisor, your compliance with regulations is extremely important. Fortunately, a blog is one the easiest pieces of online content to handle and control when it comes to compliance with these regulations. We spoke with Blane Warrene from Arkovi, a financial services solution for social media, who provided us with some advice on how to manage your blog.

“You need to monitor your blog frequently, and allow visitors to comment on your blog as comments are a crucial part of the overall blogging strategy. They allow your customers and visitors to voice their opinion and provide a great opportunity for you to respond to both positive and negative feedback. If the response is negative, address the comment and respond with facts and rectify the experience. In the US, FINRA says that unrelated comments are acceptable, although client comments (ie. “Using your advice allowed me to maximize my investment by 90%”) may be considered to be testimonials or endorsements and need to be regulated.” said Blane.

He also recommends that you monitor and approve all comments before allowing them to go live.

If you live in the US, blog content is considered static content and needs to be pre-approved before being published. If you are an SEC registered advisor or a state regulated investment advisor, you will first write the content and then wait for the compliance department to review and approve it before you can publish your blog.

If you are an advisor that is part of a broker deal, the process is similar. The only difference is that the content will be submitted to FINRA instead, and the wait time for approval will be slightly longer as it is not handled internally. While the content must be archived for a minimum of three years, Arkovi recommends six years and with their solution, you can easily archive your blog content and comments by using the RSS feed that is contained in 99% of blogs.

So if you live in the US, remember: Write. Submit. Get Approved. Archive.

And no matter where you live, consider implementing a blog to increase your online presence. As Arkovi says, you can look at your blog as the bridge between your web site and social media. It allows you to push content to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and reach out to more people.

5 tips to ensure high traffic to your site:

1. Host your blog on your domain.
2. Use images, graphs and charts to help convey your message and improve readability.
3. Encourage sharing and comments.
4. Optimize your blog title and content.
5. Make sure your message is targeted. Know your audience.