Written by: Samantha Russell
Google is the world’s largest search engine, racking up 5.4 billion searches daily. Whether that’s to search for food recipes, things to buy for the holidays or even local financial advisors. Understanding the importance and impact of search engines on your business and visibility is crucial. This is why Google’s upcoming changes might make you rethink some of the ways you market your firm.
In this case, Google is revamping how its search engine reacts to visuals. While text-based searching is wonderful, Google wants users to explore the information more naturally. Akin to Instagram or TikTok in the way that users are attracted by imagery and visuals. For example, you might find scrollable photos, maps, directions, weather, or even short videos when searching instead of the usual blocks of text.
As the Google image updates approach, financial advisors should be looking for new ways to visually advertise their business. Making great use of visuals that could include images, infographics, videos, and more. Now, we’ll be going over how financial advisors can make a foray into a visual-first marketing strategy.
It’s All About Video
As a financial advisor, you should already be exploring the video content sphere, but if you haven’t yet, check out this article on why and how you should. With Google’s new update, visuals will take center stage to allow users to more naturally explore information by clicking on what catches their eye.
For financial advisors, video content should be part of their portfolio to better engage with clientele. Instead of a wall of text, prospects or customers are able to enjoy educational and interesting videos. These could be anything from explanations of services, updates on current financial events/situations, and even fun videos such as office tours.
What Video Can Do for You
In addition to engaging customers and prospects, video has a great ROI. So much so that 83% of businesses say that video has provided them with a positive return on investment While it’s not the easiest task, the video pays off in more ways than one — allowing you to connect with your audience through one of the most in-demand marketing mediums today.
Coming Up with Ideas
Video ideas can be difficult to come up with, but trust us, we’ve done our fair share of video creation. The first step to creating a video is deciding what to record. What topics are valuable? What would your audience watch? A neat trick to finding these answers is to reverse search keywords and analyze the search engine results page. If you see video content in the results, then you know that Google is recommending video content for your specific query, and creating content targeting it could be worthwhile.
As you can see, the first search garners close to 10 million results. While that’s not bad, let’s see if we can get it lower and see what topics will be easier to rank higher in the results for.
In the next search, we simply added the specificity of age and the number of search results got cut in half. This means that posting a video on this specific topic will be more impactful.
Intrigue with Infographics
On the other hand, videos aren’t the end-all solution to visual marketing. Many financial advisors tend to focus their visual advertising on images and infographics in addition to video. Images tend to be easier to create and require less involvement. But at the same time can be more flexible when it comes to sharing with your audience.
For example, infographics are wonderful when it comes to sharing on social media or ranking on Google searches because they share compressed information in an easily understood and visually engaging way. This makes them appealing for use on social media and makes them a great source of backlinks as users are more inclined to share them compared to other images.
The Best Way to Make Infographics
There are numerous programs and sites that allow financial advisors to craft infographics that they can share on social media or on their sites. We personally recommend using Canva because it is not only mostly free but offers professional-level images without needing professional experience in visual design.
It makes designing infographics and other images easy with just a few clicks of the mouse. Try using a template or start from scratch and design something completely all your own.
Image Best Practices
Now that you’ve found a program or site that works best for you. It’s important to understand the universal rules or best practices for using and creating images or infographics. Here are some basic best practices for images you should be sure to follow:
- Optizime image resolution and size for whatever social media site you’re sharing to
- Make your images visually appealing while ensuring they’re not too busy
- Consider your brand and how your images reflect it
Be sure to check out FMG’s content that allows financial advisors to put out authentic and timely emails and social media posts along with videos, blogs, lead generation, and more.
Get Familiar with Google Snippets
First off, let’s discuss what Google Snippets are. When using Google to search, the results page will occasionally show a listing at the top known as a “featured snippet.” Here you’ll be suggested a website based on Google believing it’s one of the best results for your search. Every business or website should aim to be the featured snippet.
An important thing to note when aiming to be a featured snippet is understanding the long-tail keyword strategy. This is the strategy of using a string of keywords or keyphrases that are more specific and longer than commonly used keywords. For example, instead of searching for “financial advisors near me,” a long-tail keyword would be “financial advisors in San Diego, ca.” The more specific a search is the more narrowed down it gets and the easier it is to rank on the search results pages. Deciding whether you can rank for a snippet? Follow the same reverse-search strategy outlined in the video section to see if Google includes a snippet in your query.
Just remember that snippets are important if you want to focus on a specified area of financial advisory. They’re great for firms with niches as it allows them to be specific when it comes to setting SEO.