A Simple Step-By-Step Guide To SEO for Financial Services
SEO is a pivotal component of digital marketing within the financial services sector. Any effective digital marketing strategy in this industry must incorporate SEO as a critical element for success. Simply put, it boosts the visibility of finance and banking firms to potential clients on search engine results pages.
The industry is becoming increasingly competitive, so it’s equally crucial for your firm to bring in more growth. Plus, you must ensure that when people search online, your website is one of the first they see.
This guide discusses improving your SEO for financial services in the fast-paced digital world.
What you can expect to learn from this guide:
Are you ready to improve your SEO knowledge for your financial services company? Let’s explore it further and enhance your understanding of finance SEO.
The question “What is SEO?” can be confusing, but knowing helps your websites work better with search engines. To start, we first need to comprehend the concept of a search engine. Search engines, like Google or Bing, provide solutions to users’ online questions.
People usually look for answers online when they need help with their finances. That’s why it’s important for you to have a website that talks about what you offer. As a result, people can find you when they’re searching for help.
As a result, you will capture more leads due to higher exposure online by answering the needs of your target market.
To rank successfully online, you must:
- Provide valuable organic search content
- Ensure your website is healthy and secure
- Earn valuable backlinks from high-authority sites
What Are The SEO Challenges Within Financial Services?
Highly Competitive Landscape
Standing out in the sector is becoming more challenging due to the increasing growth of other larger firms. Plus, with the influx of new players entering the market, it’s increasingly more work to boost organic visibility. Because of this, your content must fulfil the needs of a well-defined target audience.
Complex Subject Matters
The Fintech and financial services sector keeps growing. More small companies and software service providers are joining the market, making it very crowded.
You must consistently produce great content to stand out in this busy space. In this process, your content should meet the needs of your specific audience.
You must employ a range of SEO strategies:
- Analyse search results for content strategy
- Use the main keyword in the URL
- Optimise title and meta description
- Include keywords in headings and text
- Add alt text to images
- Make the page easy to read
- Link to other content on your website
- Connect new page to relevant existing pages
This highlights the importance of having a well-versed team member in financial services seo. Or, on the other hand, partnering with an agency that excels in crafting SEO-centric content.
Having to Use SEO to Generate More Leads
SEO is a powerful strategy for acquiring new B2B leads for your business. More and more finance companies are using it. So, every company has to try harder to rank high and get the attention of potential clients.
Heightened Content quality Standards
Simply put, content about financial services is important because it can affect people’s health, safety, happiness, or money. Therefore, we often refer to it as “Your Money Or Your Life” (YMYL) content when writing about financial topics.
Choosing incorrect health insurance due to poor content can be a larger issue than picking the wrong coffee maker. So, financial services companies must be very careful with their content.
Google knows this and checks YMYL pages more carefully. Only the best content will appear at the top of Google’s search results.
The Effects of constrained Internal Resources
Financial companies, like banks or investment firms, often struggle because they lack resources. This could mean not having enough money, not having the right technology, or not having enough people to do the work.
When these companies try to market themselves and improve their online presence, it can get expensive quickly. This is especially true if they’re trying to reach consumers in many different ways.
Ideally, these companies would have a team with all the necessary skills and resources to do their job well.
But if that’s not possible, they might consider hiring a marketing or SEO agency. These agencies have teams of experts who know a lot about the industry and have access to high-tech tools. Usually, these tools are too expensive for one company to buy on its own.
Key takeaways
- Highly competitive market
- Complex subject matters
- financial services seo generates leads
- Challenging content quality standards
- Lack of internal resources
Here Are Some of The Key Benefits of Finance SEO
Improved Brand Awareness
If your brand keeps showing up when people search for related information, they’ll recognise and trust it more. One way to do this is by having good content on your website or social media. For example, this content could discuss your audience’s problems and how to fix them. That way, you’ll make people feel more comfortable with your company because you focus on their needs.
Better User Experience
Making your website easy to find on search engines helps improve how people use it. Most importantly, having a financial services website that’s simple to use is super important for getting and keeping visitors.
Hence, your website should be:
- Easy to navigate
- Have clear and relevant information
- Function well across all devices
Increased Website Organic Traffic
Using finance SEO tricks to improve your website will show higher in search results. This means more people will find out about what you offer and visit your site. Over time, this will increase the number of people coming to your site.
More Conversions
More visitors to your site means more chances to turn them into clients. SEO is good for this because it draws in people who are already interested rather than using paid ads.
Key takeaways
- Increased brand awareness
- Better user experience
- More organic website traffic
- More conversions
Essential SEO Strategies for Financial Services
Financial services SEO campaigns
An SEO campaign is an ongoing marketing strategy to make your website appear higher on search engine result pages. In short, the aim is to make your website more visible, drive organic traffic, and increase revenue.
1. Assess Your Current SEO Status
Start by assessing your website’s current SEO standing. Understanding will help you comprehend what to fix, identify new opportunities, and more. You can personally assess your site’s SEO or use an SEO checker tool for a quicker evaluation.
2. Conduct a Content Audit
The next step involves a thorough audit of your site content.
Examine your essential YMYL pages and ask yourself specific questions:
- Are they detailed and helpful?
- Is my content up-to-date with current rules and regulations?
- Is my content organised effectively and easily skimmable for my audience?
- Easy for your target audience to read and understand?
- Do they have unique and engaging meta titles and descriptions?
- Is there any duplicate content between my website and content strategy?
Fixing existing content is often a quick way to boost your site ranking.
3. Dive Into Keyword Research
After improving your existing pages, identify new content opportunities through keyword research. Look for topics and keywords that users are actively searching for. For instance, topics related to your core financial services business. Understanding the search intent behind the keyword is crucial to inform your SEO strategy and content plan.
4. Competitor Analysis
Understanding who your main organic competitors are is essential. They may not always be your direct industry competitors. Once you have your list of competitors, review their content for inspiration and gaps you could fill.
5. Create User-centric Educational Content
While company-focused pages are essential, providing users with in-depth educational content is vital to SEO success. By helping your users, you’re also improving your SEO.
This educational content helps Google:
- Better understand your site
- Establishes you as an authority
- Improves your chances of getting external links
- Provides upfront value to your potential clients
6. Enhance Your E-A-T
Simply put, E-A-T is a method Google uses to rate a website’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Improving your E-A-T standing requires:
- Providing quality content
- Building your reputation over time
- Gaining valuable external links from trusted sources
7. Focus On Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to improving your site architecture to assist search engines, and users in discovering your key pages.
You can improve your technical SEO by:
- Ensuring your primary pages are indexable
- Having an XML sitemap
- Using canonical tags for duplicated pages,
- Enhancing your navigation menu
- Using internal links to guide users between related pages
8. Improve Speed And Mobile Optimisation
In an era of rapid digital consumption, speed is everything. Slow-loading websites are not just a nuisance but can deter visitors, impacting your on-site conversions. It’s crucial to identify and rectify any issues causing delays in page loading times.
Alongside speed, mobile optimisation is imperative. With over half of all web traffic originating from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly site isn’t optional. In simpler terms, your website should load fast on mobiles, fit different screen sizes well, and be easy to use for those using touchscreens.
Google factors in both site speed and mobile-friendliness when ranking pages. Therefore, these aspects are crucial not only for user experience but also for optimising your SEO performance.
9. Enhance Your Local SEO
Local searches play a pivotal role in driving traffic to businesses. Users often look for local companies when seeking information or intending to purchase. Hence, you must focus on local SEO by identifying location-specific keywords that align with your business. To put it simply, a London financial advice company would find the search term “financial advisors in London” useful.
If your business operates in multiple locations, ensure each locale has its own Google My Business page.
Local search allows you to:
- Manage how your business information
- Display the correct contact details
- Invite client reviews to boost your local rating
10. Monitor and Boost Your Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO encompasses all external factors that impact your website’s search ranking. These include backlinks from other sites, social media discussions about your brand, and unlinked brand mentions. While you may have little control over these factors, monitoring and enhancing them remains essential.
For example, if a site mentions your brand without a link, contact the owner to request a backlink. Once you have a lot of helpful content, you can begin a campaign to get related backlinks. Ideally, these backlinks would be from well-known industry sites.
Key takeaways
- Check your current SEO status
- Conduct a content audit
- Keyword research
- Monitor competitors
- Create relevant content for your users
- focus on your E-A-T
- Check your technical SEO
- Ensure your site is mobile friendly
- improve your local SEO
- Monitor your on-page and off-page SEO
Key SEO KPIs for Financial Services
To measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, you need to monitor certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs will provide insights into your strategy’s performance and areas for improvement.
SEO Rank Per Page
Check your pages’ positions for key search terms identified during keyword research. Monitoring will help you understand how well your SEO efforts are paying off regarding visibility on search engines.
Impressions
Keep track of when your pages appear in search results for relevant terms. More impressions mean more visibility, which could lead to higher traffic.
Organic Traffic
Monitor the number of visitors arriving at your website through search engine results. High organic traffic is a good indicator of effective SEO implementation.
Engagement Metrics
Evaluating user engagement on your site is essential to fully understand how users interact with your site.
Considering user engagement factors such as:
- Time spent on a page
- The number of pages visited per session
- Bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site after viewing just one page)
Conversions From Organic Traffic
Track both major actions (like buying your service) and minor actions (like signing up for a newsletter). Measuring will help you determine the monetary value of your SEO efforts.
Focus On Your Local SEO
Many financial services still operate physical storefronts that clients can visit. As a result, emphasising local SEO for these financial services becomes imperative.
To optimise local SEO, create distinct pages on your website for each location, specifically targeting local keyword research.
Another important part of local SEO involves Google My Business (GMB). You should create a GMB listing for each of your physical store locations. Simply put, this step makes your business show up in search results when people do local searches.
Here are some crucial factors to consider for local SEO:
- Tailor your content to include local keywords
- Encourage more user reviews for your specific location
- Enhance your Google My Business (GMB) listings
- Link any maps on your local pages to the relevant GMB listing
- Confirm that your name, address, and phone number are accurate and consistent across all local directories
- Incorporate local business structured data
- Undertake local link-building efforts
You’ll significantly enhance your local rankings by highlighting the above-mentioned points. This, in turn, will boost the likelihood of users discovering your website when they conduct a local search term.
How Goldmine Media Can Help You As A Financial SEO Agency
We are a financial SEO agency with over 20 years of experience. Because of this, Goldmine Media is an expert in SEO finance, SEO for financial advisors, and fintech SEO. In simpler terms, we’ll create and carry out a plan to make your website more noticeable and attract more visitors.
Our SEO services include the following:
When you work with us, your website will appear higher in search results, and more people will visit it. As a result, this will make prospects interested and likely to use your services.
