Summit Financial Advisors was a registered investment advisory firm managing approximately $180M in assets for high-net-worth individuals and families in the Pacific Northwest. Their performance record was strong. Their client relationships were deep. Their referral network generated steady introductions.
But when referred prospects did their due diligence online — which every serious prospect does — they landed on a website that looked identical to hundreds of other RIA firms. Blue and gray color scheme. Stock photos of skyscrapers and calculators. Service descriptions written in compliance-friendly language that communicated nothing about how Summit actually managed money or what made them different.
Summit's analytics told the story clearly: average time on site was 1 minute 12 seconds. Returning visitor rate was 11%. Enquiry rate from non-referred visitors was 0.8%. The website was contributing nothing to growth and may have been suppressing conversion even among referred traffic.
We structured the project around a single objective: make Summit's genuine strengths visible and credible to a skeptical, sophisticated prospect doing online research. This required understanding what actually differentiated Summit from the crowded RIA market — and translating that into design and copy decisions.
In our discovery session, it became clear. Summit's differentiators were their investment philosophy (concentrated, high-conviction equity portfolios for clients with long time horizons and high risk tolerance), their team's depth (the two founders had a combined 40+ years of institutional investment experience), and their communication style (quarterly calls, detailed letters, complete transparency about positioning and rationale). None of this was on their website.
The new site led with the investment philosophy — not as a compliance document, but as a genuine articulation of how Summit thinks about wealth and risk. We worked with the founders to write three pieces of content that explained their approach in depth: their view on portfolio concentration, their framework for thinking about client time horizon, and their belief that fewer, higher-conviction positions outperform diversified portfolios for their client profile.
The team pages were rebuilt around depth of experience, not titles. Real photos. Specific investment perspectives attributed to each partner. The goal was to help a prospect feel, after ten minutes on the site, that they already understood how Summit thinks — and could make an informed judgment about whether that alignment was right for them.
Trust signals were distributed throughout the site rather than concentrated on a single testimonials page: AUM figures, years in operation, number of client relationships, and carefully selected client outcome narratives compliant with SEC advertising rules.
Within six months of launch, enquiry rate from non-referred visitors had grown from 0.8% to 2.9%. Average time on site increased from 1 minute 12 seconds to 3 minutes 47 seconds — a strong signal that prospects were engaging with the investment philosophy content. Returning visitor rate grew from 11% to 28%, suggesting that referred prospects were using the site for extended research before committing to an introductory call.
Summit reported two new client relationships in the quarter following launch directly attributable to inbound contact from non-referred prospects — a channel that had previously generated zero new business.
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