When a referral looks you up, what do they find?

A referral gives someone your name, and the decision comes later. Before they call, most people type the name into Google or ask an assistant about the firm. What comes back is your own site, your Form ADV on the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site, a few directory profiles, and whatever an assistant puts together from all of them. If those disagree about who you are, where you are or who you serve, the referral has a reason to wait.

So we start with the searches a referral actually runs: your name, your firm’s name, and the firm with its city. We check what ranks, what an assistant says when it is asked about you, and whether your site, your public disclosure and your listings describe the same firm. The fix is usually plain work. One description of the firm, written once and used everywhere, and a site that answers the questions a referred prospect has before the first meeting.

If your firm is registered with the SEC, the Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1) governs its advertisements, and the SEC has said that content on an adviser’s own website that offers or promotes its services would likely meet the rule’s definition of an advertisement. In practice the site is written to the rule, the same as a brochure would be. A state-registered firm answers to its state securities regulator instead, and we write to whichever frame applies to you.

Testimonials, endorsements and third-party ratings are allowed, with conditions. A testimonial or endorsement has to disclose, clearly and prominently, whether the person is a current client, whether they were paid or otherwise compensated for it, and a brief statement of any material conflict of interest, along with the terms of any compensation and a fuller description of the conflict, which can sit nearby. The firm needs a reasonable basis for believing each one complies, and a written agreement with anyone it pays beyond a de minimis amount. A third-party rating has to show the date it was given and the period it covers, who created it, and whether the firm paid in connection with it, and the firm needs a reasonable basis for believing the survey behind it was not built to produce a set result.

We build those disclosures into the page itself, beside the quote or the rating, so your CCO reviews the quote and its disclosure together and decides whether a given testimonial runs at all.

Advisors who are also registered representatives of a broker-dealer work under FINRA Rule 2210 too. It requires a registered principal of the broker-dealer to approve each retail communication before it is used, and a retail communication is anything written, electronic included, that is made available to more than 25 retail investors within 30 days. Rule 2210 also requires a member firm’s websites to carry a readily apparent BrokerCheck reference and link on the first page meant for retail investors and on any page that profiles a registered person.

Your broker-dealer will have requirements of its own on top of that, and they come first. We build to them, and we leave the time its review takes in the schedule from the start.

Nothing we write goes live until your chief compliance officer, or whoever approves advertising at your firm, has signed off. Each change arrives as a draft with the page it belongs on, what changed and why, so the review is a reading job and nobody has to hunt for the edit.

Our drafts are conservative on purpose: no performance figures, no predictions, nothing that reads as a promise, and testimonials only where your CCO has cleared them and the disclosures sit beside them. A careful draft is quicker to approve than a bold one is to argue down.

Many advisory firms run their site on a platform built for the industry, such as FMG Suite or Twenty Over Ten, and their approvals already happen there. We work inside the platform you use rather than moving you off it.

The search work is the same on any of them: a title and description written for each page, a bio page for each advisor with their name, credentials and role written as text, a page for each service a referral is likely to ask about, and the firm described the same way everywhere it appears. Where a platform will not do something we would recommend, we tell you what it costs to leave it as it is, and the decision stays with you.

The pattern is common. A principal with genuine expertise has been commenting on their market for years, and most of it sits in social posts that are hard to find again and rarely answer one specific question. When an assistant does cite one, the citation sends the reader to the platform rather than to your site. Meanwhile the page on the firm’s own site with exactly that name has not been touched since well before any of it was written, and is still linked in the footer as though it were current.

Bringing that home is the highest-value content move available to most financial firms, and most of it is already written, though on a regulated site it still goes through your CCO’s review like any other page. Each piece gets a real page on the domain you own, structured so a single claim can be quoted, with the author identified as a person with credentials rather than as a byline. Then it can be cited, and the citation points at you.

There is a second reason this matters more in finance than in most industries. Every firm is being described, whether or not it can solicit, and the description gets assembled out of whatever citable material about the firm an assistant can find. The more of that material sits on a domain you control, the more of the description comes from you. We measure where a firm stands before the work starts: three questions a customer would ask, three runs each, in each assistant we track (ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI mode), nine runs per engine, reported as how many of those nine named the firm, on what date, and which sources were cited.

Getting found is half of it. In financial-firm sites we have audited, the new internal portal was often linked from nowhere and missing from the sitemap, and buttons inviting a visitor to schedule a conversation often led to a page with no scheduler on it.

So the question we ask first is simple: you published something this morning, so where do you want somebody to go after they read it? Most of the time there is no answer, and that is the first thing we fix.

Firms that raise capital or lend work under different constraints from advisers, and the constraints decide which search work is even available. Your counsel has the last word on every line of what follows, but knowing the shape of the constraint is what separates a plan you can act on from a proposal that dies in review.

A firm raising under a private-placement exemption that prohibits general solicitation cannot advertise the offering. Not in a subtle way, not with careful wording. That rules out the entire category of work that promises to put an offering in front of investors who search for one, so “get found by investors” is not something we will sell you. The restriction applies to the offering. Factual information about the firm, its team and its point of view can usually be public, and your counsel decides where the line falls for track record and past deals.

Fund structures that cap the number of holders in any single vehicle tend to produce a great many legal entities, one per deal, each with its own paperwork and often its own name. That is an entity-clarity problem before it is a marketing problem: somebody has to decide which entity the public content is actually about, because a machine trying to work out who you are will otherwise find dozens of candidates and no answer.

The SEC Marketing Rule covers advisers that are registered, or required to be registered, with the SEC. Whether it reaches your firm is a question for your counsel, and we write to whatever frame they set.

For lending, the constraint is disclosure rather than solicitation. Licensing identifiers, equal-housing obligations and state-level requirements attach to the pages that quote numbers, and anything quoting a rate is regulated. That is workable. It just has to be designed in rather than discovered at legal review.

When the buy side is constrained, the reflex is to conclude that search cannot help. It usually can, because there is almost always a second audience with no constraint attached to it at all: the people who bring you the opportunity rather than the capital. Brokers, intermediaries, owners, referral partners, the professionals who send work your way.

That audience searches like any other, evaluates like any other, and is very often already an option on the firm’s own contact form with not one page of content behind it. Serving it well is unglamorous and completely unrestricted, and in a constrained firm it is frequently the only search work worth doing.

We do not give legal, investment, compliance or financial advice, and nothing we build constitutes any of them. We do not certify anybody as compliant, and no deliverable of ours makes a firm compliant. Your counsel and your compliance function own that, and we write to whatever frame they set.

We do not promise financial outcomes. Not new clients, not assets, not leads, not loans closed, not capital raised. We promise the work and the evidence behind every claim we make about it, and we show you the raw findings rather than a score.

And no draft we write publishes client-facing financial content on its own. A person who is qualified to approve it approves it, and on regulated pages that is whoever signs off internally today. The approval step is part of the work.