How many times a month should you be pushing out content on your website as a financial planner or adviser? What difference does frequency make to your publishing, anyway?
Here at CreativeAdviser, we’ve seen virtually all possibilities on this front. There are financial websites which have no blog at all, and those which last posted three years ago. Then you get businesses which publish once a month, once a week or even every other day.
There are few absolute rules in financial marketing. Mainly, there are principles for “good practice”. One thing we would say from our experience as a financial marketing agency is:
- It is generally best to have an active blog than no blog at all.
- It is probably better to have no blog at all than an inactive one, only showing old posts.
Why it’s Better to Blog, than not
Why do we say this? The answer to the first statement lies primarily in the SEO benefits. Publishing regular, original content on your financial website is one of the best ways to build up your search engine rankings in Google. By neglecting this side of your business, you thereby risk losing brand exposure.
The answer to the second lies primarily in brand perception. If you have no blog, then perhaps your audience might assume that you simply do not publish content on your website. Conceivably, you might publish your thought leadership elsewhere.
However, by showing a dormant blog with ageing posts on it, you risk telling your audience that you are neglecting your thought leadership. Perhaps they assume that you think it is not important, or that you are too busy to give it your attention. Neither is good.
Does that mean, therefore, that if you have an old blog that you should simply “hide” it, or turn it off? Our answer would be: hold your horses. By getting rid of your old blog, you could actually cause more harm than you want to fix.
There is still a chance that your old blog posts are generating some strong search engine rankings for your financial website, for specific target keywords which are important to your marketing. Moreover, it might be that these old posts still generate a lot of brand engagement and website traffic, particularly if they deal with more “evergreen” topics.
Turning these posts off could, therefore, result in a dramatic decline in search engine rankings or website traffic. On the other hand, keeping them switched on could also be causing you problems. The fact is, from an SEO standpoint you don’t really know what impact this content is having until you go through an auditing process with a financial marketing agency.
From a branding standpoint, however, it certainly doesn’t look good to have the most recent dates on your posts showing 2017, 2016 or even further back. To address this, one less-drastic option might be to consider just hiding the publication dates from your website visitors until you have figured out what to do with your content strategy.
Popular blog frequencies
So, there is a strong case in favour of blogging regularly on your financial planning website. Yet how often is optimal? What kind of length should each post be, moreover?
To answer this question you should have at least two things in mind: goals and capacity.
What are you trying to achieve in your marketing with your blog posts? For instance, are you primarily looking to build your brand or generate organic traffic to your website?
In the case of the former, it might be more appropriate to publish content less frequently, but focus on creating longer-term posts on a diverse range of topics which are relevant to your value proposition. After all, the goal here is to show people what you can do, how you can help and provide useful information.
In the case of the latter, the main goal is to build up your search engine rankings for a specific set of keywords used by your target market in the search engines. Here, you should aim to publish frequently (i.e. at last 1x per week). The content should be more narrowly focused on a limited set of keyword groups, and it should be published to a high standard as often as you can. The intended result is a building of momentum for your target keywords in Google Search.
Once you’ve determined your marketing goals with your blog posts, it’s time to turn attention to your capacity. How much content can you realistically publish within a month to a high standard, for instance? If you are a small, busy financial planning team then you might struggle just to get one good post out each week on your own efforts. Rather than simply give up, however, perhaps you could consider outside help from a professional copywriter in financial services.
Conclusion
The question you might ask after all this is: “Is all this blogging really worth it?” It’s a fair question, especially since the word “blogging” tends to carry certain images with it which can be off-putting to a financial planner or adviser. Perhaps it makes you think of a teenager pouring out their angst onto their personal page or platform, rather than a professional, serious financial firm publishing content to build consumer awareness and trust in their brand.
The short answer is: yes, blogging is worth it. Even in 2019 when it can sometimes feel like social media dominates our digital lives and websites matter less than they used to, financial services websites are still hugely important within a marketing strategy. Your website forms a vital hub of thought leadership for your brand, as well as a focal point for your lead generation campaigns and other digital marketing efforts. Be careful to nurture and not neglect it.
If you would like to speak to us about your content strategy and take advantage of a free, no-commitment marketing consultation, then do get in touch. Register your interest via:
T: 01923 232840
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