How Do You Know If Your Financial Firm’s Blog Is Actually Working?
“What are we even doing all of this for?”
You’ve been publishing for months, and it feels like you have nothing to show for it. There’s no report that says, “This blog produced three new clients,” so it feels like it’s not doing anything.
Unfortunately, a clean result like that is pretty rare. We don’t always get to see the role blogs play in the path from stranger to client. A prospective client might hear of your firm through a referral, Google you later that night, read two articles, disappear for a bit, and then see one of your advisors on LinkedIn when the timing is better.
By the time they book a call, you have no clue how big of a role those articles and posts played, because they’re not getting the credit for the lead.
So, a better question than how many people clicked the CTA at the bottom of an article is whether there are any signs that your content is doing its job. This article breaks down what those signals can look like and how to read them without expecting every blog post to come with its own revenue receipt.
Lead Source and Content Influence Are Two Different Things
Your CRM will probably boil your prospect’s path down to the word “referral.” So, when you look back at what helped you land that client, you’re working with an incomplete idea of what it took to get there.
Is it useful? Yes. Complete? Probably not.
The same thing happens in plenty of other ways:
Someone first sees an advisor on LinkedIn, then reads an entire series of articles before reaching out.
A prospect finds one article through Google, leaves, and returns directly to the site weeks later.
A CPA sends over the firm’s name, and the prospect uses whatever they find on the website to decide whether the team actually understands people in their situation.
Your CRM will usually record the introduction data for you, but it has a much harder time recording everything the prospect read, watched, searched, and came back to before deciding to contact the firm.
That’s why lead source tells you where the relationship started. Your content may still be doing a lot of the work between “I’ve heard of them” and “I’m ready to talk,” and you can have no clue.
Give the Blog an Assignment Before You Grade It
Your blog can be “useful” long before someone hits that CTA link at the bottom of the page. You just have to decide which part of a blog’s job is most important for you at this stage.
For one firm, maybe the priority is to show up for searches around a specific planning problem. Another firm may already get plenty of traffic through referrals and use content to help those prospects understand the firm enough to book a call. A niche advisor might just care about building a library of work around one client type or issue.
Your blog can also give your advisors something useful to send after a conversation or to a referral partner like a CPA or attorney. Or maybe it’s the basis for a YouTube video or email newsletter.
Your blog can have so many different jobs with so many different outcomes. These all have different ways of being measured; if you judge them all by how many people clicked “Book a Call,” you’re going to treat a very small slice of the reader’s behavior as the whole result.
Look at Whether the Right People Are Finding You
Traffic is a great metric, but it can be pretty misleading by itself. An article can bring you 200 visits from people who will never need your services, while another can bring in 25 people searching a question you hear every day from your existing clients.
Search Visibility
Start with the searches themselves. Are your articles beginning to appear for topics connected to the work you want more of?
If your firm wants to be known for equity compensation, business exits, or retirement tax planning, growing visibility around those searches tells you more than a random spike from a broad personal finance topic.
You’re looking for evidence that Google is starting to associate your site with the subjects your firm wants to be known for.
Traffic Over Time
This is where older articles are especially revealing. A three-year-old post that keeps bringing in relevant visitors is doing a very different job for your firm from one that gets a burst of attention on LinkedIn and then disappears.
Look for gradual growth across your library. As more related articles begin ranking, organic traffic should come from a wider mix of useful searches instead of depending on one or two lucky posts.
What Happens After the Article
The blog page is only one stop on your website. Where do readers go next?
Do they click into an advisor bio after reading an article about a planning issue, or visit the service page connected to the topic? Do they open another article and keep researching?
Readers will take different paths depending on so many factors, and plenty will leave after getting the answer they came for. A positive signal is whether some of that traffic continues into the parts of the site where people learn who you serve, how you help, and whether they want to talk.
Your Discovery Calls May Be Your Best Analytics
Some of the best evidence that your content is doing its job will come up after a prospective client finally gets on a call. A lead source field might say Referral or Organic Search, but a couple of casual questions can fill in the rest of the story:
How did you first hear about us?
Was there anything on the website you looked at before reaching out?
Have you been following the firm or any of its advisors for a while?
What you really want to pay attention to is what starts repeating. Maybe three referred prospects mention the same retirement article. Or maybe someone found the firm through Google, then spent most of their time reading about one niche problem before deciding the firm understood their situation well enough to call.
Those comments are easy to dismiss as anecdotes when they happen one at a time, so write them down and you’ll see patterns start to emerge. You can see which topics are helping prospects self-select, which advisors or channels are creating familiarity, and which pieces of content keep showing up near the decision to reach out.
Look for Signs Your Blog Is Making Other Marketing Easier
A content library, when done right, will start paying off in places that won’t be obvious in that organic traffic report. You may notice that:
Advisors already have something useful to send when a prospect asks a familiar question.
Newsletters can point readers to a fuller explanation instead of trying to cover the whole topic in one email.
LinkedIn posts can pull from existing articles, so the team isn’t inventing a new idea every time someone needs to publish.
Referral partners have something specific to share with people who fit the topic.
Prospects researching the firm find substantive material behind the service-page claims.
Over time, this changes the role of the blog from a webpage to a library the firm can pull from during outreach, follow-up, referrals, email, and social content.
Give the Blog Enough Time to Tell You Something
Checking a blog post a week after it goes live is a little like checking your garden the morning after you planted it; there just isn’t much information yet.
An article can take months to gain traction in search. Plus, a prospect might read it long before their financial situation creates any urgency to call. The library also gets more useful as related articles accumulate, giving search engines more context and readers more places to go next.
That doesn’t call for endless publishing on faith. Pick a regular interval, such as quarterly, and look for movement:
Relevant search visibility:
Are more articles coming up for the searches your ideal clients are actually making?
Organic traffic:
Are older posts continuing to attract visitors as newer ones join the library?
Movement through the site:
Are blog readers clicking into related articles, advisor bios, or service pages?
Prospect feedback:
Are people mentioning articles, videos, or topics they encountered before the call?
Sales conversations:
Do certain articles or subjects keep coming up once prospects are talking with the firm?
Inquiries:
Are you seeing more conversations with people who fit the clients the content was created to reach?
A single week can tell you whether an article got clicks, but it can take a few months of patterns to tell you whether the library is starting to do its job.
So, Is Your Financial Advisor Blog Working?
If the scoreboard is “read article, then click the CTA, then become a client,” most financial advisor blogs are going to look pretty disappointing.
You’re going to see the fuller picture usually spread across the prospect’s path to your firm. Are the right people finding your articles in search? Are referred prospects using them to research the firm? Are certain topics helping establish the kind of expertise you want to be known for? Do articles keep surfacing in discovery calls, follow-up emails, LinkedIn conversations, or introductions from COIs?
Those answers are what can give you a much better read on what the blog is contributing to your business.
Content still needs a job. Traffic for the sake of traffic is a pretty weak reason to keep publishing every month. But once you know what you want the blog to contribute, you can judge it against that job instead of expecting every article to behave like a landing page.
I work with RIAs to turn their blogs into content libraries that support search visibility, referral conversations, and the research prospects do before they reach out.
If your firm has been publishing for a while and you’re still wondering what all of that content is actually doing, I can help you review what you have, see where it’s pulling its weight, and decide what deserves a place on the editorial calendar next.
