Content for financial advisors and wealth management firms

An advisory firm's website carries more regulatory weight than most small business sites. Depending on how the firm is registered, the SEC, one or more state securities regulators, or FINRA may have a say in what its pages can claim. This page builds on our overview for financial, accounting and tax firms and covers the questions prospective advisory clients bring, the rules particular to advisers, and the content gaps worth checking first.

The questions advisory clients bring

The SEC has written part of the list already. Form CRS, the relationship summary that SEC-registered advisers and broker-dealers deliver to retail investors, must include "conversation starters," questions an investor can put to a financial professional. Among them: "How will you choose investments to recommend to me?", "How might your conflicts of interest affect me, and how will you address them?", and "Who is my primary contact person?" A prospect who has read a relationship summary may show up with those exact questions, and a site that answers them only inside a PDF makes the prospect go digging.

Investor.gov adds more, including "What experience do you have, especially with people in my circumstances?" and a request for the firm's latest Form ADV brochure and supplement. One exercise for an advisory team is to pull last quarter's discovery-call notes and ask, "Which of these did a prospect raise that our site never answers?" The results tend to point at the first pages worth writing: who the firm serves, how a recommendation gets made, how conflicts are handled, and who the client will deal with day to day.

Rules particular to advisers

Registration decides the rulebook. As of its July 2026 update, the SEC's guide for advisers says those managing more than $110 million in regulatory assets "generally must register with the SEC," while those under $100 million "generally are prohibited from registering with the SEC." Firms between those figures, and the exceptions, are for the compliance officer to confirm.

For SEC-registered firms, Rule 206(4)-1 says an advertisement may not include "any untrue statement of a material fact," and it attaches disclosure conditions to testimonials and endorsements, such as stating "That the testimonial was given by a current client or investor." The Form CRS instructions separately tell those firms to post the current relationship summary "prominently on your public website, if you have one."

For state-registered firms, each state's securities regulator governs, and those rules differ from state to state. NASAA also points out that states oversee investment adviser representatives "whether the adviser is registered with a state or with the SEC," so state oversight follows the individual representatives a site names, even at an SEC-registered firm. Representatives who also work through a broker-dealer bring FINRA Rule 2210 into play, which, as of October 2026, requires "an appropriately qualified registered principal of the member" to approve each retail communication; FINRA has asked for comment on replacing that pre-use approval with risk-based supervision standards, so the firm's principal confirms what applies when a page goes up. We bring each of these questions to the firm's reviewer rather than answering them ourselves, and the facts on every page come from the firm's own filings, because a writer should not have to guess at what the firm's ADV already says.

Content gaps on advisory sites

The usual gap sits between the filing and the homepage. A fictional fee-only firm in Oregon might have a careful Form ADV, a clear relationship summary, and a homepage that says "personalized wealth management for families." A tagline is not a fee explanation, and a prospect comparing three firms cannot tell from that line how this one is paid or whom it declines.

Other gaps worth checking: how the firm builds and revises a plan after the first meeting, what happens if the client's adviser leaves, what the firm does not do (tax preparation or insurance sales, for instance) and where it refers that work, and bios that list designations without saying what the person does for clients. Each of those answers already exists inside the firm, in an adviser's habits or in a document compliance has approved, and the finished draft goes back to the firm's compliance reviewer. A quarter of these pages fits the quarterly content system we build, with the firm's own reviewer approving each page before it goes live.