Optimising your IFAP tools and content

There are many different factors which contribute to the way a search engine will see your webpage and site. Google takes into account over 200 unique elements when it decides how relevant your page is to a particular search. The following guidelines are quick and easy optimisations you can make to your “Find an IFA” page to help it to come up in natural search results.

Create descriptive, attractive and unique page titles

Search engines value the title tag to a great extent and so changing this can have a major impact on your visibility. The title tag is usually displayed in the results by the search engine as the link, with the Meta description under it.

Example Google search results

  • A title tag should not be over 70 characters long and should ideally be closer to 60
  • The content of the title tag should be directly related to the page
  • Important keywords which you would want to rank for should be included
  • Keywords should only be used once in the title to avoid them being seen as spam.

Example – Find a local IFA for Independent Financial Advice – “Name of Company”

The meta description can largely increase or decrease the clickthrough rate of your result in listings, so it is very important to get this right. Follow these tips:

  • The description should be less than 165 characters in length
  • It should contain a ‘call to action’. This is wording which asks, or better tells the searcher to do something. For example, ‘Find details of...’ or ‘Get independent advice on...’ or ‘Search for an IFA now...’
  • Important keywords should be included because if a user has searched on them and your page comes up, the keywords will be bolded - drawing extra attention to your result. In the screenshot above, you can see that ‘financial advisers’ and ‘IFA’ have been bolded.

Write unique, quality, keyword rich content on the page

Google will always try to deliver completely unique results to users; therefore duplicated content will not normally rank for the same searches. As there are many other IFA search white labels, making content outside of the search form as unique as possible is very important – otherwise an alternative white label may rank instead of yours.

Write descriptive content on the page that explains the service and is unique to that page (not copied from somewhere else). The page should contain descriptive text about your services and content which your audience might be looking for.

Link towards the page strategically

Links are one of the most important factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites. Whilst there are many different types of links and even more different factors dictating the value of links, a basic top-line strategy can make all the difference. Effective linking towards the page must be considered and can be the deciding factor between ranking in the top 10 or Google not even finding your page. Use the following guidelines to boost the strength of your ‘Find an IFA’ white label:

  • Make sure that the page is not isolated on your site
    • Include it in your navigation/menus
    • Include the page in your site map
    • Link to the page from other related content/sources
  • Link to the white label from your homepage if possible. You could use a ‘Quick links’ box for example
  • Choose a couple of keywords which you would like the page to rank for and then link to it using these as anchor text. Every link to the page (including from the site map) should use these words as the hyperlink. For example, you may have a link to the page looking like the following (in this case, the term targeted is ‘find an IFA’):
    • Quick Links
    • Finance Resource 1
    • Finance Resource 2
    • Find an IFA
    • Finance Resource 3
  • Avoid the common mistake of including surrounding, irrelevant text within the link. Often words like ‘click here’ are included in the link. For example, ‘click here to find an IFA’ – as you are not trying to rank for ‘click here to’ this should not be in the link. This link should look like: Click here to find an IFA’ (with the underlined text linking through to the IFA search page)

Increase clickthrough and rankings with an optimised URL

The URL is the full website address of the page, eg: http://www.unbiased.co.uk/find-an-independent-financial-adviser/find-an-ifa/. While at the homepage the URL is quite short, the URL can get quite a bit longer the deeper a user goes into the site. Depending on how the CMS/site works URLs can get very long and complicated. Research has shown that searchers pay attention to URLs and use them to make a decision on which result to click. The URL also affects rankings. Use the following rules to make sure your URLs are benefiting their pages.

  • Keep the page as close to the homepage level as possible. Some search engines devalue content that is too deep, for example: site.com/level1/level2/level3/level4/page.html. Keep in mind though that the page should still sit within a related section, for example: site.com/finance/ifa-search.html rather than site.com/ifa-search.html
  • Use hyphens as spacing characters and split up keywords. Some search engines do not recognise underscores (or other characters, except hyphens) as spaces. So, splitting up keywords with anything except a hyphen won’t have the same positive effect
  • Include keywords in the URL. This will help with clickthrough rates as well as rankings for those terms. For example, your page may be at: www.site.com/find-independent-financial-advice.html or www.site.com/ifa-search.html

Browser address bar with searched words in bold

These are some of the top-tier, basic guidelines for natural search optimisation. Natural search is a powerful and very cost effective traffic driver and can simultaneously help any paid search efforts, increasing clickthrough rates and decreasing click costs.