How This Advisors Content Strategy Made His SEO Take Off

Content marketing is a must for financial advisors.

They know they should do something, but oftentimes it's tough to know where to start and difficult to keep up with.

Blog posts, LinkedIn articles, social content—it all makes sense in theory.

But nobody talks about what happens between month one and month twelve.

The silence, the slow crawl, and the moment you start wondering whether any of it’s working.

Dan Leonard for Powering Your Retirement has lived that, and now his site is proof that the strategy works.

Here's how we got there.

Dan, Already Had The Niche

Dan had already defined his niche before we built his website. He knew he was going to be working with PG&E employees.

Utility workers have specific retirement benefits, pensions, and financial questions that are different from the average person's situation. 

Dan understood that world and wanted to serve those people. 

When we looked at the keyword data while building his site, we saw there was solid search volume around PG&E retirement topics and not a lot of advisors competing for it

So when it came time to build out his content strategy, we had a clear lane to work in from day one.

What The Strategy Actually Looked Like

Every week there would be one blog post, that we would optimize for the keywords and AI detection, one LinkedIn article, and one social post.

Every week, we keyword optimize and AI optimise one blog post, one LinkedIn article, and one social post, plus one marketing email every month.

That's the strategy we stuck to, our goal was to build a massive library of content, enough that Google could crawl it, index it, and start treating Dan's site as an authority on the topic.

The first six months: nearly nothing

The first couple of months are where advisors start giving up. The numbers are quiet, there’s a handful of clicks here and there, and the impressions barely move at all.

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Dan's Google Search Console graph from June 2025 through November of 2025 is a pretty flat line with the occasional spike, but not exactly the stuff that will get you fired up.

Google won't hand out better rankings after three or four blog posts, but it will reward the websites that stay consistent and keep posting.

Dan's content library was growing, and his authority was quietly building. It just wasn't showing up in the data yet.

We both shared an understanding that this was a long game, which ultimately kept the strategy going.

That’s when things started to move

Around the start of 2026, the graph started to look different.

Impressions—how many times Dan's site showed up in a Google search result—started climbing.

Dan's impressions, which is how many times his site showed up in a Google search, started climbing, and then the site clicks followed.

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His average position, which has been sitting well outside the top 10, started climbing. By the spring of 2026, his daily impressions started hitting the 500-750 range, and better yet, his site clicks were spiking up to around 10-12 on good days.

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Over the full year (June 2025 to June 2026), the site pulled 592 total clicks and 25,600 impressions.

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We started noticing the same results on Google Analytics, with 3,900 new users over the year (up 936.9%).

What we honed in on

As Dan's blog library grew, we started seeing which topics were performing better than others.

The blogs about PG&E pensions and benefits performed especially well. So we started honing in on those and answering the exact questions that people are typing into Google when they're six months away from retirement, trying to figure out what they're entitled to.

We created more blogs around that topic, targeted more keywords, went into more depth in the specific retirement landscape for utility workers.

And that is how our content strategy continued to evolve. We saw what was working and kept doing that.

The AEO piece

AI platforms like ChatGOT or Claude are starting to be used more and more as the first stop for financial questions. People ask, and the AI answers, and if your content is well structured and authoritative enough, you could start showing up in these answers.

It's called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and it moves slowly, same as SEO.

Dan's site has already seen 136 visitors come directly from ChatGPT over the past year.

That number is going to keep growing as more people shift toward asking AI instead of Googling. The content that's been building his SEO is the same content quietly laying the groundwork for AEO.

What the data actually proves

Two things.

First niching works. Dan isn't trying to rank for "retirement planning" or “financial planners”—a term dominated by massive institutions with marketing budgets that dwarf smaller advisory practices. He's ranking for the terms his exact ideal client is actually searching. 

And second, consistency is the whole game. None of our posts went viral, and no single piece of our content flipped a switch. This was simply just one year of consistent blogging, posting, and publishing while the algorithm silently took notice.

Our results didn't arrive after three to four blogs, they arrived because month two happened, then month three, and then month eight, and so on…

Where things stand now

Now Google knows what Dan's site is about and who it's for.

His direct searches are up, organic searches are climbing, and AI-referred traffic has started showing up for the first time. And all of those numbers are only going to continue building as we keep going.

What this means for you

If you've been sitting on the idea of starting a content strategy, it takes time, the first few months are quiet but you keep going anyway.

Over a year of consistent, niche-focused content, his site went from a quiet corner of the internet to one that's generating nearly 4,000 new visitors a year—and the curve is still climbing.

That's what the Advisor Content Package is designed to do.

We handle the blog optimization, and the social posts and graphics—week in, week out. You show up as the expert. We make sure Google (and ChatGPT) starts to agree.

If you want to see what that could look like for your practice, let's talk.