Google and Adviser Ratings

The mountain of negative press coming out of the royal commission can leave you cold, dejected and overwhelmed. For good advisers, being blamed for the sins of bad advisers or failures of the licensee or corporate system they operate under can be hard to take. What can you do?? A positive first step is to use the power of Google to help control what people will read about you when they search to validate you as an adviser.

Even if a family member or friend recommends your services to someone, chances are the prospect will research you online before making contact. The vast majority (over 90%) of consumers research online before making a substantial purchase of a service of product. We all know, to do this people use Google.

In December 2016, just over 2 years after Adviser Ratings launched, we received great news from Google. They had confirmed Adviser Ratings as an independent rating and review platform and recognised this by showing advisers’ consumer ratings in the five-star format in search returns for the adviser.

GOOGLE IT

This means that advisers with at least 1 review on their profile, get shown in Google search results with a rating out of 5 stars. If this review happens to be from one of your happy clients, who have rated you at 100%, you will have a 5 star rating shown beneath the link to your Adviser Ratings profile.

1. This is how your profile is returned in a Google search of your name if you have not claimed your profile and have no reviews:

2. Yet if you take 5 minutes to claim your profile and ask one client to review you (and they give you a 100% rating), you get this returned when you Google your name:

SEO

In addition to this, Adviser Ratings has taken steps to improve our own site ranking and weighting with search engines through means such as “indexing” our entire site for search engine optimisation (SEO). As our ‘weighting’ increases, so too are any pages that are listed on our site – such as your own profile page. You can help strengthen this process for your own profile by sharing links to your profile or articles you write that are published on our site as much as you can, via the widgets, free buttons and badges that are available in your profile, and also by re-posting your profile or the review you receive on social networks such as twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Get Reviews to increase SEO

You can also increase your SEO by getting more reviews - as every time you get a review, a client visits your profile. Improving the SEO for a particular page means that that page will appear higher in search returns. 

More reviews = Greater SEO.

Greater SEO = Maximising the opportunity to be higher up the list in the search returns.

Like it or not, there will be even more scrutiny of financial advisers due to the royal commission and consumers will be doing their research on advisers using Google.

Without putting too finer point on it – put your self in a punters position. They want to seek advice, but they don’t know where to go.

They go to the independent ratings site called Adviser Ratings or have heard of you so they search Google for your name.

How will the link to your profile on Adviser Ratings be returned when someone searches for you? And will your profile page be blank – with no profile picture and no client reviews? To a punter an unclaimed profile is just another one of those faceless advisers who are all the same. Take control of your profile – claim it, put up a picture and invite your clients to rate you. It’s free.

This won’t change the bad news coming out of the royal commission, but it is one small way you as an adviser can start taking control of the narrative around yourself, amidst the storms engulfing the industry. You know you have nothing to hide, show the general public that you actually have dozens of happy clients by getting them to review you.

You can claim your free profile here 

To find out more about claiming and enhancing your free Adviser Ratings profile see here 

If you have any questions or queries, contact admin@adviserratings.com.au

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Adviser Ratings

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