SEO for financial services companies is different from other industries.
Strict regulations, high competition, and complex products mean coming up with an impactful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy takes a lot of time and effort.
And it can cause a financial black hole if not done well.
If you’re responsible for financial services marketing, you may find that:
- You’re ready to invest in financial services SEO but have no idea how it works
- You’re already familiar with SEO but want to know how it can be applied differently for financial services.
- You’ve tried optimizing your site but haven’t seen the SEO success you wanted.
Let’s take a look at how you can follow in the footsteps of Mint Position clients that appear on the first page of Google and bring in valuable traffic.
Don’t leave SEO for financial services to chance. Book a no-cost consultation with Mint Position, a fintech SEO agency, to find out how we uniquely combine journalistic-quality content and SEO ranking strategies to get you more customers.
What is SEO for financial services and why is it different?
SEO for financial services is a digital marketing strategy that improves a finance company’s website ranking in search engines like Google or Bing.
It’s a strategy that we can apply to various branches within the financial services sector, including accountant SEO services, financial planning SEO, and SEO for investment banking.
You don’t need to be a skilled marketer to know that a high search engine ranking means higher online visibility and more leads to be converted into new customers.
You do, however, need to be a skilled marketer, data analyst and communicator to do fintech SEO well. This means having an understanding of different fields, such as:
- Keyword research and targeting
- Journalistic-quality content creation
- Technical SEO, such as ensuring correct meta data, hreflang code, and Google My Business (for local search)
If you cover these areas really well, then you’ll get closer to what should be every fintech’s goal: to appear at the top of search results for highly valuable keywords.
Yet, this is very difficult to achieve in the financial services industry without specialized SEO help.
Here’s why.
Why financial services SEO is different from any other SEO you’ve ever done
SEO has been around since the dawn of the internet so you’ll probably have a good idea of how it works.
However, performing SEO for financial services requires a different set of focus compared to other industries, and many people aren’t aware of its complexities.
Here’s an overview of what we should bear in mind with financial SEO.
1. Financial products are complex
If your friends don’t understand how your investment app uses an algorithm to automate financial planning when you try to explain it to them at a dinner party, then your potential customers probably won’t either.
This is the beauty of great SEO campaigns: they guide your target audience toward expertly written content that simplifies complex financial concepts.
Explaining your product in clear, relatable terms will help you stand out from competitors who overwhelm people with jargon.
People are much more likely to buy a product they understand.
2. Financial SEO helps build trust and authority
Your target audience is looking online for financial services. If they see your company high up on the search rankings, then they’re much more likely to trust you.
Trustworthiness goes a very long way in a financial industry that often suffers from customer skepticism, particularly in fintech.
If you can show your brand’s trustworthiness via high-quality content on the first page of Google, then you’re much closer to converting (and retaining) potential clients.
3. It must help you target highly specific client segments
Think of the best SEO for financial services as having laser precision.
Instead of casting a wide net, as many other types of SEO tend to do, effective SEO for financial services needs to be highly niche-specific.
This means you can tailor your content to attract specific clients seeking retirement planning, investment banking, or any other financial service.
A focused approach that matches search intent with your brand ensures that the people who land on your site are genuinely interested in what you offer. They’re more likely to engage with your content, stay longer, and ultimately become your customers.
4. It needs to deal with market volatility and rapid changes
In a financial industry that’s constantly updating regulations and introducing new products, you need to adapt quickly.
Financial SEO content can help you do just that. Whether it’s about a new service, a regulatory change, or a shift in the market, your content needs to be fresh and relevant, helping clients find informed decisions that you publish.
The 7 tactics you should employ when using SEO for financial services
In the previous section, we touched on technical SEO but this should take a back seat in favor of content SEO, unless you’re a huge company with thousands of webpages.
Content SEO directly attracts and engages prospective clients, which yields better results for smaller brands than getting bogged down with site functionality. We recommend making sure the site runs fast and doesn’t have any major errors and then move on to content. The following tactics bear this in mind.
1. Conduct advanced keyword research
Keywords are the virtual metal detectors that help you uncover traffic opportunities – as it happens, this is also what your audience is specifically looking for.
Ranking for the right keywords means opening up a potential gold mine of valuable new leads; rank for the wrong keywords, and you’ll get irrelevant traffic. This makes the keyword selection process of critical importance.
Let’s break this down into a three-step process:
- By advanced keyword research, we mean digging deeper than even other SEO specialists to find out what the search intent is behind what your potential clients need. We do this by looking at a lot more data. This also means actually asking customers about what they’re looking for, their pain points, and which rivals they’re comparing you to, then compiling a list of at least 50 relevant keywords.
- Look at what your direct (and indirect) competitors are ranking for. At Mint Position, we scrape the keyword profiles of financial services websites that are currently getting the traffic we want, then identify ways to target those search terms and outrank those sites.
- Here comes the fun part. Finding the “low-hanging fruit” opportunities that will fast-track you to the top of the rankings. These will be the terms that have the highest buyer intent, low difficulty (easier to rank for), and high search volume. We’ll also use other metrics like cost-per-click (CPC) (also known as Pay-Per-Click or PPC), which acts as a commercial gauge for their value.
The below table is an example of the extra work we put into this process. Note how we additional factors to help us decide how to prioritize the best keywords. For example, we also take into account metrics like the top formats and the keyword search intent. (The top format is the most common page format for that keyword, which helps guide us about what kind of page to write; ie, if Google’s page one has 8/10 listings going to product pages, that is a signal that a product page is likely the best format.)
Mint Position’s advanced keyword research
Once we’ve listed the keywords in this process, we’ll then start to filter out those that will be the most valuable for our current marketing objectives. Below is an example of the filter we commonly use when prioritizing which keywords we’ll choose.
How Mint Position’s keyword filter works
2. Use our Multi-Keyword SEO approach
Multi-keyword SEO is an approach created by Mint Position.
After working with over three dozen companies in the finance industry we’ve tested a popular theory, which states that around 80% of website traffic comes from just 20% of the pages (as posited by marketing author Andy Crestodina). We believe this to be accurate.
We then realized that looking at the URL keywords of these high-performing pages elsewhere (starting with the top three competing sites) opens up a treasure trove of valuable secondary keywords. These are often missed opportunities by other top-ranking sites that we can exploit.
Our research for this article is a good example. Here are our top three rivals for the primary keyword ‘SEO for financial services’: Siteimprove, Siege Media, and NinjaPromo.
For example, by looking in-depth at NinjaPromo’s keyword profile, we can see that it only ranks #35 in the US for ‘Keywords for financial services’ – clearly a topic that is related to the primary keyword that we can focus on better than they did.
Rival keyword profiles also give us lots of secondary long-tail keywords that show us which industry-specific information our target audience is looking for.
Here, we can see how Siteimprove’s readers are typing ‘SEO financial advisors’, ‘SEO for financial planner’, and ‘bank SEO’ into their search boxes – all terms that we can target.
But we’re not done yet.
Next we review the ‘People Also Ask’ section on the Google search engine results page (SERP) for financial services SEO. These questions are also an additional reflection of what people are searching for.
Not all questions will make sense, but often this box provides relevant terms that will make your content much more comprehensive.
Investment platform Sarwa found out just how powerful our Multi-Keyword SEO approach could be when they got 5x more organic traffic and over 3,600 new organic leads within months.
Their article about how to invest money in the UAE ranks #1 for a wide range of related and relevant keywords which may not seem to be obviously connected to the primary keyword, including ‘different ways to invest money’ and ‘investment plan in the UAE’. This means most potential paths of finding our article, and thus much more traffic.
Sarwa still benefits from a large and lasting pipeline of traffic to their website and a standing as one of the UAE’s most authoritative sources of investment knowledge.
3. Meet your target audience’s search intent, and don’t neglect the bottom of the funnel
A trap that many an SEO agency falls into is to target specific keywords, but then write generalized content that fails to resonate with the people they’re reaching out to – what we could also call missing the search intent.
Andy Crestodina, the marketing expert we mentioned above, summed this up beautifully when he said: “Most companies, including the SEO agencies who should know better, produce a ton of original content that no one reads, no one shares, and does not affect trust, authority or ranking.”
The advanced keyword research mentioned above will give you some vital clues about what your target audience is thinking. Now it’s time to use that to write to them in a manner that they’ll appreciate.
You can build a clear roadmap for this via a detailed fintech content strategy. This will help you target people at various stages of the buying journey, which we also call a buyer funnel or content marketing funnel.
At the top of this funnel are people who may not even be aware they have a problem, but they’ll find your content to be informative and enjoyable to read. They’ll mark your brand down as a quality and trustworthy source of information.
Further done are people who may know of you and are looking to solve problems or find specific solutions, which we also call pain points. This is the middle of the funnel.
The people closest to buying await you at the bottom of this funnel, so it makes sense to start producing that content at launch if more leads are your top goal (and they often are). Yet, many companies do not do this!
This bottom-of-the-funnel content can be product pages or tutorials that empathize with readers by identifying their pain points and then demonstrating how your product or service can solve them. They can be product feature-focused articles filled with lots of screenshots, or a list of how to successfully handle a pain point by using your product/service.
Getting this stage right will drive conversions and you’ll win over people at the decision-making stage — not to mention build up a lead-generating pipeline for the long run.
4. Use expert input to build authority
Fintech customers crave expertise as they wish to make potentially life-changing decisions like investing their money in the right place.
Google thus recognizes financial topics as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content and its EEAT (Experience, Expertise Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) guidelines reflect this.
In short, Google prioritizes unique, expert content and downgrades sites that use rehashed content. It’s even started de-indexing those that rely on the likes of ChatGPT.
This is why providing your own expertise can fire you up the rankings. In-house expert interviews, quotes from leaders in your field, and educational white papers are all essential SEO strategies for financial services
Mint Position has seen first-hand just how effective this can be helping Sarwa attract respected names like Vanguard to contribute to their content. Within a year, we had built a robust library of expert content optimized for SEO.
This strategy pushed engagement through the roof, with average on-page time rising to 6.5 minutes, well above the industry average, and made Sarwa into a credible financial authority.
5. Use high-quality link-building
Another way of quickly building credibility is to link to other quality sites – and get them to link to you.
A solid link-building strategy will help you climb the rankings as you’ll signal to Google’s SERP algorithm that you’re a valuable and reputable source.
Your customers will also take comfort in knowing that highly respected websites value your brand.
Let’s break down this strategy into its two core components and explain why each is important.
Backlinks, also known as inbound or incoming links, are hyperlinks from a quality website to yours. They serve as a vote of confidence, indicating that your content is valuable.
For our industry, examples include high-quality fintech blogs linking to your website or a news article referencing your research as a source. (To see how Mint Position qualifies ‘high-quality links’, please see our backlink building service page.)
Link building is the process of acquiring these quality backlinks from other websites. This might mean guest blogging on a top website, reaching out to influencers, or using social media to promote your content.
We shouldn’t overlook internal linking, either, where you infuse your content with links your own pages. This creates what we call the “Wikipedia effect” where your visitors click deeper into your content library and stay on your pages for longer.
6. Upgrade your technical SEO
We’ve mentioned how a full-site technical SEO audit isn’t as important if you don’t have a large website, but it’s still important to carry out some core checks.
If you’ve tried optimizing your site but haven’t gotten the results you wanted, then make sure you do the following:
- Transition to HTTPS
Switching to HTTPS not only protects user data but also builds trust with visitors. Plus, search engines favor secure sites, giving you an edge in organic search.
- Optimize for mobile
More people access websites via mobile devices than ever, so you must ensure your site meets them there. A responsive design improves user experience (UX), which helps improve your SEO efforts.
- Improve page load times
Fast-loading pages are a must for retaining visitors and enhancing your bounce rate. Visitors expect quick access to information, and search engines reward speedy sites with better rankings.
- Update Meta tags
Don’t underestimate the power of meta descriptions, headings, and title tags! Well-optimized meta tags not only help search engines crawl your site but also entice users to click through from search results.
- Structure Your XML sitemap
A well-organized XML sitemap guides search engines through your site’s hierarchy. It ensures that all your important pages are indexed, and will help grow your online presence.
- Register a Google Business profile in local directories
This improves your local SEO for financial services by attracting visitors close to where you’re based.
7. Monitor and analyze SEO performance
Tracking the performance of financial services SEO is crucial in making sure that it’s helping you get the business results you want.
It’ll also help you understand SEO better if you’re still a little mystified by it.
Metrics like MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), and revenue generated from content will give you tangible outcomes that you can build upon.
This may seem like a lot of work, but tracking tools like Hubspot, Ahrefs, or Google Analytics will give you financial brand SEO reports about the fintech lead generation that your efforts are bringing you. Using an SEO agency for financial services will also advise you on what you can do next.
Both of these will let you see just how successful your strategy has been and what you need to do to make it better.
Don’t leave SEO for financial services to chance: Use a specialized fintech content marketing agency
SEO for financial services is a very powerful lead magnet when done correctly, but it can repel customers (and lose you money) when done badly.
Mint Position is an SEO-focused content marketing agency that helps companies attract the new customers they need to grow.
We do this with a tried-and-tested SEO approach that has helped:
- Multiple businesses rank on Google’s first page for several keywords
- A company become the most visible commercial real estate financing provider in the US
- A startup become the most visible investment platform in the UAE (with 5x more organic leads and over 3,600 new leads)
- A payment provider get 100+ new B2B conversions a month.
In each case, we root our strategy in thorough customer research specific to the brand, targeting key phrases that resonate with their target audience.
We then infuse these terms into journalistic-quality content, designed to win over your audience with expert-led insights and guide them toward choosing your product or service ahead of your competition.
Ready to grow your business with new customers? Get in touch with us and we’ll show you how we’ve helped dozens of fintech businesses create a pipeline of higher organic traffic and conversions.
