So, you have your financial planning website all ready. It looks great, you’ve spent hours on the content and the design and you’re very proud of it.

And you launch it.

And for a few days, it gets a bit of traffic – mainly because you’ve sent out an email to existing clients, (and friends and family).

But after a while, you notice there’s not much traffic at all coming to it.

Welcome to reality! You can have the best website in the world, but without traffic, it means nothing.

Over the next few months we’ll post some articles on how you can get more traffic to your site. For now, here’s a summary.

Two ways to get traffic

There’s two ways to get traffic to your site:

1. You tell people about your site.
2. They find your site themselves.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

You tell people about your site

This is the traditional way financial planners have promoted their websites. This strategy involves you telling others about your site and getting them motivated to go to your site.

Ways to do this include:

• Placing your web address on business cards, letterhead etc.
• Using an email signature that promotes your site.
• Advertising – either online or offline.
• Emailing your existing clients and either they visit your site or they forward the email to their friends who click on the link to your site.
• Using social media like Facebook or Twitter to promote your site.

There’s other ways to do this – I’ve only listed a few above. The main point is that you’re the one doing the promoting.

They find your site themselves

Consider this – every day there are people who are searching for your services but they don’t know you exist.

How do people find a financial planner? Word of mouth is still a popular method, but even with a referral, potential prospects are likely to visit your website before they call you to get a better idea of who you are.

These days, more and more people are turning to the internet to get financial planning advice.

And they’re looking for businesses like yours.

Ways people can find you include:

• Doing a Google search for financial advisers in your local area.
• Searching Google using other keywords, such as retirement planning’.
• Seeing your business listed in the Google local search listing (contact me to find out more about how to get your business featured here).
• Seeing your advertisement alongside the search results when they use a search engine.
• They see your business mentioned on Facebook or Twitter.

There’s a lot of ways people can hear about you.

Imagine if every month in your local area 500 people searched Google for a financial adviser.  What if you could reach just 1% of that number – 5 people. If two of them became new clients, would that be helpful for your business growth?

But you need to do some work with your website to get it in the right positions on the search engines.

Do something different today!

Very few financial planners understand about how they can set up their sites to obtain a better listing in the search engines.

It is possible to get your site to the number one position for certain keywords. And this opens the door to more new clients because now they can find you.

We help financial planners who are interested in learning about how search engine optimization of their website can help them find new clients.

Contact us today to find out more about how we can help.

Do you have questions about this article? Please leave a comment below.

photo credit: jurvetson