A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Financial Advisory Firms

This guide is structured as a layered diagnostic, not a to-do list. The goal is to give you an honest picture of where your firm stands before you spend time or money on fixes. Work through each section in order — technical problems at the foundation level will mute everything built on top of them.

For each diagnostic area, you'll find a set of evaluation criteria. Score your firm on each one using a simple three-point scale:

• 0 — Not in place: This issue is present and likely suppressing performance.
• 1 — Partially in place: The element exists but has meaningful gaps.
• 2 — Fully in place: This area meets baseline SEO standards for an advisory firm.

At the end of each section, total your score. Sections scoring below 50% of maximum points are your priority repair areas. Sections scoring above 80% can be maintained rather than overhauled.

Who should run this audit? An operations manager or marketing coordinator can complete the surface-level checks with a few free tools. The technical and compliance sections benefit from someone with direct site access (Google Search Console, your CMS backend) and a working understanding of SEC and FINRA advertising rules. When in doubt on compliance questions, consult your compliance officer or legal counsel — this guide is educational, not legal advice.

Plan to spend two to three hours on a first pass. The output is a prioritized list of gaps, not a finished optimization plan — but that clarity alone is worth the time.

Technical SEO problems are invisible to visitors but fully visible to Google's crawlers. Most advisory firm websites have at least a few issues in this layer — the question is whether those issues are minor friction or a fundamental crawl block.

Crawlability and Indexation

Open Google Search Console and navigate to the Coverage report. Look for pages marked as Excluded or Error. A healthy site has the pages you want indexed in the Valid bucket and nothing important excluded. Common problems include orphaned pages (no internal links pointing to them), accidental noindex tags, and robots.txt rules that block key sections of the site.

Also run a site: search in Google (site:yourdomain.com) and compare the number of results to your actual page count. A large discrepancy suggests indexation problems worth investigating.

Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

Use Google's PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and a key service page. Industry benchmarks suggest financial services sites frequently underperform on mobile load speed, largely due to oversized images and unoptimized third-party scripts (chat widgets, compliance disclosure tools, analytics tags). A Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) above 4 seconds is a meaningful ranking disadvantage on mobile.

HTTPS and Security Signals

Every page on your site should load over HTTPS. Mixed content warnings — where some assets load over HTTP — can suppress rankings and reduce visitor trust. Check your browser's security indicator on multiple pages, including any client portal login pages.

Structured Data

Financial advisor sites benefit from LocalBusiness and FinancialService schema markup. This markup helps Google understand your firm's name, address, service area, and professional credentials. Use Google's Rich Results Test to check whether your schema is present and valid.

Score this section out of 8 points (2 per criteria above).

Google's helpful content guidance rewards sites that demonstrate genuine expertise on the topics they cover. For financial advisory firms, this means your website needs to do more than list services — it needs to show depth of knowledge in the areas your ideal clients are searching for help with.

Service Page Depth

Pull up each of your core service pages (retirement planning, wealth management, tax-efficient investing, etc.). Ask honestly: does this page explain the service in a way that would help a prospective client understand what they get, who it's for, and why your firm handles it differently? Pages that contain fewer than 400 words of substantive copy, or that repeat the same generic language across multiple pages, are thin content — and thin content pages rarely rank for competitive terms.

Topical Coverage Gaps

Map your existing content against the questions your target clients are actually searching. Tools like Google's People Also Ask results, Answer the Public, or even your own client intake conversations are useful sources. In our experience working with advisory firms, common coverage gaps include fee transparency (clients actively search for this), fiduciary explanation, and niche-specific planning (e.g., planning for business owners, physicians, or federal employees).

E-E-A-T Signals on Author Pages

Google evaluates Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) especially rigorously on financial content. Check whether your site includes advisor bios with credentials (CFP, CFA, CPA designations), professional history, and links to external profiles (LinkedIn, professional association directories). A site without clear author attribution on financial content is leaving E-E-A-T signals on the table.

Internal Linking Structure

Every service page should link to at least one related piece of educational content, and every blog post or guide should link back to a relevant service page. A flat site where pages don't connect to each other loses the topical authority signals that help Google understand what your firm specializes in.

Score this section out of 8 points.

Most financial advisory firms serve a defined geographic market, which means local search — the Map Pack results that appear when someone searches "financial advisor near me" or "fee-only advisor in [city]" — is a primary acquisition channel. This layer evaluates how visible your firm is in that local ecosystem.

Google Business Profile Health

Claim and verify your GBP if you haven't already. Then audit the following:

• Business name: Matches your official registered name exactly — no keyword stuffing.
• Primary category: "Financial Planner" or "Financial Consultant" depending on your services — choose the most specific applicable category.
• Address and phone: Consistent with what appears on your website and across all directories.
• Services listed: Each core service you offer should appear in the Services section with a brief description.
• Photos: At least 10 photos including your office, team, and logo. Profiles with photos consistently perform better in local pack results.

For a deeper GBP optimization framework, see our financial advisors SEO resource hub.

Citation Consistency

Your firm's Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) should be identical across every directory where your firm appears — your website, GBP, Yelp, NAPFA directory, your state bar or FINRA BrokerCheck listing, and any chamber of commerce listings. Inconsistent NAP data confuses Google's local algorithms and suppresses Map Pack rankings. Run your domain through a citation audit tool (Moz Local, BrightLocal) to surface inconsistencies.

Review Velocity and Compliance

Advisory firms face specific constraints on how they can solicit and display reviews under the SEC Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1) and FINRA Rule 2210. This is educational content — consult your compliance officer for firm-specific guidance before implementing any review solicitation strategy. Subject to those constraints, Google reviews are a meaningful local ranking signal. Audit your current review count, average rating, and recency — a review profile where the most recent review is 18 months old signals low engagement to both Google and prospective clients.

For a full walkthrough of compliant review strategy, see our guide on testimonial compliance for financial advisors.

Score this section out of 8 points.

This section is unique to financial advisory firms. The regulatory environment governing how RIAs and broker-dealers can communicate publicly — including on websites and in organic search content — creates constraints that don't exist in most other industries. Compliance gaps in your web content are both a legal risk and an SEO risk, since content that must be heavily disclaimed or removed loses its ranking value.

Disclaimer: This section provides general educational context about common regulatory considerations for financial advisory firm websites. It is not legal or compliance advice. Always consult your compliance officer, legal counsel, or your state securities regulator for guidance specific to your firm's registration status and applicable rules.

Core Regulatory Framework

Three regulatory frameworks govern most advisory firm web content:

• SEC Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1): Applies to SEC-registered investment advisers. Governs testimonials, endorsements, performance data presentation, and hypothetical performance claims in advertisements — including website content.
• FINRA Rule 2210: Applies to broker-dealer communications with the public. Sets standards for fair, balanced, and not misleading communications, with specific requirements for performance presentations and risk disclosures.
• State securities board advertising requirements: Vary by state registration status. State-registered advisers may face requirements that differ from SEC rules.

Content Audit Checklist

Review the following on your live website:

• Do any pages display client testimonials or endorsements? If so, do they include required disclosures under Rule 206(4)-1?
• Does any content reference past performance? Is there appropriate disclosure that past performance does not guarantee future results?
• Are hypothetical scenarios or model portfolios presented in any content? These trigger specific disclosure requirements.
• Does your homepage or "About" page make claims about results achieved for clients? These are likely regulated as testimonials or advertisements.

Content that cannot be properly disclaimed — or that would require so many caveats it loses its usefulness — is better removed than left to create compliance exposure. Work with your compliance team before publishing any new content that touches on investment results, client outcomes, or endorsements.

Score this section out of 8 points.

Add up your scores across all four layers. The maximum is 32 points. Here's how to interpret your total:

• 24–32 points: Your firm has solid SEO fundamentals. Focus shifts to competitive differentiation — building topical authority, growing local review velocity (within compliance constraints), and expanding content coverage into niche client segments.
• 16–23 points: You have a functional foundation with meaningful gaps. Prioritize the sections that scored below 50% first. Technical problems should be addressed before content investment, because technical issues suppress the performance of everything else.
• 0–15 points: Multiple foundational gaps are likely compounding each other. This is the profile where a professional audit and managed remediation almost always returns more value than DIY fixes — because the issues interact in ways that make triage difficult without expertise and tooling.

When to Handle It In-House vs. When to Bring in Help

Some audit findings are straightforward to fix with internal resources: updating GBP information, adding advisor bios, consolidating duplicate content, or correcting NAP inconsistencies in directories. Others require technical expertise or specialized knowledge of the financial services regulatory environment: fixing crawl errors at the server level, implementing schema markup correctly, or restructuring content to meet compliance requirements without gutting its SEO value.

The signal that consistently indicates a firm needs outside help is a site-wide ranking drop with no obvious cause — this often indicates a technical issue, an algorithm update impact, or (rarely) a manual action in Search Console that requires specialist diagnosis.

If your scores reveal gaps across multiple layers and internal bandwidth is limited, the most efficient path is a professional audit that maps all issues simultaneously. That gives you a prioritized remediation plan rather than a sequence of disconnected fixes that take months to work through.

If you want a professional set of eyes on your firm's specific situation, you can request a professional SEO audit for your advisory firm — we'll identify what's holding your rankings back and what's worth fixing first.