Despite the fact that the financial services sector is one of the most competitive fields on the web, many companies don’t mind investing in promotional tactics like SEO. While search engine optimization takes time and massive effort, it’s the best way to build a brand from the ground up.
Financial services SEO can help your web pages rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s a meticulous process of improving various website elements, creating engaging content, and spreading your message on the web.
Unlike paid advertising, search engine optimization takes time to implement, which can pose a financial burden on new brands. Nonetheless, due to its massive upsides, most companies prioritize this strategy for promoting their financial service online.
Challenges in the financial services industry
In theory, every marketing activity can provide certain benefits to your brand. Being active on social media allows you to share your posts in an unassuming way and generate leads through casual chit-chats. On the other hand, paid advertising is better if you wish to generate instant results.
Unfortunately, financial services have much less wiggle room than some other fields. Due to numerous financial frauds throughout history, regulatory bodies have enacted numerous rules monitoring the actions of all participants. Among others, these regulations can also affect your digital marketing strategy.
So much so that some platforms don’t even advertise financial service providers. Due to all these restrictions, Google optimization has emerged as one of the best methods for promoting a financial services company. Here’s a breakdown of the most common challenges for financial providers and how SEO service providers can resolve them:
Compliance and regulation
The finance industry is one of the most regulated fields in the US. The laws streamline what finance companies, but also a marketing or SEO agency, can and can’t do. For example, you’re unable to promote certain financial services or target specific users (most notably, minors).
Because of that, many businesses turn to SEO as a way of circumventing these issues. Given that all this content belongs to the organic results category, it isn’t considered a promotional activity, per se. So, as long as your blog posts stay within the limits of what you can do, you should be able to reach your target audience.
Content quality
SEO for financial services is affected by certain quality requirements, which marketers call YMYL (Your Money or Your Life). This is a highly sensitive content category that can endanger readers. After reading YMYL posts, a reader might have a bad understanding of a subject matter, prompting them to take action against their health and finances.
For example, if you have an online pharmacy, you’re not allowed to say that a specific medicine will certainly cure your ailment. Similarly, you can’t promise users unrealistic profits or lead them to potentially hazardous financial behavior.
Given these strict content policies, financial businesses need to be careful what they’re writing online. Otherwise, they can be hit by massive online suits. Given that SEO content provides more leeway than paid ads and social media posts (blog posts are longer), users will better understand the ramifications of their actions.
Client variety
Another major marketing challenge is that financial services usually target a variety of different audiences. The short-form format prevents you from properly converting some of these users. Some of them require longer engagement with a website before they decide to spend money on a particular service.
Luckily, with a good SEO strategy, you can circumvent these issues. When you create content clusters, you can slowly introduce qualified leads to a potential issue and how they might solve it. The long format is also incredible for reaching different demographics, something that you can’t always do with social media posts and emails.
Lack of trust
A good portion of users believe that banks and other financial institutions work against their interests. According to a survey, 43% of people don’t trust these organizations and are generally reluctant to give them their money. The issue is widespread within the industry, with many people being worried about how unethical behavior would affect their investments.
While financial services SEO can’t fully eliminate the issue, it can at least soften the blog. Through high-quality content, brands can show users that they care about their well-being. They can create a bridge of trust, something that most other marketing channels are unable to do.
The importance of authority
Although we can say that the success of every website hinges on authority, this is even more notable with financial services. These brands offer financial platforms and expensive services that urge users to invest tens of thousands of dollars. So, as we’ve just mentioned, trust is a major factor within the field.
Whether you’re getting a reverse mortgage or spending fmoney on eToro, you must be certain that the web owner won’t embezzle your funds or take advantage of your data. The need for authority and trust can be seen on every website level and is reflected in your content. With that, we come to the EEAT.
EEAT concept
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Although the concept has affected the Google search engine for quite a while, it has become more prominent in the last year or so.
Basically, Google measures EEAT for the entire website. It evaluates the writers’ qualifications and assesses the relevancy and quality of blog content. EEAT is especially important in industries like finance, where there are many shady brands lurking around. So, when building your SEO strategy, you need to put extra emphasis on this concept.
Here are a few ways to boost your EEAT:
- Only feature reputable financial authors on your site. Make sure that these writers have been mentioned in other popular publications and that they have verifiable social media accounts
- Your content should always be top-notch. Financial service providers should regularly update their pieces to ensure that the information is still relevant
- Use as much scientific information as possible. This is crucial for new blogs that want to establish authority within the field, as they don’t have enough “street cred.” Link and cite relevant resources
- Similarly, you need to get as many external links from elite financial services brands to demonstrate website quality
- Disclose your policies and leave relevant company data like phone number, name, address, and so on
With EEAT, you need to prove to Google that you’re a legitimate organization and that you’re doing everything in your power to provide quality information and boost user experience.
Understanding SEO metrics
Before hiring an SEO agency, you need to understand various factors that affect search engine rankings. In the end, if you don’t know what the marketing agency is doing in the backend, you can easily get scammed. These are some of the crucial KPIs that you need to monitor to ensure your SEO efforts are on track:
- Organic traffic: The main reason why financial companies invest in any digital marketing activity is so they can boost the number of website visitors. While traffic volume is important, we also need to understand other factors to better assess performance
- Conversions: In SEO, conversions can refer to various things. Most agencies use this metric to measure the percentage of visitors who bought financial services. However, it can also be used to measure the number of newsletter subscriptions and other interactions
- Links: Getting numerous links from high-authority sites is the best way to boost your placement within global and local search results. Links are also important for your brand-building efforts and can have a long-term impact on your sustainability
- Rankings and impression: Rankings refer to how well your content ranks for relevant keywords. Impression is a metric that determines how many people saw your link within the Google search results. Although traffic is a more important metric, these two KPIs can provide supplemental information
- User engagement: Nowadays, user engagement metrics are vital for understanding how users interact with your site. Things like click-through rate and pages per session have become critical factors for boosting your placement
Most of this data is accessible within Google tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics. For more advanced insights, you can also use third-party software like SEMRush and Ahrefs.
8 Steps for a perfect finance SEO process
Here are the 8 crucial steps for any financial services website:
1. Technical audit
Technical SEO is usually the first thing that a marketing agency will do upon starting a new project. Improving various technical aspects of a financial website sets the basis for other SEO strategies and procedures. Among others, you need to pay attention to the following:
- Make sure your site is accessible to crawlers and create robots.txt file
- Create a simple architecture that would allow users to easily scroll through your financial services website
- Add your most relevant pages to the XML sitemap
- Check whether all pages are accessible and, when necessary, add noindex tag for duplicate pages
- Check outbound and internal links for potential errors
- Remove anything that might interfere with user experience
All search engines pay attention to these factors. More importantly, if your site isn’t working as intended, not only will it be hard to improve your online presence, but you will also struggle to cover incoming leads.
2. Content audit
A basic content audit is usually a part of a larger technical SEO process. However, it is advisable that a marketing agency performs a deep dive into every page to determine if the information is good enough. Among others, you need to ensure that:
- Every page feels unique and revolves around a unique keyword
- Introduce meta titles and descriptions to each piece
- Create a proper structure for each piece and make content skimmable
- If necessary, improve visual solutions
- Update information within each piece
- Consider the existing internal link structure and create clusters when applicable
High-quality content is the basis of financial services SEO. As previously mentioned, it can boost the authority of your financial site and present you as one of the more reputable sources within the industry.
3. Page speed and mobile optimization
In the last few years, Google and other search engines have placed special emphasis on page speed. Nowadays, if you wish to reach the top of Google’s search, your financial site needs to be responsive and provide quick access.
Another emphasis of your SEO campaign should be on optimizing the site for mobile devices. Given that most users access the web via their phones, you need to ensure they have the same browsing experience on these devices as they do on desktop computers.
4. Competitive analysis
Financial services companies have some of the toughest competitors out there. Truth be told, even if you invest lots of money in SEO, there’s no guarantee you’ll reach the top of search engine results pages for lucrative queries. So, if you want to assess the potential benefits of SEO for financial services, you should perform a thorough competitive analysis.
These are the main things brands should consider during the process:
- Your marketing company should start by assessing broader website metrics such as Domain Authority. Most of them measure link quality but can also indicate how long a site has been in the business
- Check which sites rank on top of Google search for the most relevant queries. For example, penetrating the insurance niche isn’t the same as vying for the loan market
- Consider the strategies your competitors used and determine how much money you’d need to replicate them. Try to assess content and link-building costs
In many industries, companies use competitive analysis to determine whether they should even invest in this promotional tactic. However, given that financial brands have limited options, the analysis serves more for benchmarking than anything else.
5. Keyword research
Competitive analysis, search intent analysis, and keyword research usually go hand in hand. Marketers try to asses all external factors that would allow or prevent them from ranking a particular keyword. During keyword research, in particular, agencies focus on the following factors:
- What are people trying to accomplish when browsing a query? Are they looking to make a purchase, or are they just seeking information?
- How many monthly organic visitors does a keyword get?
- What are the competitors for a particular keyword? Is the phrase related to a specific brand (so-called “branded keyword)?
- How many links do you need to rank?
- What does the best-ranking content look like? Do you need extensive research to rank on top?
If you’re just starting as a financial company, it’s best to pursue informational, long-tail keywords. Although they don’t convert on the same level, they give you the option of gaining initial traction.
6. Content creation
Whether we’re talking about SEO for financial services or any other marketing activity, content should always be front and center. Quality posts are vital for any SEO strategy and search engines, ensuring the best user experience.
One of the best practices is creating articles that are educational in nature. You shouldn’t be pushing financial services on your website visitors; instead, your main task is to provide sound financial advice. You might also consider sharing relevant stats from other authoritative sources, which would also boost the perception of your platform as well.
7. Local SEO
Building your local SEO is a somewhat new practice within the marketing field. Although not as important for financial institutions, it still gives you another avenue of market penetration. To get started, you need to do the following:
- Create a Google My Business account
- Enter relevant company data
- Share the website on all major aggregates
- Start collecting user feedback
- Optimize for local keywords
While local optimization isn’t that important for financial services, it might provide some extra organic traffic. Most importantly, during the process, you can also leave relevant business data that will ensure people can easily find you on the web.
8. Off-page SEO
For the most part, off-page SEO refers to link-building. These links are vital for boosting your placement within search engine pages, but can also drive referral traffic.
Besides links, you can implement other external procedures to drive engagement to your financial site. For example, you can organize various events, and PR campaigns, and post on social media, forums, and other third-party websites. All of these activities can have a direct and indirect impact on your SEO and marketing.
Conclusion
Despite certain inherent barriers, search engine optimization remains the best method for building a financial brand. Whatever you do, give it some time as SEO requires lots of time and effort. However, once you gain traction, you can easily scale all your marketing activities and lead generation through search engines.