Does Your Financial Planning Practice Come Up in a ChatGPT Search?

A couple of weeks ago, one of my financial advisors told me something interesting.

She said she had just gotten off a prospect call with someone who had found her name doing a search on AI.

Up until this point, I've done plenty of searching for information on AI, but it hadn't occurred to me to look for services that way. Intrigued, I started looking around.

I began looking up terms that I thought my clients would want to rank for. One of the most exciting results was when I searched for financial advisors in Denver who work with single women.

The result? The top three on the list are Social Seed Marketing clients.

I continued searching for phrases that I thought other clients might rank for and while some would pop up in the top 10, none were as "robust" as the three who work with single women.

I'll tell you why this makes sense in a minute.

I also searched phrases for my own business. "Digital marketing for financial advisors" - I didn't even rank. "Digital marketing for small financial planning businesses" - I was number one.

What's the difference between an AI and a Google search?

I should have prefaced this entire article by saying I am by no means a ChatGPT expert and while I dabble in SEO for blogs, I'm not one of those people who does a deep dive into optimizing complex websites.

That said, I am an internet user like you, which means I'm likely searching for things the way you would.

When I take the exact terms/phrases I searched for in ChatGPT and put them in Google, what comes up on the first page are a bunch of directories and articles. So, in that way, ChatpGPT was much more efficient in searching for a list of businesses. It immediately gave me a list of people to call and while the list is likely comprised of a lot of different factors (including directories on the internet), I know it's not entirely made up of a directory of people who paid to be there.

Also, when I searched for specific parameters. it wasn't really a surprise to me who came up and who didn't - and that includes my own business.

What the businesses on the list are doing right

When I look at the three advisors who ranked in that initial ChatGPT search for single women, all three are women who do the following:

• Create consistent targeted content. (This is the BIGGIE.)

• Think outside the box a little when it comes to video and written blogs.

• Address questions this specific demographic wants to know about.

What other businesses could be doing better

With some of the other practices that aren't ranking as high, there are fixable reasons why that's happening.

• Their content is too broad, so they're being outranked by other practices.

• They might have changed their niche more than once in a short amount of time, which doesn't help with longevity.

• Their website doesn't specifically say who they work with and what they do.

Now, before you think I'm pointing fingers remember that I'm looking at my own business as well. While I'm ranking for pretty specific terms, I'm not even on the list for general "digital marketing for financial advisors."

The good news is that I AM on the list for the demographic I want to work with: solo advisors and small financial planning practices.

Overall, this has made me rethink the content that I'm putting out there. Am I being too broad? Am I addressing the concerns of the smaller businesses? What issues are they having and how can I help? Again, this isn't that far off from what I should be doing to rank well in a Google search.

This whole exercise has been interesting to me, thinking about this new way people might be looking for services. AI has changed a lot of things about how we do business. I guess it's changing how we find businesses as well.