Keyword research for an advisory firm usually starts with a guess. Someone opens Keyword Planner, types "financial advisor," and gets back a few thousand ideas, many of them about Roth IRA limits, retirement calculators and how to become a financial advisor. The list looks thorough. Most of it would spend your budget on people who will never hire you.
The fix isn't a better guess. It's a better seed. Keyword Planner can read a website and return the searches Google associates with it, and which website you hand it decides what comes back.
This chapter covers how to see who's advertising in your market, which competitor to feed Keyword Planner, why your firm's name needs its own campaign with logins excluded, and the negative list every advisory account should start with. Search volumes are US-wide unless we say otherwise; the competitor findings come from our example market, the San Francisco Bay Area. Run the same steps where you practice.
National Firms and Lead Sites Advertise on Advisor Searches. Most Firms Down the Street Don't.
Start by looking at the field. Inside your account, the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool renders the results page a prospect in your town would see for "fiduciary financial advisor near me" or any other search. Google steers advertisers to it instead of their own searches because a preview doesn't add impressions to your stats. And it removes the temptation to click a rival firm's ad to see where it lands, which only charges them and tells you nothing.
What you'll find may surprise you. In our example market, we checked 108 independent advisory firms that showed up on Bay Area advisor searches against Google's Ads Transparency Center. Only 4 had run Search ads in the previous three months. The advertisers were mostly national firms, online and robo advisers, and lead sites such as WiserAdvisor, SmartAsset and Unbiased, whose ads promise to match a prospect with an advisor and then sell that lead.
You can run the same check for free. Type any advisory firm's name or web address into Google's Ads Transparency Center and it lists the ads that firm has run and when each last appeared. Look up the five firms that compete with you most often. If none of them advertise, your keyword list is competing mostly with national brands and lead sites.
That's good news for a local firm. The auction is crowded with companies that can't sit across a kitchen table from a client in your town. Your keyword list should be built around exactly that advantage.
A Firm Your Size Hands Keyword Planner the Searches Your Clients Actually Type
In Keyword Planner, the option labeled "Start with a website" accepts any web address and suggests searches based on what that site's pages are about. Set the location to your market, paste in a competitor's address, and you get the searches Google ties to that competitor's pages.
Which competitor matters more than anything else in this step. We ran the same pull for twelve example firms in the Bay Area. Seeded with Edward Jones' website, Keyword Planner returned searches worth about 53,060 a month in the market, and only about 140 of that came from people looking to hire an advisor. Most of the rest was Roth IRA limits, retirement calculators and the brand's own name, because that's what Edward Jones' consumer content is about. Seeded with KB Financial Advisors, a small firm that serves tech employees, about 21,930 of 25,740 were advisor searches. In the Bay Area pull, the hiring searches near the top could fill a first campaign by themselves: "financial advisors" at about 5,400 a month, "financial advisor for retirement planning" at about 2,400, plus "financial advisors near me" and "financial planning services" at about 880 apiece.
So pick competitors that look like you: similar services, a similar client, a similar size. If you're a fee-only planner for physicians, seed with the two or three firms that show up for physician searches, not the national brand with a Roth IRA calculator. Then pull a second time with one of your service pages, a third with another, and merge the lists.
Your Own Website Shows Keyword Planner What Google Thinks You Sell
Then feed it your own address. It's the fastest way to see your firm through Google's eyes. If your retirement page returns searches about Social Security and pensions, it's doing its job. If your home page returns generic "investment" ideas and nothing about the services you actually offer, your pages are too vague for Google to place, and that will show up in Quality Score too.
Keyword Planner has one more helpful setting: when you start with keywords, you can enter your domain, and Google "will try to exclude keywords not related to what you offer." Use it. It trims the noise before you have to.
"Edward Jones Login" Gets Nearly Half as Many Searches as "Edward Jones" Itself
Your firm's own name belongs in its own campaign. People who search for you by name are as close to hiring as a search gets, the clicks are usually cheap, and you don't want those searches competing for budget with "financial advisor near me."
But advisory firms have one thing most local businesses don't: a client portal. And clients use Google to find the door. In Keyword Planner's US data, "edward jones login" draws about 450,000 searches a month, against about 1,000,000 for "edward jones" itself. "Ameriprise login" draws about 135,000 against 201,000 for "ameriprise." Even a smaller national firm like Creative Planning sees about 1,900 login searches against 22,200 for its name.
Every one of those people is already a client. Paying for their click is paying to show your own clients the way to their own account. Add "login," "log in," "sign in," "portal" and your custodian's name plus "login" as negatives in the brand campaign before it goes live. The share varies by firm, so check your own name plus "login" in Keyword Planner.
"Financial Advisor Salary" Gets 12,100 Searches a Month From People Who Want Your Job
Advisor searches attract a crowd that has no intention of hiring one. Some of the biggest:
- People who want the job. "Financial advisor salary" pulls in about 12,100 a month, "series 65" about 9,900, "financial advisor jobs" about 8,100, "how to become a financial advisor" about 6,600 and "cfp exam" about 5,400.
- People who want it free. "Free financial advisor" draws about 2,900 and "cheap financial advisor" about 260. A firm with a $1 million minimum shouldn't pay for either.
- People looking for someone else. Competitor names come back from competitor-seeded research and, later, in far larger numbers from broad match. "Edward jones near me" alone draws about 27,100 searches a month. Names go on the negative list. If a firm ever targets a competitor, it does so in a separate campaign, on purpose, and that's a big if.
If your firm doesn't offer tax planning, "tax planning" and "tax advisor" searches go on the list too.
Insurance and annuity searches are a judgment call, not a default negative. Some firms sell insurance and want those prospects; fee-only firms don't. Decide deliberately.
To Google Maps, a "Fiduciary" Can Be a Professional Trustee. Your Negatives Decide Which You Pay For.
"Fiduciary" is one of the most common trust words in advisor ads. It also names a different profession. When we searched Google Maps for fiduciary financial advisors in the example market, the results included several professional fiduciary services, the trustees and conservators who manage someone else's affairs.
Someone searching "fiduciary services" may need a trustee for an aging parent, not an investment advisor. Add "trustee," "conservator," "conservatorship" and "fiduciary services" as negatives, and read the search terms report for the rest.
One technical note from Google: negative keywords don't match close variants the way regular keywords do. You need to add plurals and synonyms yourself. "Trustee" won't block "trustees" unless you add both.
Six Keywords per Ad Group, Live on Exact Match, Beat Sixty Keywords in One Group
Now sort what's left into the service ad groups from Chapter 4: retirement, wealth management, tax planning, estate coordination, equity compensation, only the ones you offer. Cap each group at half a dozen keywords a prospect would use for the same service, and switch them on as exact match, so the account buys only searches you picked. A retirement group might hold "financial advisor for retirement," "retirement planning services," "retirement planner near me," "retirement financial advisor" and "retirement income planning," all pointed at the retirement page.
The bid estimates in Keyword Planner come from past auctions. Google defines the low end of its top-of-page range near the 20th percentile of what advertisers paid in the past and the high end near the 80th. In our experience, treat any single estimate as plus or minus about 30% and let real cost data replace it within a few weeks.
The negative list is never finished. It earns its keep later, when an Exploration campaign joins the account. That's our label for broad match run on a target cost per lead, and it finds the searches nobody wrote down. Expect it once the account logs roughly 30 quality conversions a month, often in months 2-3 and sooner for firms spending more. With it switched on, check what people actually typed every morning for its first month, and exclude whatever doesn't belong.
Next: The Clients Nobody Types a Keyword For
You've got a clean list of the searches you know. Chapter 6 covers the ones you don't: the niche clients, like tech employees with stock grants, who search in words no keyword list predicts.
All chapters are on the guide's home page.
When we research keywords for advisory firms through Google Ads management, the competitor list comes from the client's own market and service mix, and the negative list is ready before the first ad goes live.
