Link Building for Financial Advisors

Building Online Authority Through Backlinks.

Ultimately, your search rankings will depend on the search engine’s perception of your authority within your industry and geolocation.

The more trust and authority the search engines have in your pages, the higher they will rank on search engine results pages.

The key is in knowing what signals the search engines are using to determine authority, and then focusing on reinforcing or strengthening those signals.

10 years ago, Foundational SEO — on-page factors such as keywords, title tags, URLs, and content mark-up — was usually enough to rank in most markets.

However, in today’s more competitive online markets, Foundational SEO, while still an important first step in getting found and listed in the search engine results, may not be enough to differentiate you from your competitors.

What Signals are the Search Engines Looking for?

There are hundreds of signals the search engines use, but the biggest two signals for authority are:

1. Backlinks from reputable, high authority sites
2. Online ratings and reviews (local authority)

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links from another site to your website. They allow another website to share some of its earned trust and authority with your site.

Authentic Backlinks

Search engines like Google and Bing, work very hard to ensure that the links that point at a site are actual “votes of confidence” for that website or page. They look for natural links and try to ignore links that are purchased from link farms, traded for, or look unnatural.

When looking for a company to help you with building authority and developing your link profile, make sure that the links that they will acquire are permanent, one-way, from reputable sites, and that they are acquired over time, not all at once.

Buying backlinks from link farms, exchanging links, or generating backlinks from spammy, low-quality sites will hurt your Search Engine Rankings.

At AWM we follow the changes in the search engine industry very carefully, and only use Search Engine approved techniques and strategies for building backlinks.

Why “Content Marketing” Isn’t Enough

One of the challenges with building backlinks, and a common misconception in the “build it [content] and they will come” theory of link building, is that within each industry, there are only a few high-quality industry-leading sites (in many cases 2-5% of online participants) linking out to others. You have to be very well connected, very strategic, or very lucky, to gain their attention and obtain a link from them.

We are able to identify the financial “linkerati”, research the type of content that they like to link out to, and proactively put it in front of them, thereby increasing the chances of gaining valuable links.

Our Link Building Strategies

There are a number of strategies that we use, the specifics of the plan we implement for you will depend on your niche, the content assets you already have in place, your competition, and timeline. Most plans include:

1. Research Competitors: We begin by developing an in-depth backlink profile of your competitors to determine where we need to get to, as well as to identify link opportunities that may be available to you.

2. High Authority Site Link: we will identify relevant, high authority websites, arrange a post or profile submission to that site, then write and submit content of interest to their audience that will link back to your web page.

3. PowerPage Technique: the PowerPage technique involves finding a piece of content that was successful in attracting backlinks, then creating a bigger, better piece of content. This requires us to:

• • Identify the important sites in your market and determine what type of content they link out to.
  • Create linkable content — blog posts, infographics, images, and video.
  • Actively promote your content on the Web.

4. Guest Posting: we identify high authority, industry-related websites, and work with them to create a guest post opportunity for your firm. We can write the article for you, or help guide your writers through the writing, submission, and promotion process. 

As always, you will have full access to our SEO dashboard where we will establish baselines to compare to, list work that has been done, and share results.

At AWM, we recognize that our success is measured by your success. That is why we monitor the Search Engines closely for changes, making sure that we only implement Search Engine approved strategies.