Today, one of the most important "best practices" you can deploy is an excellent web presence. To encourage people to upgrade their presence, I created an award: the Apex Award for Advisor Presence Excellence.
The annual Apex Award is to be presented in recognition of outstanding web presence according to these criteria: (1) dominates page one Google search result, and (2) multiple sites look good.
In other words, the recipient meets the two criteria for the APEX award: Be found. Look good.
In July 2011, I announced the first APEX Award winner: Thomas V. Christopher for outstanding Web presence. His award is posted here. You should visit his Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Christopher Financial Group to see why he received the award. He can certainly be found and he looks good.
I am awarding the second APEX award to Heidi Foster. Heidi is a financial advisor with American Wealth Management in Reno, Nev.
Heidi owns Google page one. The first 10 are hers. Check it out here (The search term I used was simply "Heidi Foster Reno NV.")
The reason this is so important is that 85% of the click-through rate occurs on Google page one. And get this, an astonishing 36.4% of people who hit page one click on the first position. Move down merely one place to #2, and your click-through rate drops to 12.5%.
The reason Heidi dominates Google page one is what she has done with the rest of her sites.
