SEO Case Study for Financial Advisors

A previous client referred this financial advisory firm to BeFound because of our proven track record of delivering significant results for service businesses in competitive markets.

The firm is based in Dublin and serves clients from the capital down to Wexford. Their work focuses on a small number of carefully chosen service areas for a high net worth audience.

Who they serve

• High net worth individuals
• Business owners planning an exit
• Professionals approaching retirement

Services offered

• Financial planning
• Pension planning
• Investment services
• Business exit planning

Project goals

The primary goal of the SEO campaign was to increase the firm’s online visibility so they could attract more qualified leads from organic search, in a market where competitors were spending heavily on paid channels.

Financial services is one of the most competitive verticals in Irish search. The firm was up against larger brands, established advisory networks and well-resourced comparison sites, all chasing the same high-intent keywords.

On top of the competitive pressure, the website itself had a long list of issues that were holding it back.

• Keyword research had never been done in any structured way
• Significant duplicate content across pages
• A confusing website hierarchy that worked against both users and search engines
• Missing pages and posts for important services and topics
• Broken pages and underlying WordPress configuration issues
• Weak on-page optimisation across the entire site
• Poor internal linking, so authority was not flowing to the pages that needed it
• Low overall website authority due to a thin backlink profile

All of this combined meant the site was effectively invisible for the searches that mattered most to the business.

When BeFound began the engagement, the site was attracting only about 50 organic visits per month from Google.

For a firm operating in a high-value space like financial planning and pensions, that level of visibility was nowhere near enough to support a serious lead generation pipeline.

The starting position can be summarised as:

• Around 50 organic visits per month from Google
• Very few ranking keywords of commercial value
• No meaningful backlink profile
• A site structure and content base that needed to be rebuilt before growth was realistic

The brief was clear. Fix the foundations, then build visibility around the services that actually drive revenue.

The work was sequenced so that technical and structural problems were fixed first, then content and authority were built on top of a stable base.

Content strategy

• Weekly blog posts covering retirement tips, investment strategies and tax-saving advice
• Detailed service pages for each core financial service
• Case studies and client testimonials to support trust and conversion

On-page optimisation

• Meta tags, headings and URL structure reworked across the site
• Internal linking improved so authority flowed from supporting content to commercial pages
• Homepage and service pages prioritised as the main conversion targets

Technical SEO

• Image optimisation and caching to improve page speed
• SSL certificate installed to secure the site
• Broken pages and WordPress configuration issues resolved
• Site hierarchy restructured to give search engines a cleaner map of the content

Link building

• Guest posting on relevant financial and business websites
• Local citations across trusted Irish business directories
• Articles placed in local Irish news websites to build topical and geographic relevance

Each strand fed into the others. Cleaner technical foundations made the new content easier to rank, and the new content gave link building genuine assets to point to.

The combination of technical fixes, ongoing content and steady link building produced a clear and compounding improvement.

• Starting point: around 50 organic visits per month from Google
• Year one: grew to a few hundred organic visits per month
• End of year two: organic traffic over two thousand per month
• Since then: roughly 30% year-on-year growth in traffic
• Rankings: highly ranked in a very competitive market for many directly relevant keywords across financial planning, pensions and investment topics
• Business impact: combination of excellent content and high traffic resulted in a high level of inbound leads, so much so that they do not need any other form of prospecting

Financial services is one of the hardest verticals to rank in. Trust, regulation and competition all push the bar higher than in most industries, and many advisory firms default to paid ads because organic feels too slow.

This project shows what is actually possible when SEO is treated as a long-term asset rather than a quick campaign.

• A site starting from almost zero organic visibility can become the main source of new business if the foundations are rebuilt properly.
• Sequencing matters. Technical and structural fixes first, then content, then links. Skipping steps wastes budget.
• Consistent weekly content, focused on real client questions around retirement, investments and tax, compounds into rankings for high-value commercial terms.
• Strong organic performance can fully replace outbound prospecting for a specialist advisory firm, which changes the economics of the whole business.

For any financial advisor weighing up whether SEO is worth the patience, this case is a clear answer. Done properly, it becomes the most valuable channel in the business.