Ever built a site for a Financial Advisor?

You can build it yourself; use a hosted option like Wordpress.com or Squarespace and you can learn the basics of web development along the way. Otherwise, find a freelancer on Odesk or Elance and they can develop an open source site e.g Wordpress.org or Drupal on your hosting account (assuming you have one).

You can build it yourself using the wordpress in a matter of clicks, but bringing website live on domain is not everything, your website is useless if it doesn't fulfill the primary purpose of having the website.

Everyone is expert what they do it their daily routine, as Financial Adviser you would be able to create a website and bring it live, but you won't be able to make it the way an expert web development agency can.

The biggest question is how much population is in your area and how high is the competition. Try doing some keyword research with the Adwords Keyword Planner on the terms you would like to get found for and then make a strategy.

Building a website simply does not bring leads in like it used to. You will have to include on and off page SEO. Pricing for a site really depends on competition, size and functionality of the site, and any extras such as SEO or marketing.

I find that Financial Planning is one of those niches that can be very easy to rank for or can be very difficult depending on the location and population. Good luck!

Hey!

Heh, wrote a response here yesterday but forgot to post it...

Meanwhile most of the things have been answered already - building the site is the easy part, getting some visibility is another story. Luckily there are more than few companies in this forum who provide SEO services so ask for quotes and find the right fit.

Have you considered PPC ads?
For instance facebook advertising, you can set up your campaign so that your ad will be shown only to people living in your preset area, Detroit for example. Drive the traffic to a squeeze page, put together a little report that answers the questions your clients most often ask and ask for their email in return. In the Thank You page offer them free xxmin consultation over the phone. To those, who don't request the free consultation, send a couple of emails with relevant content and offer them free consultation again. You can write the follow up emails in advance and this little system can run pretty much on auto-pilot.

All the best,
Tomi

My brother is a financial advisor for NYLife. They MUST have a site built using their tool which sends every new page to compliance for review. A real PITA. Maybe you are independent and don't have this worry, but be careful when it comes to compliance and what you can and can't do with your site.

I'd agree that you will likely be wanting to do paid advertising to get traction and traffic. You'll of course want to do all of the SEO efforts, G+ business page and so forth.

I've built several sites for Financial Adviser / Insurance and also done the SEO for them. My client is now getting approx 1-2 new leads per day.

Compliance can definitely be a PITA. We have a bunch of "canned" stuff that is approved to post on FB. No one wants to read that crap though. It's not engaging. I've been told I can post other stuff, it just has to get approved.

I tried a couple different FB advertising campaigns but that failed miserably. I got about 10 new likes out of it though. Hell, if I was about to get more likes, I'm not sure how to convert them to customers.

My metro area has a 500-600k population. If it would help, I can pm the exact location.