It’s unlikely that a client’s financial plan, carefully constructed by you and your team, will achieve their goals if it isn’t regularly reviewed, and, when necessary, updated. The same is true for your website. Content is king.

This isn’t the field of dreams; if you expect hordes of perfect prospects to flock to your website the minute it goes live, you will be disappointed. To meet your goals (normally linked to new client generation) it must be updated regularly.

Search Engine Optimisation

Although I don’t recommend advisers spend money on SEO (you can read why by clicking here), I do believe you should engage in other activities, which have an SEO benefit. For example, adding content to your website, usually, but not exclusively, in the form of blogs, news articles and guides. Adding relevant meta data to your website (particularly page titles) is another example.

In my experience, there’s no doubt that adding content to your website increases the number of visitors who find it via an online search (principally Google). It’s also my experience that the number of enquiries an adviser receives is correlated, in part at least, to website traffic volumes.

The evidence

I’ve also written before about the importance of ‘evidence based marketing’, so here are some figures to show the effect of adding content.

All the data is sourced from Google Analytics and is taken from websites to which we add content, usually at least three articles each month, often significantly more. We also updated (or in some cases added) meta data when we started to work with the client.

To avoid accusations that the figures have been massaged for my own ends, I have compared two sets of data:

• Traffic from the 30 days before we started working with the client (shown as an orange line)
• Traffic from the past 30 days (shown as a blue line)

178.32% increase in organic traffic

55.88% increase in organic traffic

243.24% increase in organic traffic

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Compare this to a website with zero content added since launch: organic traffic has fallen by 55.56%.

No one knows the exact makeup of the Google’s search algorithm. But adding content has, for as long as I can remember, been a tried and tested method of appearing more prominently in the search results and consequently increasing traffic. Content is king (I’ll keep saying it).

So, where to start? Here are a few quick tips:

1. Set time aside to produce content on a regular basis. If you can’t commit to doing that, you don’t enjoy it, or have the necessary skills, outsource it
2. Write articles, blogs and guides that will be interesting and relevant to your target clients; remember, it isn’t just Google you are writing for, you actually want people to read and engage with your content
3. Ideally the content should be at least 800 – 1,000 words in length, even longer, around 2,500 for more in-depth pieces and guides. Remember the fundamentals of writing for an online audience though, you’re not just writing for Google. You can read more on that topic by clicking here
4. Research and add keywords, for which you would ideally like to be found, in to your content
5. Remember to add the relevant meta data (page titles in particular) to your content. In fact, check it has been appropriately added to the other pages on your website too
6. As an alternative to written content, consider video
7. Find other ways of pushing traffic to your content; the wider the audience the better. Promote it on social media, consider Facebook ads and send the content to your clients in the form of online newsletters
8. Try and repurpose (I know, it’s a horrible phrase), for example by turning a blog post into a guide, video or press release.

Content is king… Truely

I’m a huge Steve Jobs fan, but Bill Gates really hit the nail on the head when he said content is king.

A website without content regularly updated will go the same way as a financial plan which isn’t reviewed on a regular basis.

Try it out yourself; add relevant and engaging content, and see how it affects the organic traffic on your website. Providing you do it often enough and follow the basic rules, you should find that more people, some of who will hopefully become clients, will be dropping by in no time.