Financial services and products are increasingly being marketed online, making SEO an essential tool for success. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful technique that can help financial service and product providers gain visibility on the web, attract more customers, increase website traffic, and ultimately maximize profits. In this article, we’ll look at some tips and steps you can take to improve your SEO for financial services.
What is SEO for Financial Services?
Seo for financial services is a digital marketing strategy that helps different economic sectors, like bank sectors, easily find their websites through various search engine platforms. So, it means that SEO for financial services drives natural traffic to your services in an organic way. But even to rank in SEO, your site must provide helpful content for your viewers and valuable backlinks from higher authority sites.
But keep in mind that, as a financial service provider, your site will go through an extra examination from the visitors. So, you also have to step up that extra little to ensure your SEO content. This is a must because, after all, you want people to trust you with their wealth.
The Benefits of Improving Your Organic Visibility
Increased Organic Traffic: Increased organic traffic to your website is the most apparent result of a properly implemented SEO plan. More people will notice and visit your site to read your content as you rise in the rankings for crucial keywords.
Better Conversions: More people will eventually have a chance to become paying clients if your website receives more visitors. Due to its emphasis on attracting visitors who are already interested in what you are offering rather than attempting to buy their attention with advertisements, SEO is frequently one of the traffic sources that convert the best.
Better brand trust: As your sites begin to appear regularly on searches, more people will start to notice your services. And soon, they would get familiar with your brand and its existence in the finance industry. And if by the time your website meets the demands of the visitors, it will increase brand trust for your site
Unique SEO Challenges Within Financial Services
While doing seo for financial services keep in mind that you might face some challenges that you didn’t think of before or haven’t faced in case of other services. However, by following the steps below you can easily overcome the challenges within your financial services.
Increasingly Competitive Landscape
The industry’s growth in Fintech and financial services will remain the same. As more and more smaller firms and software-as-a-service providers enter the market, the finance sector is also becoming more and more fragmented.
It takes continuously excellent content that appropriately meets the needs of a well-defined target group to get organic visibility in this crowded market.
Increased Focus on SEO of Lead Generation
The reliability of SEO as a source of top-notch B2B leads has also been demonstrated. Because of this, an increasing number of established companies in the financial services industry are using SEO to generate leads.
This means that any specific business within the sector must put in more effort to rank and win over potential clients’ minds.
High Topic Complexity
It might be difficult and unpleasant to choose an insurance plan or how to spend your savings, for instance. For financial services content to fully meet client needs, it must be much above the level of flimsy filler.
As a provider of financial services, your SEO performance will depend on your capacity to delve into challenging themes that call for in-depth knowledge of the subject. Also, you’ll be asked to clarify complex ideas in ways that your potential clients can comprehend.
Stricter Content Quality Requirements
The health, safety, happiness, or financial security of an individual may be impacted by the content on this website.
It’s comprehensible. Far more harm might result from choosing the incorrect brand of a coffee maker than from selecting the wrong form of health insurance based on subpar content. Due to this, businesses that provide financial services are automatically held to a higher standard of responsibility for content.
Google will hold YMYL pages to a higher standard of quality and is likely to only prioritize the best content on search engine results pages.
Understand YMYL and E-E-A-T
Every content is taken carefully by Google when it comes to its algorithm, but YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content is given extra consideration.
The term “YMYL” refers to content that has the potential to significantly impact and influence the reader’s life. Examples include financial advice and, you guessed it, medical advice.
It suffices to remark that most FinServ company websites fit under the “YMYL” category. Google claims that these pages may have an impact on users’ “happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”
For businesses that offer financial services, YMYL pages that show up in organic search results may include suggestions or details regarding Retirement Planning, Insurance, Loans, Taxes, investments, and Banking.
This includes web pages that let users send and receive money online.
Google thus uses its E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) principles to determine how to rank a YMYL page.
More specifically, E-E-A-T stands for E for Expertise, E for experience, A for Authoritativeness, and T for Trustworthiness.
Even though you can use a variety of marketing strategies to demonstrate E-E-A-T, content marketing is still the best option. Due diligence should be taken to ensure that each blog post and website page is. Especially if the content has the potential to affect your readers’ financial future, everything you post should be valuable to them.
Use Content Clusters
By using content clusters, you may make it easier for users to find information on your website and attract more search engine attention. A content cluster is made up of a pillar page and some supporting pages.
The pillar page serves as the main subject overview and contains general information about the topic, while the supporting pages offer in-depth coverage of the sub-topics covered on the pillar page and include links to them. Using this tactic, you may make use of a thorough internal link-building system, a wide range of keywords, and your experience.
Add Visual Content
Infographics are extremely valuable when it comes to financial data or guidance. Your financial services website’s traffic can grow significantly with the help of this shareable content. Also, it can make complex material easier to understand for your target audience by simplifying complex information that you need to present.
Another approach for clarifying complex concepts is through video marketing, which will also grab the interest of your target audience.
Implementing various forms of visual material, such as:
- Explainer or how-to videos
- Webinar recordings
- Case studies
- Tutorials
- Review videos
- Q&A videos
Repurpose Old Content
Your website probably already has a few pieces of previous content if your business and blog have been around for some time. It might be time to revisit these posts in order to strengthen your financial services SEO efforts.
You can reuse your present material in the following ways to make it more current:
Updates: It is very volatile in the financial industry. Your information can quickly lose relevance in large portions. It doesn’t imply, though, that you should abandon your earlier work in favor of producing fresh stuff. You should simply reflect on changes in your previous posts and articles. The authority of your page will increase as a result of this.
New target audiences: You can adapt outdated information to new subgroups of your intended audience. For instance, maintain the fundamental information while modifying or expanding it to serve a different audience group better. (This is adding a reference that Generation Z might understand.)
Formats: If you have a popular post, blog, or webinar, you can increase your website traffic even more by creating a sub-article or post, and then you can internally link that article to your existing article.
Take an Intelligent Approach to Keywords
It can be very competitive in the FinServ sector. When competing for the same customers, employing keywords strategically might make all the difference.
First, be sure to create and maintain a robust keyword map. When considering keyword competition indicators like Keyword Difficulty or Competitive Density, it is advisable to choose the route that presents the least amount of opposition (i.e. search volume).
Avoid obsessing over keyword density. Accuracy and delivering useful material are far more critical in the FinServ sector for SEO ranking.
Improve Your Trustworthiness
When it comes to SEO for financial services, as was previously noted, trust is a significant problem for both consumers and search engines. Because of this, you should continually work to maintain the credibility of your brand.
To make sure you come across as a reliable source:
- On essential pages, include precise contact information (a phone number, email address, and social media connections).
- Get rid of 404 errors
- Utilize descriptive domain names and URLs
- Use Schema markup, meta descriptions, and solid site architecture.
- For the best user experience, create a website that is simple to navigate.
- Showcase all credentials and accomplishments.
- Add evaluations, success tales, and references to web pages.
- Make sure your Google Business Profile, which is previously known as Google My Business, is precise and comprehensive.
Maximize Your Chances to Rank Higher on SERPs
Your chances of appearing well on Google’s search engine results page are improved by making your material as obvious to Google as possible (SERP). Do your homework to understand how Google ranks pages, the best practices for using schema markup, and other ways to improve your online presence.
Make sure you are aware of the specific SERP characteristics that are offered for your niche. Keep in mind that depending on the particular keywords and search intent used, this can vary depending on the piece of content. Knowing the nuances of Google ranking for your sector and themes is crucial for this reason.
KPIs to Keep Track of
To ensure your SEO efforts are successful, tracking the right KPIs is crucial. Here are five metrics that will give you an accurate picture of how well your financial services website is performing:
- Organic session duration (Time on a page)
- Organic sessions (Traffic)
- Organic bounce rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Number of pages viewed per session
By keeping track of these metrics, you’ll be able to identify which strategies are working and which ones need some work. This can help you optimize your SEO efforts for maximum results.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays an essential role in the success of any financial services business. By optimizing website content, creating trust-oriented webpages, and staying mindful of the right metrics, you can stay ahead of the competition in terms of rankings.
This type of optimization requires ongoing effort, but it’s well worth it for the higher visibility and conversions you can get from appearing on SERPs. To learn more about SEO best practices for financial services companies, please contact us today.
