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3 Ways Financial Advisors Can Improve their visibility in AI search

I’ve been working with financial advisors for over 7 years now, helping them improve their SEO, website usability, and digital marketing visibility. Digital Dynamo has helped them gain phenomenal search rankings growth in traditional search. And now, we’re using GEO and LLMO to help them improve their visibility in AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode.

We’re still learning and studying what impacts AI search visibility for our financial advisory clients, but here are 3 learnings we have gleaned so far to help financial advisors be seen more in AI-driven searches.

Jump to:

  • 1. Pick a Niche, and Create Content Related to It
  • 2. Have Strong Informational Pages on Your Site
  • 3. Get Online Branded Mentions & Backlinks to Your Site
  • Conclusion
  • About the Author: Marcie Lord
  • Related Posts

2. Have Strong Informational Pages on Your Site

By Informational Pages I mean: About pages that contain your mission, history, and credentials, author pages for the writers on your site, and contact pages.

“If there is one area of your website you need to improve on, your About page may be it,” advises Search Engine Journal in their recent article, How To Get Brand Mentions In Generative AI.  “Generative AI models utilize these types of pages to understand what a company does and how credible the company is. If you ask any of these platforms for information about your brand, you may be surprised by how heavily they rely on your About page to deliver the answer.

When we analyzed the types of pages most users were landing on from AI search tools, outside of the home pages, most users were taken to informational pages. This indicates that tools like ChatGPT are answering questions and delivering provider solutions where branding and location are integral to the user’s query. Informational pages that clearly outline the financial advisor’s brand, its location, and its credentials will gain more AI visibility.

3. Get Online Branded Mentions & Backlinks to Your Site

Backlinks and digital PR have long been necessary for visibility in organic online search. The same is true for AI-driven searches; we have found that financial advisor websites with a good number of backlinks and mentions from reputable and relevant platforms see more traffic from AI search models. Backlinks from websites with a local audience will help advisors targeting a local market.

Per Ahrefs, branded web mentions have the strongest impact on appearing in AI Overviews specifically. A branded web mention is when your brand’s name appears in sources separate from your site.

There is also a key difference in the impact of unlinked mentions for traditional search engines vs. AI-driven search engines. As Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, states:

Unlinked mentions—text written about your brand on other websites—have very little impact on SEO, but a much bigger impact on GEO… LLMs derive their understanding of a brand’s authority from words on the page, from the prevalence of particular words, the co-occurrence of different terms and topics, and the context in which those words are used.

Prior to AI search, unlinked but branded mentions presented little value for boosting rankings. But they now appear to be effective for helping a brand and its website get mentioned in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT. This is good news for many financial advisors who have strong journalistic connections but rarely get a backlink to their website, due to the policies held by some well-known publications (like Bloomberg and Bankrate).

Conclusion

AI-driven search engines can be the next big lead generator for financial advisors and may even deliver better qualified leads. The three tips I’ve listed in this article give financial advisors a good starting point for where to start optimizing their site and online presence if they want to be seen in more generative AI search results.

If you’re a financial advisor and need help with your digital marketing, AI visibility, or building reviews (which can also help with your online visibility) you can learn more about our GEO & LLMO for business, or book a call to speak directly with me, Marcie Lord.