SEO for Finance Companies

Trust is crucial for financial companies when it comes to selling their services, and as such, makes it an essential part of how these businesses promote themselves online. Users are rightly discerning when it comes to searching for an expert to help them look after their money and therefore, SEO for financial services has to be done right.

A financial services website that looks unprofessional, untrustworthy and doesn’t appear high on the SERPs is unlikely to be a top choice for customers.

Financial SEO services can help solve these problems by:

  • Increasing your site’s online visibility
  • Building audience trust
  • Increasing website traffic
  • Achieving higher search engine rankings
  • Growing conversions when users reach your site

We’ll explain how SEO for financial services companies can work as part of a multi-channel strategy, helping to ensure your potential customers can find your business and feel confident they can trust your brand.

SEO for finance businesses: how to create a strategy for success

UNDERSTAND YOUR COMPETITION

Our team of SEO specialists use an exclusive in-house competitor analysis tool to help you understand what your rivals are doing well and how you can make the most of the gaps and opportunities in the market.

It will include:

  • Comparing your site’s SEO performance vs market-leading and direct competitors
  • Growth opportunities based on their strengths and weaknesses
  • Crucial details about where you currently sit in the market and what this means for you
  • SEO Metrics that are underpinning or undermining performance

With our competitor analysis tool, you’ll have everything at your fingertips to make SEO decisions that can give you a competitive advantage.

THE IMPORTANCE OF KEYWORD RESEARCH

Knowing which keywords and phrases your customers will use to search for your services is a crucial starting point for any finance SEO campaign. In very competitive markets, staying on top of keyword trends means staying relevant.

Focusing on identifying keywords that strike a balance between relevance and search volume (rather than chasing the broadest, highest-traffic keyword) is an approach that often yields the best results. Whilst commercial intent keywords are naturally pivotal and can drive more conversions, identifying informational keywords can also help build out top-of-funnel traffic.

Here are some of the key considerations:

  1. Identifying focus areas: These are a good starting point and can be based on your main services or customer bases. Once you have established these you can follow up by building out the keywords and phrases that sit within these.
  2. Keyword research: You can use keyword research tools to find specific words and phrases that users are searching in Google for. Often longtail, niche phrases offer the best conversion rates as these hold the most direct customer intent.
  3. Mapping keywords: Grouping and mapping keywords can inform the type of content you need to produce for the site. A good rule of thumb is that in order to rank for a keyword, you need a relevant landing page that covers that topic in depth.

Once you have your keyword strategy in place, you can start making more informed decisions about how you market your finance business online.

WRITE HIGH-PERFORMING CONTENT

When it comes to content for financial SEO, it needs to be high quality as it falls into the category of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), defined as content that can ‘dramatically influence and impact the reader’s life’.

Pages of this type should adhere to Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness). While content has an important role to play in financial SEO, there’s also a real need to make sure each piece of content has been vetted carefully. Churning out lower-quality content could not only fail to have the impact you want, but it could also backfire and work against your efforts.

You can produce high-performing content by:

  • Creating content that offers real value to readers, answers their questions, and provides them with information they need to know about your services or their finances.
  • Having thorough sign-off processes to ensure only high-quality, legally compliant content is published.
  • Being transparent. Any potentially misleading content on your website could be damaging to your rankings and go against FCA guidelines.
  • Speak concisely and keep the jargon to a minimum so readers can easily understand it.

PUBLISH LONG-FORM CONTENT

Long-form content plays a pivotal role when considering E-E-A-T in your content strategy. Financial service brands can create in-depth, informative pieces that explore and aim to address any issues or questions users may have. Here’s how it can help:

  • Demonstrate expertise: Finance is a sector where expertise is essential for both prospective customers and search engines. By putting your company’s knowledge and expertise at the forefront, you can create insightful content which should be a key part of your financial SEO strategy.
  • Raise brand awareness: Quality, in-depth content can help raise your rankings and brand awareness via search engines and also give you a shareable asset to market through social channels – in turn, developing your brand.
  • Better optimisation opportunities: In the old days of SEO, some brands made the mistake of keyword-stuffing as many phrases as possible, but this tactic is no longer viable. Keywords should be naturally placed without compromising the readability. This is easier to do in long-form content.

We can help you improve your content with the help of our exclusive Content Quality Score metric. This tool gives an objective measure between one and 100, based on Google’s ranking factors, so you can aim to ensure that each piece of content supports your SEO goals.

CREATE A LOGICAL WEBSITE STRUCTURE

Any kind of financial information needs to be carefully structured so it can be easily understood and digested. The same applies to your website. Search engines need to be able to crawl and index your pages so they can deliver results to their users. If your site is a jumble of broken links and confusing navigation, your SEO efforts could be negatively impacted.

Broken links or people arriving at the wrong page can result in a higher bounce rate, lower rankings, fewer click-throughs and fewer conversions. All of which can mean your site won’t be viewed favourably by Google or by potential customers.

INCREASE YOUR SITE’S AUTHORITY

High-quality content gives you a better chance of earning backlinks from other quality sites. This can help prove that you are a trustworthy and authoritative business within the financial sector.

Earning this authority, especially through backlinks, may not be easy but the value of the trust they imply makes it worth the effort. Through a concerted digital PR and outreach campaign, you can promote your long-form content to carefully targeted outlets and aim to reap the benefits that come with an integrated digital strategy with SEO at the core.