session today. I'm the owner of Out and About Communications. We're a full-service marketing agency, specifically in the advisory space and financial services at large. So we have seen a number of website redesigns and you are lucky to have an incredible team that's going to share some best of the best, you know, insights into what really makes a website work. So I am going to go ahead and hand it over to the team that you'll be hearing from today. We'll go ahead and do introductions. So Sydney, do you want to get us started? Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited to be here. I'm Sydney Squires. I am Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitsis.com and for the last three and a half years, I've basically been focusing in on all things content strategy, both content strategy for advisors as well as in some side work content strategy with advisors. So this has ranged from kind of the how can we distribute things that our audience actually engages to, you know, building out email campaigns and iterating and stuff like that. But really, the thing I'm most passionate about is just helping people design cool things and getting them in front of the right folks. Love it. Rachel? Hi, I'm Rachel Hanley. I'm the founder of YBI Copywriting. I got into the finance space about six years ago working with marketing agencies geared towards financial advisors. Today, I write copywriting all across the spectrum from websites to long form blogs, ebooks, email newsletters, social posts, everything for financial professionals, large institutions, bookkeepers, everybody kind of in the financial ecosphere. And I am super excited to be here. Great. And Brent? Hi, everyone. Thanks. Thanks for inviting us, Lauren. My name is Brent Carndiff. I run advisor rankings. We're primarily we're a financial advisor focused SEO firm, primarily SEO. I've been doing this since 2010. And I used to be a school teacher, basketball coach, I was looking for a new career, went back to school, got an MBA in financial planning. But along the way, decided I really enjoyed what was going on online at that time, you know, it was pretty new for me. And I found it very interesting. And particularly the SEO, it felt a little bit like coaching, very strategic scoreboards. And so I, I'm the the SEO nerd here on the panel. Great. All right. So before we get into the, the thick of the content and conversation, everyone can just grab a pen and paper, if you want to pull up a note, you know, on your computer, and just let's write down just a few business goals, because websites can be very shiny object syndrome, there's a lot that can go into websites, we get a lot of marketing messages, a lot of input, if we're, you know, having conversations with clients or sales conversations or what have you. So if you can just take a minute and just write down a few business goals, three business goals, short term, because as we're talking through this, we want to make sure we connect those dots back to those business goals. So folks can take a minute to do that. Alright, so I'm going to actually hand it over back to Sydney here. And we've got a chart to share. So let me go ahead and share that for you. And we wanted to start here, because like I said, websites can be very shiny object. But but Sydney, if you can just talk us through like, where do websites fit into the funnel? And what should we be thinking about if we really want a website to work for us? Yeah, so the the marketing funnel is a common term used in the marketing industry. And basically, what it charts is, is the journey someone goes through from, hey, this business exists to I'm going to spend money at this business. So like a super, super generic example of this might be, if my husband and I are going out to dinner, what are the restaurants in the Cincinnati area, which is where I live? What sort of restaurants do we want to eat at? And then finally, like, okay, we're going to walk through the door, we're going to order something. And the way that this translates for financial advisors, you know, is that top of the funnel is just that very big awareness, right? So this is a lot of the leads, this is a lot of like, I'm a financial advisor, this is my specialty, and I exist, right, is, is kind of about as as big as that top of funnel gets. That middle of funnel is, is really what comes down to establishing trust and competency, right? Which is basically just like, who is this person? And, you know, for a lot of, for a lot of potential prospects, the question is, how can I trust them with the money that I've spent my entire life earning, right? Like building, building that trust in the middle of a funnel, having those conversations and figuring out who the advisor is, is, is a really big leap. And then the bottom of funnel is all about that decision. Here, it's written out in like the generating clients, which is when you finally gotten through, you know, the end of those prospecting meetings, and they go, yes, I want to sign on with you. I'll also highlight like this can iterate in smaller ways to like, for some people, you may choose a small funnel that just run through they know I exist to they became a prospect, right? And stuff like that. But ultimately, the bottom of funnel goes from when a person is aware that you exist to a person is speaks up and says, yes, I want to do business with this person. And then with that, Sadie, are there any gaps that you all see in the funnel as it relates to websites, right? That you consistently see as conversations or questions that come up amongst the advisor community? Yeah, um, one of the biggest pieces that I, I personally see comes a lot down to that middle of funnel. I think that in particular, a lot of advisors. So in my perspective, the middle of funnel is kind of all about the personality, right? Like the middle of funnel comes a lot down to like, here's what it's like to work with me as a person. And here's how you can trust that I'm going to, you know, help you make good decisions. Um, I think that, that often, um, often where the middle of funnel can sometimes get neglected is like stuff can get built, you know, a lot of people try to get stuff started, but then they're nervous to really put their full energy and self out there. And it kind of gets funneled through, you know, not just the compliance side, but like, I don't want to scare prospects away. So then people err on the side of kind of not, not standing out because they're so nervous to drive people away that they kind of don't share their voice in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. If I could add to that, I think, and I think personality is a great place to put, put that. The other part of it comes like what I see from an SEO is advisors, a lot of advisors are creating content now, which is kind of a top of the funnel. It can be throughout the funnel, but it really is a part of the top of the funnel. And with the goal of bringing people to the website, and then they don't do anything with the visitors once they're there to capture that, to continue the conversation, to engage them through the middle. Or if they do, they have a list sitting there that they don't, they don't know what to do with. And so I agree. The middle seems to be a big gap, um, for advisors. Rachel, what are you seeing too? Yeah, I was going to say, it almost seems like it's kind of twofold challenge versus even recognizing that the middle of the funnel exists for advisors. I think sometimes it's, it's kind of, especially like if, if they're getting people through like referrals, it's kind of like, oh, well, this, this client vouched for me and they can see I exist. Why aren't they converting? Like our back might be like one example. Um, so kind of understanding why the middle funnel exists in the first place is, is challenging, I think. And then second, I would say what Brent said is being willing to stand out against what everybody else is doing. I think is a big challenge I've seen. Um, people are a bit afraid to rock the boat. They don't want to push compliance boundaries. They don't want to come across as too unprofessional because money, they're handling money. And I think it's sometimes hard to balance showing personality, but still wanting to be a very serious professional who can manage millions of dollars. Um, I see that's like the biggest challenge I would see, um, for sure in that middle funnel. Just to make this a little bit more real for folks here that are listening, can you all share, let's kind of go from top, middle, bottom of the funnel. What tactics go into each section of this? Um, just so we can see kind of where those gaps are. And of course these will connect in different ways, but let's just throw out, what are some kind of top of the funnel, um, tactics here? Yeah, from, for me, I think a top of the funnel kind of as being a blog article, maybe something that's just out there that people find you or they're searching to find you. The middle gets to be where you're carrying that conversation on. So maybe you capture their email address and continue to speak to them once a month or whatever. The bottom is more about now they've gotten to know you, they've gotten to trust you somewhat and believe in your expertise. It's are they going to do business with you? And so I think then you get more into the social proof, case studies, stuff like that, that, that actually are showing how specifically you work with, with clients. Absolutely. Rachel, Sydney? I think at the bottom of the funnel, that's when it's like, all right, let's schedule the call. Right? Go to that contact page, click on the introductory call, let's do this. Um, yeah, top of funnel, I would agree, like blog posts coming across your LinkedIn page. Um, Googling advisors in the Harrisburg area, that's top of funnel, middle funnel. I think middle of funnel can also be like blog posts. It's, it's your, your online presence, your, your social media posts that are continually educating, um, delighting people, informing them, showcasing your personality, your email newsletters, your campaign for new subscribers to your email newsletters. If that's something you offer, those are kind of examples throughout the funnel. Yeah. And I guess to differentiate a bit, um, so I think that where, for example, blogs can be a top of funnel thing is, you know, like all in Brent's specialty with the SEO, where it's like, here's a really targeted thing and I'm going to show up on Google, right. Or in YouTube or wherever, wherever your content is versus the middle of funnel, which is like, oh, this blog is interesting. I'm going to click around and open up several articles and see what this person is like. And I think that's a really good example of how one piece of content can sometimes branch a couple of different areas of the funnel, just depending on how, on who the person is and how they're engaging. Also well said, I think sometimes there's this idea of you launch a website and the floodgates will open with traffic, right? So all of these things we're talking about are how we actually pull people in and down through that, um, that funnel at large. So, okay, great. I know anything else anyone wants to share regarding the funnel or thoughts? I think one thing where there's a shortage and it goes back to something I think Sydney said, and I believe I got this information from Kitsis, but I'm not going to hold you to it. A lot of times advisors don't want to reach out. I hear all the time. I don't want to flood their inbox. I don't want to spam them or I don't want to annoy them or bother them. Yet the research shows that most clients leave their advisor because they are not getting enough communication. And that's one of the biggest complaints, whether they leave or not, is that not hearing from their advisors enough. So there's a real disconnect in what advisors are perceiving to what their clients apparently are saying. Just to add onto that, I see a lot of top of the funnel activities, maybe lower barrier to entry activities like social media or what have you, but the middle of the funnel are oftentimes the hardier pieces like doing a webinar or a seminar, just that kind of deeper dive. And so those pieces, if you do them, just kind of a note on that to just do them really well and just stick with one thing and keep it going. And like one example of an advisor who was doing middle of funnel very well, she has since moved to a separate firm, but I think it was Maddie Keegan who had on her site like, hey, share some info with me and I will send you a five-minute video just like sharing my thoughts. Super, I mean, for her and, you know, with all the appropriate asterisks of like not financial advice, right? And like taking care of herself from the compliance side. But I thought that was such a cool, like really low investment of time, if she's taking, you know, let's say it's 30 to 45 minutes by the time she's looking over things, filling a response and sending it back, but a great way to kind of demonstrate that expertise, get people's contact information and all of that without really moving into that full bottom of the funnel decision. I love that. I'm going to use that. I thought it was so clever. I think that really plays off. I keep hearing over and over, like one of the best pieces of marketing advice was just give it all away, right? Give away your best stuff. Just keep being informative and a thought leader. And those high net worth clients, they aren't going to want to do it themselves. So they're going to like, that's, I think that's the fear. It's like, oh, why would I give away all my secrets? Like, well, you share your thought leadership, you show yourself as a person who knows what they're talking about and you're connecting and building trust at the same time. And then they will, they will come. No, that's exactly right. Yeah. So with that, I think that's a good transition. I know we've got several examples that we want to talk the, talk everyone through here, just websites that kind of set, there might be elements of it that set the model for kind of, you know, full funnel marketing or components of it that are done really well. So I'm actually going to stop sharing and hand over the sharing to Sydney to dive in for an example. So we can start to see some of this play out and kind of real life, if you will. Yeah. Let me share my screen. Um, always a moment of, of, of stress to, to do. Um, does everyone see the FlowFPK Perfect? Um, so I just want to briefly talk through a couple of things on Meg Marteltz. Uh, so she, she's the founder of a FlowFP site that I personally really like. Um, one of the biggest things is, um, uh, Rachel correct me if I'm, I'm wrong, but, uh, so the marketing term, I believe is hero language, right? Which is a lot of like using you terms, right? So are you a woman in your early and mid career in tech, you know, versus we terms, which is often used to talk about like we as the firm, we as the financial advisor, sort of the Royal weed. Um, so we can see that there's some of that here, but then a lot of just kind of those you questions. Um, and then the other thing that I, uh, I just think is done really, really well is, um, candidly, I think that Meg Marteltz blog is, uh, kind of a bit of a masterclass and how to do blogging as a financial advisor. Um, it's a combination of, uh, it's, it's very SEO bindable, right? It's, it's very friendly to that with a lot of the topics that she covers, which are technical. Her specialty is a lot in women in tech. So it's focused in a lot on those different events. I think you don't have to scroll down too far, um, before you start reading about problems that, uh, her clients have that the rest of us can only dream about, um, and all of that. Uh, but the other thing that she has as well is just things like this Meg's musing piece, right? Things that are just a little more of like the personal reflection, sharing tidbits of like her life, her journey as a firm owner, um, and all of that. Um, and then finally the, the last thing that I, I like is kind of that she's got this pair of, of call to action. So people who are ready can totally click. They can schedule the consultation, right? If they, if they look over Meg's site or have been following her on, on Twitter, they might just be ready to act and they might be ready to schedule. But if you're looking over things and you're starting to like Meg and you're like, I don't quite know if so to speak, like, this is it right now. Um, you can also just sign up for her email list and she just sends the blogs, you know, and I, I kind of love, um, what I loosely call in less scientific terms, the big call to action in scheduling the consultation as well as a much smaller call to action. That's a little less of like a, you've got to jump in and commit, which is just like, Hey, if you'd like my blog, I can just send it to you. Um, which I think is really, really great. Great. And then, um, for folks, just a reminder, if you do have questions, go ahead and drop those in the chat and we'll make sure it gets into. So, um, and I want to move on to Rachel and you've got some show and tell as well. I also want to say Sydney, I do appreciate her logo. It totally is that tech five, right? With the, with who she's going after. So it's not just the content, but the whole aesthetic clean. It's got that kind of edgy or more modern feel. So it's, it's got the full experience. No, it's a great sign. Okay. Can you see, you can see mine. Okay. Yep. Okay. So if you asked me to pick a website that I think kind of checks off all of my boxes for what makes a really great high converting website, um, this is Drucker wealth. I worked with them a few years ago. I know they've made some changes to it since then, but this is just one of my favorite websites. They are losing with personality in the best way. They are clear about who they work with. They are blogging every day. They have a online scheduler. They use video. They have it all going on. So this is a really cool website. Um, they brutal honesty, radical transparency, family owned. They do a really good mix of talking about themselves in the context of how it helps you and what makes them different, which I think is a really refreshing take. Um, I love that they kind of right away say, Hey, here's who we work with. They have logos here and then up at the top who we serve you can kind of self-identify right here and go and they'll talk to you and your specific pain points on your page. I just think this website does a really great job of kind of helping you the reader navigate and self-identify as somebody who might get a lot of value out of working with them. Something else that we haven't really talked about yet in terms of great websites I think are bios. Bios are just I think a pain point for me because they often end up becoming kind of glorified resumes when in reality your bio should be like your opportunity to show the most personality and you have the most fun with it. So you can kind of see here they have professional headshots and then you hover over and you get a taste of kind of who they really are behind this personal facade. They have kind of their accolades up here a bit of bullet points and then they kind of get into the nitty-gritty below and their bios have ctas which is great. I'm hitting you with a lot. I'm just trying to go rapid fire and then the last thing I think I'll talk about for this website is that they are active bloggers which as we talked about before a really great element of SEO and bringing people to your website talking to your specific audience. You can see just in the month of September they've blogged they've shared four blogs which is incredible. Yeah this is I think this is a really great website and not saying that because I wrote some of it but I'm really happy with what they've done with it. Yeah that's that's Drucker Well. I love that comment too about the bios. We see that in our data and working with advisors as well. When you look across the board it's usually the home page at least from our from what we see on our side. Home page number one which is probably no surprise but followed by that is the bio pages. People yeah it's a human business right and do you guys have any thoughts on that too? I've always heard that it's the home page about us in contact. Those are the top three pages. Yeah that's what we see and it's by quite a lot right like home page is way up about us is a little bit down and then everything else is quite a ways down below the so the the about page it's not an SEO page but it's very much part of that getting to know you building trust who you who are you kind of thing so it's worth putting. Absolutely yeah. Do you guys see we try to encourage if folks feel comfortable sharing a little bit more of that personal side to you on those bio pages if it's a photo family photo or a little bit more about your hobbies things like that is do you have you guys said any of that with your work? Yeah I find that hard to do the site and I'll show you a little bit here at Elgon. I think one of the things I loved about her site and I'll be showing that in a minute is she does a great job with that but yeah I think it really because they do want to know you. I mean they know you're a financial advisor they know you deal with financial planning investment management retirement planning state plan. They want to know what differentiates you who what your personality is and I think that's really important if you're able to to present that through your content and on your about about us page it's really helpful. So with that actually you want to go ahead and share. I need to get into that right let's do it okay. Everybody see that all right okay so this is Elgon Financial Advisors. Jane I ran across her site a few months ago and it's very simple but I really loved it. It's very clean I think one of the things that we saw on all three of these sites which I've yet to do on mine but want to is that they're using real photographs right or real video of their team. It's not stock images and so I think it really makes a difference. Again you got the social proof of where who she's worked with and is very clean. I like there's a few things from an SEO perspective I really like well I'll get to the about first. This is what really sold me so there's information about her as an advisor but like you get down to her playing tennis with her daughter or she's still trying to beat her and stuff like that and I just felt that it was super warm and more inviting than any other one I've actually ever read. I wish I could mimic it more but I've talked to her about it and I just really think she did a wonderful job in this. So if you're looking for an example of an about us page that gets a little bit more personal I think she did really well with it. The other thing from an SEO perspective that she did well that I don't always see is she broke out her main services into pages. If you want to be found for something you have to have a page dedicated to it and so there's always a push-pull between probably all marketing but SEO and design. You know design perspective usually you want to limit it you want to make it more image than text where search engines like text and they like the pages to be broken out. So you always have that balance and you'll have to figure out what works for you but I do recommend if there's search in your area around the main topics that you have a page dedicated to that so you can show or local to that. And the really big thing that she did from an SEO perspective is she has a niche a very obvious niche right and what that allows her to do she writes as Rachel mentioned about Drucker she writes often and she writes content that's answering questions that her target audience is asking. And I don't think everything has to be SEO based right there's time for market commentary there's time for you know getting to know Meg and different things but but some should be SEO based or answering questions people want and what it allows by having a niche what it allows her to do is if she were just to write about inheritance planning she would never rank for it but she's going to rank probably near the top for overseas inheritance right because there's not very many advisors writing about that. So people are going to find her for the problems that they want solved and so identifying that niche even if you don't want to strictly go with that is really important. You know one of the things I think she could be do better is local SEO right like getting found in Austin because she's approached all of her things to you know non-U.S. citizens but she had but she does work with other people and so there's that whole base in Austin that she could be trying to pull from as well and so she doesn't have you know you don't just because you have a niche doesn't mean you can't work with other people it just allows you to speak more directly to your to your actual target audience. And if I could add in just from a sheer content strategy perspective this is something that spoiler alert in the Google Analytics site of the of the Kitsis site we can really really see right whenever we we publish I tend to call them just my are evergreen articles right like they're they're articles that are relevant to a very specific number of people but when they look for it they haven't been able to previously find answers on it. And so a great example of this is that Jane wrote for us last year and I think she was the first article that that was the first article that Kitsis had really published going in deeply to you know how to work with clients who are not you as citizens and those things in the long term just kind of consistently you know you consistently get with the organic search traffic from that because to Brent's point no one else is really writing to that so it's really powerful. Yeah it is and I think you can see too when you get to her about page she talks about I relate I was a born-born person that had moved to the U.S. and you know had to transfer my education and get started and go through the visas and stuff like that and so it just makes her more approachable right and you can do that with your client you know you're a business owner talk to business owners so you're you know whatever it is from some way try to make that connection where you understand their problems. All right I'm going to take that down now. So just for full transparency we hadn't gone through each one of these those are the first time we had kind of prepared and gone through them but one of the things is everyone mentioned the the blog content right and it started also narrow to around a target. I think it was really interesting Cindy to what you're talking about of like really listening so I actually love to turn over the team what sort of advice would you give to advisors if they've identified a target or if they're really thinking about maybe tailoring their blog content or their blog like their blog page or website copy what have you to really listen to what people want because it's an easy mistake to just create to create but not really understanding to like what people want so what I'll send you I'll hand it over to you how do you guys make sure you kind of have your ear to the ground and are actually serving up what people are searching for. Yeah so one of the big pieces particularly for websites right is I think that one of the most important questions financial advisors can always be trying to answer is why now right and so you can look at the clients you already have right like what was the pain point that led them to approach me to say like hey Sidney I really need your help right like that sort of thing and tailoring like write blogs about that put those questions and pain points on your home page right and all of that like I think that if you start with that you probably have a good half dozen to dozen different topics some of which can get put on your home page some of which can be put on blogs that can get you started and then from there like it really comes down to like you know if your specialty is dentists like dentists who own their own businesses like are you on Facebook groups where dentists who own their own businesses are talking about their problems are you you know when you're talking with your niche listening to what those things are and just like can I continually just answer the questions that I'm kind of organically seeing and getting and you know I think the other thing is like people put a lot of pressure on themselves to be super insightful but like uh quote-unquote like answering those questions is quote-unquote all you have to do you know for uh and and it really doesn't have to be any fancier than that if I could pick oh sorry ah please if I could just kind of piggyback off of that and send me I have two tips for this and one kind of starts with a short story um I once was writing a website for a client and their whole thing was annuities and that's great the problem was that they had so much content that they wanted to put right on front and center on their website about annuities they really wanted people to understand what they were the benefits the different types that they wanted to get so in the weeds and we went back and forth and back and forth and finally I said listen this belongs on a blog post we can have all of this content that you want to include but we're going to make it live on a blog post and we're going to make it readable and skimmable and give it an appropriate home it did not belong front and center on the home page because that's just going to overwhelm any visitor who's going to come to your website um so that's kind of like my first tip if you have like something specific that you that that's kind of like your thing um or your your services that you really want to explain more about create blog posts about them and you can always link to those blog posts on your website and kind of say like hey you want to learn more about annuities check out this blog post um so that's the first tip the second tip is to kind of talk if you have a team talk to your team about what kind of questions are commonly coming up maybe certain times of year or just regularly by clients like what are clients always asking them and repeating the same questions if you have clients with equity comp it's probably about taxes um or like they might not understand like what rsus are versus stock options like whatever is always getting asked and you're like constantly having to explain the same thing over and over and over again write a blog post or write a couple blog posts about it next time an email comes in with that question send them to the blog post and then say happy to hop on a call but here's a quick resource in the meantime um those are my two tips if you're just like i don't even know where to start but you want to write something specific for your clients um the other thing i think is take a topic that might be kind of general and make it say like i don't know like required minimum distributions for retirees in harrisburg like start to get like local if that's who you work with um incorporating kind of those little aspects in it um can kind of help as well those are my tips also there's a great point about clients and also centers of influence as well right yeah you can arm that especially if you have centers of influence that are of influence that are totally aligned with your your target so then that can just help them do their job better and be a soft lead-in to be able to make a connection so um yeah just following up again marcus sheridan is a is a marketing person um about 10 years ago he wrote a book called um they ask you answer and it was all of this um it was just about whatever questions your people are asking the clients you work with every day that's those are your blog topics you're answering those because they're searching them online if they're asking you to advisors about this quite often they can't they can't quite think that narrow so so making notes and talking to the other advisors and and making a list of them is really great way to go um and not everything's going to rank and not everything has to rank most most advisors that get good traffic can really down to two or three blog articles is bringing most of that traffic in they just hit it right but but that other content is still important for people when they visit your site to get to know you to get to know your expertise and what you're talking about um length still is a factor with google um and you see i see a lot of places around online that it doesn't matter anymore but we find it still really does um that the longer articles do better one of the things you can do once you pick a topic a general topic uh if you go if you search that and compare the articles that are being written particularly by other advisors rather than the media companies you can get an idea for subtopics within that area how long that article should be kind of reverse engineer what's ranking and follow that pattern yeah so well said any data tools just things like uh spots in google analytics or things just for people to um just be aware of so beyond just sort of talking with um clients and others maybe brent we should share that s yeah obviously google analytics it ga4 has made it less easy to get information from it seems to me but you can still find organic traffic that's what you want with seo is organic traffic that's what people are searching and finding you i think a tool that nobody uses or very few people use but most have available it's it's free to add if they're not is google search console um it you can go on there and see what keywords people are searching that you're showing up for and what they're clicking for now you'll have to kind of look in how to do that but it's all right there there's lots of videos i'm sure how to use google search console to find your keywords and same with google analytics but those are both free um and and i think have some really great information and then i want to also pitch us over to city too but do you mind just explaining for folks to the nuance of what organic traffic is versus inorganic just so we can kind of square that way did you say me yes please um yes so organic traffic is simply somebody has searched in google or bing or on ai or whatever and um clicked on your listing and come to your site so it it it is pretty much somehow based on seo whether you've intentionally done it or not they have found you on search or ranking non-organic and it could come from other areas but primarily where i'm concerned about is is is google right um non-organic would be like paid ads or referrals links you know on your wealth tender site come over to you or your napfa site come to you that's that's inorganic um and and where although napfa was probably found organically and then they found you inorganically or came to you all right thank you and then sydney i want to kick that back over to you so any tools that you all use at kids days or things that you found to be really valuable for advisors and all the conversations you all have had yeah um another tool if you're really getting curious around keywords and stuff like that i i really like semrush that's s-e-m-r-u-s-h.com um so that can get i mean if if you're a data nerd i can personally attest to the level to the number of rabbit holes that you can fall down there um but the the two the two tools if you're just trying to get started and um get oriented in there is first semrush will crawl your pages for you and will highlight like here are some improvements you can make to improve both the overall height health of your site and the overall health of your pages and i'll highlight i mean if this is the thing that lights you up you're more than welcome to spend time doing it this is also something that you can outsource pretty easily to someone who has a working knowledge of wordpress or whatever the site or whoever is hosting your website um for like for the level of of what sem rush gives you um so if it lights you up you're welcome to spend the time on it if not that can give just a really helpful diagnostic list that you can then hire out someone to help with um and then the second portion is just keyword rankings um i think it's been mentioned a couple of times like when you stay really general you're basically competing against the entire world for that person's attention but the more specific that you can get um the more and more that you're competing uh with a smaller pool of people or that you're competing against a smaller pool of people um and all that and if you can really demonstrate that relevancy that's very powerful and so sem rush is a great tool uh once you've kind of decided who you're speaking for, for like, what words are going to matter the most? How can I get this in? What is my niche really responding to and all of that? And so, like I said, there's a ton of things if you want to get very nerdy with SEO in SEMrush, but I would start with those two spots if you're just trying to look at it yourself. Rachel, anything to add to? Yeah, usually advisors I work with don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole. I guess another tool I've used in the past is Ahrefs, but again, it's similar, it's technical. That would be the only other one I can think of. It's so true. So I know when we started, we kind of talked about rabbit holes, right? There's a lot of the shiny object out there, and I know we've stuffed a lot into this conversation today. Everything from top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom, we've looked at websites. So on this call, you've got us, we do outsource marketing, you've got Rachel, she's copywriting, Brent, SEO, Sydney, you're seeing the whole kit and caboodle behind the scenes from our content engine. So I want to get into some questions about what should you be asking of your provider? But before we do that, can we just throw out, like when you say you can outsource, it used to be the, you might think like, oh, that goes overseas, or what does that mean? What can you outsource when it comes to your website or to your marketing? Just if you all want to kind of throw out some, just for folks so we can get an idea of the world here, so. Let me, what can you not outsource? I do, I mean, I work with advisors out top to bottom. I will meet with you and create kind of what your website, the flow of your website, like the navigation, what pages we should actually include, the content I get on in-depth calls with them. So writing the copywriting, and then there's designers who will go out and build it. If you already have like a platform, like Squarespace or WordPress or something, they'll build it on that. You can get custom graphics created. And then there's tools for outsourcing, like online schedulers, the pop-up chatbots, those kinds of things. I feel like you can pretty much outsource it all. Yeah. Yeah. Specifically for SEO, we do the keyword research. We'll work with you to determine or figure out who your target is, do the keyword research. We can write the content or create outlines for content for you. And then down into even creating an email and stuff like that for follow-up. Sydney, things you're seeing on your end? Yeah, I would say that there's kind of three spots that depend, that you could really hire out. One is like content ideation, which is kind of being discussed here in terms of like outlines, what can I put on my website, right, and all of that. The other is content creation. So like, do I want someone to ghost write for me or something like that? And then the last is a content distribution. So that would be things like, I'm happy to sit down and record a podcast. I do not wanna figure out Adobe Audition. And I don't wanna figure out how to distribute it across my socials. And I don't wanna select soundbites and like all of those things. And so some advisors have an interest in one or two parts of that process. Some advisors have an interest in zero parts, but those are kind of the really big umbrellas that if you're looking to start, like I would kind of start with those circles, looking for help with ideation, creation, or distribution as kind of the three places that outsourcing can help. That's such a good, oh, I'm sorry. No, no, go ahead. I was just gonna say that was such a good point, Sydney, because I just started working with some advisors who like, they love to write. And it's interesting, it's like they love to do it when they have the time, but they need almost like an accountability buddy. And somebody who will come in and kind of polish it up, do kind of some of the SEO, or not captions, headers and things like that, and then give it back to them to publish. So yeah, it's interesting. It's like you can have as much involvement or interest as you want as an advisor. Yeah, that was a really good point, sorry. Thank you. Really appreciate that too. And then thinking about sort of that initial exercise, right, of being able to write down your business goals. Again, we've shared a lot here, but it's gotta be able to connect back to your business goals and what you're looking for, which is gonna impact your budget. What do you actually need? Do you need a full service? Do you need just to sort of fill in a gap? Are there other sort of components that impact the right fit for outsourcing? So part of identifying the right fit goes in a number of ways, right? Personality, cost, all these kinds of things. But can I just throw it over to the team? What questions should you be asking either as a team or to your provider to make sure that it's the right fit against maybe your own brand sort of values or budget or what have you? So I'd love to throw it over to the team here. We'll start with Brent. What questions should folks be asking to a potential provider? Yeah, if they're looking for SEO, I think one of the things that has changed over the years, I think it's really important now that they are experienced in the financial industry. I don't think years ago when I started, you didn't have to be. You could rank fairly easily for most keywords. And now you really need to get beyond the very basic keywords to find content that you can rank for. So I think that's really important that they have some understanding of the financial industry, the terminology. I think you wanna make sure that they create baseline measurements and are transparent in where you are starting and where you move through to. And then I think maybe not necessarily a question, but kind of watch. If you start watching and working with somebody and they're bringing ideas for content, make sure, try to understand the intent behind the search. So by that, like if somebody's searching financial planner for positions, that's gonna be, you know, they're looking for a financial advisor or at least starting to shop. If it's, you can get lots of traffic without actually achieving anything, right? Like if, so if I wrote an article, how much do physicians make? How much does the average physician make, right? That would seem like it could go on a doctor financial site, but there's no intent behind that. They're not looking for an advisor, not looking for information relevant to advisor. So just make sure that the content, that there's an intent behind that to find out more about the financial industry and working with a financial advisor. Other questions that would be good to ask? I'll pop it over to, Brent, unless you've got another one, I wanna make sure to pop it over to Sydney to Rachel. Any other final ones, Brent? No, those are the big ones. Okay, Sydney? Yeah, I think that if I were coming away from this with one question, it would honestly be, how can I do more with what I'm already doing or what I already have? So this might look from something like, I really enjoy writing and blogging. Am I getting like, can I distribute that across my socials, right? Like, can I use what I'm already inclined to do and expand the reach of what I'm already doing? That sort of thing. And I think getting in a little more specifically there, in talking with a lot of advisors, I think Lauren used the phrase of like shiny objects, right? The reality is that all marketing works. It doesn't all work efficiently is the big asterisk that I will put on it. But research shows like, if you're out there and trying some sort of marketing, someone eventually will show up through that. And so I think in some ways that can be a little frightening because the website, like even just the web content strategy world is enormous. And I think in some ways, like that can be liberating in the sense of like, okay, what am I most inclined towards? And then how can I get more out of the stuff that I'm most inclined towards doing? I think would be kind of the two big questions that I would lead with. Great, Rachel. So I kind of, I think this sounds counterintuitive, but I asked them about what is your dream scenario? If we were working together, I start with kind of your dream scenario. If a budget was no object and I can do anything you ask me to do, like what do you want out of this? And usually that kind of doesn't throw people off, but they're kind of like, oh, well really this is what I want. And it usually kind of ends up changing the whole relationship because I don't think people always realize like what, and maybe this is something that I need to be better at advertising on my end, but it's kind of, I don't think people always realize what's available to them. So I always try to pull that information out of the conversation. And then kind of on the opposite end of that is asking them what's realistic in terms of their involvement in the relationship. I think a lot of people see social media working for a lot of advisors, but, and so they think they have to do it or they want to do it. But then when I start to ask about it, it's like, well, I hate social media and I hate posting. I don't wanna go on there every week and be commenting and blah, blah, blah. So it's kind of like helping them figure out, well, what is realistic? What do you want? And where can we meet in the middle to figure out this relationship that's gonna be best for you? And then just in terms of finding the right provider, I think I'm kind of a very like boutique firm because it's kind of just me. And then I can really adapt myself to do what you need and I'm flexible and we can really work one-on-one and have that kind of relationship versus some larger institutions, which they have more resources behind them, but they may be a bit less adaptable to some last minute changes or they may be stuck to more of a rigid scope. So in terms of just an advisor choosing a provider, I think those are some important considerations. Yeah. Okay, so we've got a question. We've got a little bit of time left for Q&A. So our question that came in is, how many prospects do you see advisors getting per website search per year? So, and then how many are converting? This is a little bit of a loaded question, right? Unless we're gonna kind of do a across the board survey, but can folks speak to leads when it comes to websites and expectation setting? I can speak to SEO. SEO is very, takes a long time. So timelines, usually looking, depending on where they're starting at from a year to two years, doesn't always take that long, but I think it often does. Traffic, was that part of it? How much traffic, Lauren? What I, so this is, and this will be different. From my experience from SEO, you won't really start seeing leads until you get minimum 750, probably closer to 1200 visitors, organic visitors a month. It's not a, it's just kind of something I've observed. So I talked to advisors and they see they're getting 200, 250. And most sites, until they're starting creating content, are gonna be 200 or fewer visitors. And if they're, I talked to advisors and I said, we'll get 200 people and nobody's, and I don't, I can't connect the reasoning and everything else, but it does take a volume of people, just like sales, right? It's the number of people you talk to. Some people are gonna say yes. And the more people you talk to, the more they're gonna yes, but it does take a higher volume to get the turnover. And then it, with SEO, again, with most of it, probably accelerates over time. You get, as you start out, you're only gonna trickle. And then if you commit to doing it long-term over years, you'll get more and more and more coming. But I usually see the start coming in somewhere, I guess I'd say 1,000 organic visitors roughly. And then it builds up over time, over that next year, you'll start to get them more regularly. And then any thoughts around conversion defined by prospects filling out forms and numbers to expect around that? Let's say that you're at the 1,000 and up traffic point. What sort of trends are you seeing on that side of things? That's, does anybody else have, I'm gonna have a really rough answer on this one. It's hard to, so much of it depends on what conversion is set up, right? Like, so traffic, and that's one of the things, no matter what marketing you're using, you need to kind of get to that point, what's your goal? Your goal is to get leads and get clients, right? And so, again, it doesn't matter how much traffic you get ultimately, if it doesn't convert. And so you want that intent behind it. Conversion depends a lot, the ideal conversion is somebody picks up the phone and says, I have money for you to manage. That doesn't happen all that often. More often, the conversion is somebody sign up for your email list, right? And then you still have to continue marketing. But it's not high, it's under 5%, maybe under 2% overall online. I'm not sure if anybody else seen something different. Yeah, that charts out, I just pulled up the Kitsis 2024 marketing study while you were chatting, so that's why my eyes were over here. But basically, in terms of the actual conversion rate, I'm sorry, I'm skimming right now. So currently, SEO is used as I am, sorry, skimming up towards it right now. So- Big old Kitsis reports, they're so meaty. They're so long and they're so helpful and I am skimming through charts as quickly as I can. I'll jump in here too as you're skimming unless you found it there. Yeah, yeah, I just- Okay. So basically about 40% of firms are using some sort of social media, SEO, right, blogging and all of that. So in the aggregate, each of those individual things are being marked as about two to 3% of their incoming revenue per year versus referrals is being marked as about 38%. And I can share exactly which figures and stuff I was looking at either here or we can email it out afterwards if that's helpful for people to look at. Yeah. And there's really along that track really a couple conversions, right? The first one is mostly adding to your list. And then it depends, it's dependent on the advisor or the firm somehow having a follow-up. So they're using social media, SEO, video podcasting, speaking, whatever it is to bring traffic to the website. The website's converting it probably to an email list, not a call. And then the email has to continue working on it. And so there's a long, a lot of steps in the conversion and the better you get at each of those and the longer at each of those, the more success you'll have. Brent, I see similar numbers on the paid side. I see anywhere between one and 5% converting. So it, you know, it's a big kind of, it depends, but the longer you invest in it and the more you're committing to it, you do see an increase, so. Oh, Brent, there's a question about calendarly pages. I know you had, you wanna share that insight that you've got with folks too. Yes, I'm glad that that was brought up because I meant to mention it when we're talking about websites. And this is data I've seen, and I've also gotten, seen some of it from other sources out there. Calendly pages, and we see more advisors moving over to calendly rather, away from the contact us, the generic contact us. And I certainly encourage advisors to do that. There's a higher click-through rate or higher conversion rate with calendars, scheduling a meeting than there is through a contact us form. We see people are more willing to schedule that appointment rather than fill out, you know, an information or ask questions and send it, wait for an email or something like that. So I would encourage, it's okay to offer both, like offer a contact us for questions clients might have or whatever, and schedule a meeting. And I think it's been a more successful call to action. Got time, oh, go ahead. Sorry, free, it's free to start. Yes, great. I have time for one more question, it's a good one. Any tips to leverage the NAPFA profile to attract prospects? Thoughts on how to best leverage that? Sort of the advisor profile page or the firm profile page. Yeah, it acts as a, so from my perspective, again, from an SEO, it's like a description on the Google business profile. It's a conversion factor, right? So NAPFA is gonna be found through organic search and then people on NAPFA will be looking. And that information that you share within your description is going to be a determinant factor whether they click on you, right? They have a lot of choices there. And if yours is generic, we're a financial planning firm. We work with everybody across, you know, we really specialize in near retirement and retirement people across the United States. Versus somebody that's looking, you know, we specialize with foreign born or outside US, non-US citizens. And I'm a non-US citizen, I'm more likely to click there. If it's generic, you're gonna reach no one or everyone, but nobody will click. So you wanna be specific, which is gonna cause you to miss out on some people, but we'll connect with the right audience when they see you. That's right. And then I think just circling back to the earlier conversation, if there's a bio page photos, make sure you link back to your website. Adding in that personal human side of it are all key things to this relationship business. So we're at the top of the hour. Thank you all for your time today. This was a lot of fun. So again, the recording will be available. You get one NAPFA CE credit as well. And when we close out here, there'll be a survey that will pop up. So we'd appreciate any feedback that you have. So thank you again to NAPFA. Thank you to our panelists here and great discussion, lots of takeaways and everyone have a great rest of your week. Thank you everybody. Thank you, Lauren.

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