* 22 YEARS *

The Top 15 Financial Advisor Website Calculators You Need to Be Aware Of

As someone who has devoted a lot of time to generating predictable leads for independent financial firms over the last decade, I see a lot of people fall into the same basic trap again and again.

They do an incredible amount of research into their market, making sure beyond the shadow of a doubt they know exactly who their ideal audience members are. They pour over all the latest trends, breaking news items, tips, tricks and best practices in their industry. They spend hours writing articles and finally hit that “Submit” button… only to not get anywhere near the number of leads that they thought they would. If, of course, they were even able to generate leads at all.

There are many reasons as to why something like this might happen. Sometimes it’s because the articles themselves are too short – the topic itself just didn’t have as much “meat” as it needed to and, as a result, the finished product lacks what it needs to make a genuine impression on a reader.

Other times, it’s because those articles were created without a real SEO strategy behind them. Remember that it isn’t good enough to just write a high quality blog post and get it out into the world. Everything you do needs to be purpose-driven. You should be able to see how each piece will work individually, but also as a collective. It needs to be just one small-but-critical part of the much larger journey that you’re going on.

But something else is happening, too – and it’s something I want to spend time talking about today. To help people find your articles, you need them to rank as highly as possible for your desired keywords. To get those pages to rank, they need some high domain authority backlinks. Typically, you won’t be linking to another piece of content. More often than not, you’re going to want to link to some type of resource in your articles.

If your content isn’t generating leads, it’s probably due in large part to the fact that you just didn’t have them.

Where do you get those high domain authority backlinks, you ask? Luckily, the answer to that question is a straightforward one – particularly for those financial advisors and other investment professionals out there:

Financial advisor calculators.

The Power of Financial Advisor Calculators

As a financial advisor or other investment professional, you’re no doubt already well aware that the “math” side of the conversation is a large part of what your clients need help with every day. That, in essence, is why financial advisor calculators are so helpful – they take something inherently complex and distill it down in a way that is so straightforward that practically ANYONE can understand it.

In a larger SEO perspective, financial calculators also typically receive a higher percentage of backlinks than the other types of resources that you might be experimenting with. That means that if you reference one particular calculator in an article that is directly related to that topic (so if you link to a mortgage calculator in an article about current interest rates, for example), you have a better-than-average chance of getting more visibility for that article.

Leveraging Calculators in the Right Way

One of the major objections that people sometimes have to this technique has to do with the fact that there are many calculators out there – meaning that the search competition is fairly high.

This is true, but keep in mind that there are also MANY sales funnels out there – and many other forms of deliverables like white papers and books, too. None of this is to say that you shouldn’t be embracing those alternative sales funnels or other types of content. It’s just that the key here – as always – comes down to presentation and usability.

Whether you’re linking to a financial advisor calculator that already exists or you’re building one of your own, the most important thing to do is make it easy to use and attractive to the eye. If people enjoy interacting with it, their engagement levels will be higher – and your content will get a boost as a result.

But at the same time, you don’t want to make your financial calculator TOO powerful or you run the risk of making yourself obsolete, to a certain extent. Yes, a mortgage rate calculator should help someone find the information they’re looking for. But it should also ask more questions than it answers so that your audience members know that they need more than just a simplistic answer to their question. They need an expert to properly guide them and help them attain their goals – and that expert just so happens to be you.

When leveraged properly, you have a very real chance at getting a steady stream of quality leads from these types of financial calculators. They generate the inbound traffic, the calculator raises engagement and the overall value of the experience you’re offering is what gets people to reach out and make contact.

The Top 15 Financial Calculators to Be Aware Of

Again, not all financial advisor calculators are created equally. Just as your content needs to be specific to bring the maximum amount of value to your readers, the same should be true of your calculators, too.

Don’t embed any old calculator in an article – embed one that ties directly into the topic under discussion.

Having said that, here are 15 terrific financial advisor calculators from Schwab, Nerdwallet, SmartAsset, and others that you can start using as inspiration to build your own today:

  1. Retirement Calculator. This financial calculator would be a great resource to use in a blog about combating retirement anxiety, for example, or for showing people exactly how much money they need to save to live comfortably.
  2. Required Minimum Calculator. People who are over 70-years-old and who have Traditional, Rollover, SEP or SIMPLE IRAs are required by law to take Required Minimum Distributions every year. This calculator will help them do exactly that.
  3. Income Annuity Estimator. Income annuities are a great way to provide people with the confidence they need to know that they will have a guaranteed amount of income during their retirement years. This calculator breaks the process down of finding that annuity income estimate into a series of smaller, more straightforward steps.
  4. Beneficiary RMD Calculator. People who have inherited an IRA or some other type of retirement plan account can use this calculator to find out more about the estimated annual withdrawals that they might have to take in certain situations.
  5. College Savings Calculator. A lot of people stress out about saving for college because of how uncertain the whole process is. This calculator is perfect for clearing up some of that uncertainty and is perfect for helping people find out exactly how much they’ll really need to save.
  6. Roth IRA Conversion Calculator. Depending on someone’s unique situation, converting to a Roth IRA may not actually make sense. You could write a blog post about why this is the case and then include a link to this helpful calculator to help illustrate your points in greater detail.
  7. Investment Planning. There’s a lot that can go wrong in terms of investment planning, but this calculator is a great way to make sure people have the accurate information they need to make the best decisions possible moving forward.
  8. Retirement Planning. Retirement planning is a very precise process, and one that is unique to the individual. This calculator can help people consider their options very carefully so that they can begin to build a stronger and longer-lasting future for themselves.
  9. Self Employed Plan Contribution. When someone is self employed, it can be difficult to determine how much they should be contributing to things like an IRA. This calculator can help someone make sense of the situation in just a few easy steps.
  10. Rent v Buy Calculator. At a certain point, it absolutely makes more sense to buy a home than it does to keep renting from a financial perspective. This calculator is designed to help people understand whether they’ve reached that point.
  11. Home Affordability Calculator. Home ownership is a dream of many people out there, and this calculator is optimized to give people insight into just how close to that dream they really are.
  12. Using a 401k for a Home Down Payment. A lot of people don’t realize that it does sometimes make financial sense to take money out of a 401k to help with the down payment on a house. This calculator helps them weigh the pros and cons while considering their own unique information.
  13. True Cost of Living Calculator. This calculator is perfect for illustrating just how much money it takes to live in a place like San Francisco once things like rent, food and even taxes are accounted for.
  14. Mortgage Refinance Calculator. Refinancing a mortgage is a great way to reduce your interest rate and to generally just lock into more favorable terms. This calculator can be a helpful way to illustrate just how much a person can save.
  15. Emergency Fund Calculator. This calculator can help people understand exactly how much money they’ll need to save to make sure they’re prepared for the various types of unexpected emergencies that life happens to throw at us.

Contact Midstream Marketing Today

At Midstream Marketing, we’ve been helping financial advisors and other investment professionals generate predictable leads for over a decade. We’ve spent hundreds of hours leveraging the power of our proven LeadGen Formula™ to the advantage of clients everywhere and at this point, we’re confident in saying that our results speak for themselves.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage a financial advisor calculator or similar types of resources in your own efforts, terrific – we may be able to help. Give us a call today and we would be happy to evaluate your site, which will give us a chance to see what type of calculator might be the right fit for you. Once we pair the right resources up with the types of prospects you would like to be doing business with, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking the types of results you need when you need them the most.

Christopher Wendt Administrator
Christopher P. Wendt is president of Midstream Marketing, a digital agency that generates predictable leads for independent financial advisory firms. Over the last 10 years, he’s spent hundreds of hours applying the LeadGen Formula™, a proven method helping financial advisors generate more leads. You can reach him at cwendt@wendt.enterprises.
​​ ​