Get Better Quality Leads for Your Wealth Management Firm with SEO
Article by Colette Nichol, Story Strategist, Organic SEO Expert, Founder of Story Envelope Media
SEO for financial advisors is the best way for wealth management firms located in major cities to grow beyond word of mouth.
If you’re located in a city with 300,000 or more residents, then SEO will likely be one of the highest ROI marketing activities you can do. If you’re a financial advisor, wealth management firm owner/founder, or marketing director working to increase AUM, then you already know that lead generation in the financial services industry can be tricky and time-consuming.
But without a consistent lead generation system, business growth is unpredictable.
SEO is a long-term strategy. It’s not for struggling businesses.
It’s for businesses playing the long game.
It’s for wealth management firms that want to leave a legacy.
How Long Does It Take for SEO to Work? What’s the ROI?
It usually takes about 6 months to 12 months for your SEO strategy to start paying off.
From that point on, you typically see very positive ROI. For example, over the past 3 years, one of our clients has been adding between $40-$50M in AUM to the book each year with just organic traffic from SEO-based content.
In the past 3 years, they’ve added $150M to their book. (1)
So far, this client has spent about $200,000 to generate $1.5M in annual recurring revenue.
This firm is on track to achieve an ROI of at least 7400% from their SEO investment. In fact, since their retention is so high, they’ll likely see even higher ROI than that.
In addition, they continue to add new clients to their book each year with SEO. (Because, why would you stop something that’s working so well?) The majority of the new clients they bring on have $4M or more in investable assets, and their client minimum is $2.5M.
They aren’t building a bloated book full of low asset clients.
Thanks to their investment in SEO, this firm has a profitable book and an effective lead machine.
Keep in mind that since all advisors are in different markets, you can’t expect to see the exact same results. Nothing in this post is a guarantee of results and should not be taken that way. How long it takes to get results and ROI depends on the potential of your niche and location, as well as the competition and your team’s sales process.
If you’re interested in SEO, get in touch so we can do an assessment of your niche and let you know if SEO is right for you.
Not every firm should invest in SEO. But for some firms, SEO will be the best investment you can make in your business.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
Why Is SEO Important for Financial Advisors?
SEO is important for financial advisors because it’s one of the highest ROI channels for lead generation.
SEO helps your potential clients find your website when they search for financial planning or wealth management services online.
When someone is looking for a new advisor, they will typically go online or open an AI tool and start searching for financial advisors, CFPs, or wealth management firms in their area. If your firm isn’t doing SEO, then you won’t get found on the traditional Google search engine results page, Google Map Pack, in the Google AI overview, or on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Grok.
In other words, you’ll lose the chance to get found by someone who was looking for your exact services.
The New Era of AI-Driven Search Is Here to Stay
In the new era of AI-driven search, SEO is important because it helps you get cited and recommended by LLMs such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, etc.
Also key is the fact that an excellent SEO campaign will focus on driving better quality leads who are actively searching for a firm like yours. Top-notch content and prospect filtering will help reduce the number of tire kickers and ensure you’re speaking with more qualified potential clients. In addition, when you’re found organically, your brand automatically gets viewed by potential clients as authoritative. This establishes greater trust right from the start.
As long as you have a smooth sales system, organic leads typically close much more quickly than cold leads from sources such as Smart Asset.
Why SEO Is Important for Financial Advisors
| Reason SEO Matters for Financial Advisors | Impact on Advisory Firms |
|---|---|
| High ROI Lead Generation | SEO targets clients who are actively searching for financial advice, generating high-quality leads that often convert faster and more reliably than cold leads. |
| Increased Visibility & Credibility | Ranking higher on search engines improves online visibility and lends credibility. We’ve found that organic leads close faster. |
| Local SEO Captures Nearby Clients | Optimizing for local search brings high-intent clients who may be more likely to close. |
| Content SEO Builds Authority & Pre-Sells Clients | Thoughtful, relevant content educates and pre-qualifies. It builds trust before any personal interaction and leads to fewer poor-fit prospects. |
| Technical SEO Enhances User Experience | Fast, secure, mobile-friendly sites perform better in search and reduce bounce rates. In our experience, they also convert better. |
| Off-Page SEO & Backlinks Boost Authority | Backlinks from reputable sites improve domain authority and signal trust to search engines. This results in more relevant traffic to service pages. |
| Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for AI & Voice Search | Structuring content that answers questions succinctly increases chances of being cited by LLMs and AI search interfaces. |
| Competitive Advantage over Lead-Gen Firms | Independent advisors can compete by focusing on local and niche SEO, bypassing costly and inffective middlemen like Smart Asset. |
| Passive, Long-Term Lead Flow | Unlike paid ads, SEO grows over time and can keep attracting traffic long after initial effort. |
| Strategic Importance in the Digital Age | As clients increasingly research advisors online, having a searchable, consistent digital presence is no longer optional. |
Story Envelope x Traffic for Experts
Story Envelope Media is a boutique SEO and video SEO agency based in Vancouver, Canada.
Story Envelope specializes in helping financial advisors and wealth management firms grow their book and increase profits with organic lead generation. We’ve created a process called the Traffic for Experts Method, which is designed to generate organic traffic and leads for expertise-driven service businesses.
If you’re one of the best advisory firms in your area, but you’re not getting the traffic you deserve, we want to work with you.
We combine avatar analysis with SEO, storytelling, premium video, modern website design, premium branding, and clear writing.
The goal: get more and better quality leads for your business so you can achieve your long-term business goals with greater ease and efficiency.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
SEO for Fiduciary Financial Advisors and Wealth Management Firms
Your ideal clients are already searching for you online.
If you’re the owner of a wealth management firm and you’re located in a major city, there are thousands of people looking for your services each month.
But if you’re not coming up on the first page of Google, then your competitors will be getting all the Google leads. Instead of relying on word-of-mouth, let your ideal clients find you at the exact moment they’re researching financial advisors.
While social media advertising may be useful to increase brand awareness, it’s not able to target people in the exact moment they want what you offer.
SEO allows you to start a conversation with your ideal clients at the exact moment they’re searching for a solution.
Should Your Advisory Firm Do SEO?
Many advisors start out with networking, word-of-mouth referrals, and running seminars.
Some brave souls even do cold calling. But in 2024, you have a range of digital marketing strategies that can help you grow your firm with ideal clients. Search engine optimization isn’t right for every advisory firm.
So, to save you some time, here’s who should be doing SEO:
- Financial Advisory Firms in Major Cities
- Wealth Management Firms in Major Cities
- Financial Advisors and Advisory Firms Focused on a Clear and Specific Niche
- Financial Advisors in Affluent Medium-Sized Cities (300,000+)
- Financial Advisors in Smaller Cities with a High Percentage of Retirement-Aged HNWIs
If you don’t fit into one of these categories, then SEO may not be the right fit for you.
For SEO to work, you need to have a potential traffic pool that is large enough in your niche or geographic location to validate the investment. If you’re a single advisor in a smaller city, then doing SEO on your own may be a better solution.
We can create a content plan for you. Then, you can execute the plan with the help of your assistant or website designer.
However, no matter where you are or what size city your business is located in, it’s important that you create and optimize your Google Business Profile and have an excellent website that is optimized for conversions.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
Does SEO Work for Financial Advisors?
SEO works for all financial advisory firms.
We’ve seen our SEO clients attract and land clients with investable assets ranging from $1M to $14M. When we first started doing SEO for financial advisors, we weren’t sure if there would be a cap on how large a client you could attract via search. But we soon discovered that HNWIs are searching online just like everybody else.
You don’t need to have a low client minimum for SEO to work for you.
In fact, we’ve seen better results when our clients increase their client minimums. When you have a higher client minimum, it attracts higher-quality leads.
High-income earners who are looking for a financial advisor often prefer to work with clients who have a minimum of $1M or more. This is likely because it feels more exclusive. Having more filters rather than fewer can often generate more trust and authority for the business.
However, just because SEO works well, doesn’t mean all firms should pay for an outside agency to help with SEO.
For example, if you’re a very small firm in a small town, working with an agency may not make sense. There needs to be enough search traffic in your area for investing in SEO to make sense.
If you’re located in a small town, it may make sense to have a team member get some SEO coaching and then execute the plan in house.
However, if you’re located in a major city, you should hire a good SEO agency. Why? Because SEO is one of the highest ROI ways to aquire new clients if you’re in a large city.
What Is SEO and How Does It Work?
SEO is the act of optimizing a website and its contents in order to maximize visibility on search engines.
In other words, if you’re doing SEO correctly, you’re creating a clean website and high-quality content that allows Google to index your site. Over time, your website pages and blog posts will start to rank higher and higher, allowing better quality leads to find your website and content.
SEO includes three main areas: on-page, off-page, and AI optimization.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO just refers to anything that you do to a specific website page in order to get better results and get more traffic. For example, creating structured content that helps visitors learn about your services is on-page SEO. Using the right words in the right places on your website is on-page SEO. Doing technical updates to your site to speed it up or improve performance (technical SEO) is also typically considered on-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO strategies include anything that you do on the web that is not on your particular website.
For example, if you create a YouTube channel with premium videos that are based on SEO research, that’s off-page SEO. If you do guest blogging or get interviewed on a podcast, that helps your off-page SEO. Getting links from a third-party website to your website is often an important part of the off-page SEO process. This is called backlink building. It can help a good website with great content get better results faster.
SEO for LLMs (Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AIOs, etc.)
In addition to traditional SEO, part of your SEO strategy should include getting found and cited by LLMs.
LLM stands for Large Language Model. AI tools such as ChatGPT and Grok are LLMs. They are now being used be searches as search engines.
You may have used ChatGPT or Grok to find a service provider for you or help you solve a problem. Well, you’re not alone. In May of 2025, ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users. That’s no small sum. While Google search is still king, it’s best not to ignore the kid in town: AI Search.
When people are looking for a local or niche advisory firm, we want you to be suggested by some or all of the LLMs.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
SEO and Conversions
It’s not enough to just drive traffic to your advisor website.
You also need to convert that traffic into scheduled calls. We recommend that all our clients use a call scheduler. The only call scheduler we work with and recommend is Calendly. It’s the best call scheduler in the market and helps you ensure you’re not losing prospects due to poor tech.
You can also embed contact forms on all of your pages. However, using a call schedule allows for a smoother process.
Identifying Your Ideal Client Avatar
When doing SEO or any other digital marketing strategy, it’s critical that you identify an ideal client and target all your efforts toward that one ideal client avatar.
We recommend that you identify 1-2 ideal clients that are the perfect fit. Then build out your avatar based on them.
Every marketing decision you make should be based on your avatar’s needs, goals, and desires. Marketing becomes much simpler when you hone in on a specific ideal client avatar. This is something we can help you with as we build out your SEO campaigns.
SEO Services for Financial Advisors and Firms
SEO Services for financial advisors and financial advisory firms include the following:
- Home page optimization – for SEO and conversions
- Website transfers so you can grow traffic on a solid foundation
- Service page creation and optimization
- Pillar page creation and optimization
- SEO-based blogging
- Integration of lead magnets
- Video SEO for traffic and conversions
- Backlink building
- Google Search Console and Google Analytics implementation
- KPI setup and tracking
But what does all of this mean?
Essentially, when we do SEO for a financial advisory firm, we create service pages that cover all of your offerings. We ensure these pages are optimized for your local area. If you’re a national firm focused on a specific niche, we optimize your pages for a national search.
We create content that helps you get found by the right people at the right time.
If you have a new and highly functional website, we may be able to simply work with your existing site. If your website is older or built on a slow or poorly functioning platform, then we will transfer your site to Wix Studio.
Turning Visitors to Leads
Having thousands of visitors per month isn’t all that helpful if you can’t convert those visitors into leads.
We prefer to work with businesses that can handle inbound 15-minute calls because this is one of the best ways to capture qualified leads.
Ideally, you’ll have 2-3 lead gen methods active on your website:
1) 15-minute call scheduler with filtering in place
2) Email opt-in with a targeted lead magnet
3) Inquiry form with strong filtering in place
When you have the first two methods in place, the third method is less important. However, it’s still good to have an inquiry form in place until you reach a point where you have so many 15-minute calls scheduled that you no longer wish to receive email inquiries.
Financial Advisor Websites
Your financial advisor website is the foundation for achieving your lead gen goals.
To attract more and better quality traffic to your website, we need to make sure that the site is working properly. It must be clean and easy to use. It needs to have clear CTAs (call to actions) that allow your prospects to make the next move.
Your site should make visitors feel good.
It should be simple to navigate. It should build trust and confidence in your brand and business. It should be a conversion machine. And it should be easy to update. You shouldn’t be held hostage by your website team when you want to make some minor text updates.
If you’re not happy with the performance of your current advisor website, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you and find out more about your business.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
What SEO for Advisors Is All About
SEO for financial advisors is all about getting you found by ideal prospects who really, truly need your services.
It’s about harnessing the power of organic traffic to grow your business. It’s a long-term process that can pay for itself over time. In the new AI era, SEO for financial advisors is also about getting you found and cited by LLMs so that your ideal clients can find you when using non-traditional search tools.
What SEO for Advisors Isn’t All About
SEO for financial advisors isn’t about quick wins and instant results.
If your business is struggling or you don’t have a good sales system, then SEO isn’t the right move. Before doing SEO, you want to make sure that you have a reasonably clean sales system and happy clients. You need to be prepared for the influx of leads.
SEO isn’t for businesses that are desperate.
It’s for successful firms that are excited about adding a new and powerful growth channel to their business.
Exclusivity and Non-Compete Agreements
We don’t like to compete against ourselves, which means we only work with one advisor per market or niche at a time.
For example, if you’re located in Houston and we have an opening for a Houston advisor, we’d be delighted to work with you. However, if we’re already working with a firm in Houston, then we won’t work with any other firms in the area.
Our clients typically stay with us for many years – since nobody likes to say goodbye to great results – and we take our commitment to helping each advisory firm win very seriously.
When looking for a good SEO company, make sure there will be some form of non-compete.
Who Story Envelope Works With
We work with financial advisory firms that are aiming to build a $1B book.
We also work with financial advisory firms that have a very specific niche and want to focus on growing their business exclusively within that niche.
If you meet either of those criteria, we recommend that you schedule a discovery call.
We’ll assess your site and location before the call so we can discuss your particular situation. If your business is a good fit, we’ll create a plan based on your area and business needs.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
Common Questions about Search Engine Optimization for Advisors
How do search engines decide which pages to put on the first page?
Since Google is the most important search engine, we’ll address these based on Google.
Google has hundreds of algorithms and ranking factors that it uses to determine if a page and website demonstrate E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, trust).
If your website and pages meet the basic requirements or higher, they will start to rank higher and higher. Once users start to visit your pages, their interactions will signal to Google whether the pages are of quality or not. If you have positive user engagement signals coming from a particular page, that page will move higher on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
When you add quality backlinks and overall topical authority, you have a winning recipe for getting found in online searches.
What are the most important SEO strategies for financial advisors?
The most important thing is to have an optimized homepage with copy that converts and service pages that are optimized for SEO and your ideal client avatar’s needs and desires. Next, you need to have supporting blog posts that boost your website’s authority. Finally, you may need some backlinks to push your pages higher if you are in a competitive niche.
Which is the best website builder for SEO for financial advisors?
We use Wix Studio because it is great for SEO and provides all the security and hosting you need in one package. You can also use Squarespace and WordPress. We don’t love WordPress because it requires additional security and hosting, which means you need to have a website team. Wix Studio allows you to have beautiful websites that are fast, optimized for search, and made to convert visitors to leads.
Does SEO also work for financial planning services?
SEO works for all financial services, including financial planning, tax planning, accounting, wealth management, estate planning, insurance, and fintec.
Should every financial advisory business be doing SEO?
If you have a very small firm in a small town, then SEO won’t be a huge business driver for you. If this sounds like your situation, definitely optimize your Google Business profile and your website so you come up in search. But in a small town, there won’t be enough traffic coming from search to warrant the cost. SEO is best for businesses in larger markets.
Should my SEO strategy include video?
Most SEO strategies should include video. Why? Videos provide outsized long-term results. Almost nobody puts the time and effort into creating quality videos. However, it’s one of the highest ROI strategies because it boosts traffic and conversions dramatically. We’ve seen this personally in our work with financial advisors.
Which SEO efforts yield the greatest long-term results?
Video SEO combined with a solid website, excellent service pages, avalanche posts, and supportive local blog posts will yield excellent long-term results.
Take the Next Step
We’ve been working with financial advisors since 2015. If you’d like to discover whether SEO is the right fit for your advisory business, schedule a call so we can learn more about your business.
On the call, we’ll find out more about your goals, where you are today, and answer all your top questions.
If we both determine there’s a fit, we’ll move forward with a 1-hour call. Next, you’ll get a custom proposal. Then, if you decide that you’d like to grow your business with organic traffic, we’ll get started!
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
Important SEO Terms Explained
1. Keyword Research:
Keyword research is the act of finding the relevant keywords (phrases) that potential clients use in search engines to find financial services. Identifying the right keywords is essential because otherwise, you could be driving the wrong traffic to your website. Keyword research becomes much more foolproof when your SEO team has a strong understanding of your business and niche. Keyword research is the foundation for all SEO strategies.
2. On-Page SEO:
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual website pages to rank higher and attract more relevant visitors. This is crucial because without solid on-page SEO, you will be at risk of losing your traffic.
3. Off-Page SEO:
Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website, like acquiring backlinks, that impact your rankings. This may be important if you’re in a competitive niche because it builds your site’s authority and improves its visibility in search results. However, for some businesses, off-page SEO isn’t required to get outstanding results.
4. Backlinks:
These are links from other websites pointing to your site, which act as “votes of confidence” indicating that your website has authority. Backlinks can boost your rankings.
5. Domain Authority (DA):
This is a score that predicts how well your website will rank on search engine results pages. A higher domain authority indicates better chances of ranking well in competitive search queries. However, we’ve seen low-DA websites beat out high-DA websites many times.
6. Technical SEO:
This refers to the optimization of a website’s technical aspects, such as speed, mobile-friendliness, and structure. This is essential because search engines need to crawl and index your site properly to rank it.
7. SERP (Search Engine Results Page):
The page that appears after a user submits a query in a search engine. Understanding how to appear in different sections of the SERP (organic results, ads, snippets) is important if you want to get found.
8. Local SEO:
This refers to doing SEO so your site appears in geographically targeted searches (e.g., “financial advisor near me” or “financial advisor Seattle”). This matters because ranking well in local searches is key for financial advisors who do not have a highly specific niche but rather work with clients in their area.
9. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
This is the process of improving the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as booking a call. This is crucial because SEO drives traffic, but CRO ensures that traffic turns into leads.
10. Search Intent:
Search intent refers to the underlying reason behind a user’s search query. Understanding and matching content to search intent is important because it allows SEO experts to build out content at all stages in the buyer’s journey.
Work with an SEO for Financial Advisors Expert
If you’ve read to the bottom of this page, your business is probably a good fit.
We recommend that you get in touch to schedule a discovery call. We’ll go over your business goals and the keyword volume in your location to see if the Traffic for Experts Method is the right fit for you.
If we both decide that there’s a good fit, we’ll schedule another longer call to go over the process and our recommendations in detail. From there, you can decide if you’d like to move forward and have us as your partners in growth.
What Would Page #1 of Google Do for Your Business?
If you’d like to discover more about how we can help you, please get in touch.
You may be in a niche where dominating Google is actually within reach.
Some niches are super competitive. In these cases, getting to Page #1 is prohibitively costly for a small or mid-size business.
However, most local businesses do not fall into that category. In fact, most local businesses can massively increase their organic website traffic and walk-ins if they have a solid SEO strategy that’s properly executed.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
Would You Like to Get Found By People Searching LLMs like ChatGPT?
Right now, a new form of search is blossoming: AI-generated search.
Billions of people are using LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Grok to search for solutions to their problems. They’re also using these LLMs to get recommendations for service providers.
We’ve found that our clients surface in LLM searches thanks to the work we’ve done with SEO.
In addition to traditional human-oriented SEO, we have a proven process we execute to help LLMs find and understand the content on our clients’ websites. The key is to structure your content in a way that is helpful to both humans and AI models and to be referenced across the web for your main area of expertise.
When you do SEO the right way, you’ll get suggested by LLMs, and you’ll show up on the first page of Google’s traditional search results pages.
You’ll also show up in Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs). AIOs are the little blocks of AI-powered summaries that you now see on some of Google’s search results pages. And getting into the AIOs can drive relevant traffic to your website.
Schedule a Free SEO Consultation to Discuss Your Business Goals
If you’re serious about getting on Page #1 of Google with your business and driving more leads, please reach out and schedule a call. I’d love to hear about your goals and see if our services align with your needs.
CLICK HERE: To Schedule Your SEO Consultation
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(1) These results may not be typical. You are not guaranteed to see results identical to those mentioned in this post. All websites, businesses, and niches are different.
About the Author
Hi! I’m Colette Nichol. I’m a solo filmmaker, SEO, story strategist, and digital marketer based out of rainy Vancouver, Canada. I’ve been helping small local businesses and global brands since 2014.
In 2017, I started applying SEO to my work with clients and in my own business. The results were extraordinary, and I got obsessed!
If you’re interested in working together, please reach out. I’d love to hear about your business goals to see if we can help.
We currently take on a maximum of one new client per month and are typically booked 3-months in advance, so please reach out early.
