Financial Services SEO

Digital Marketing for Finance Industry

As the financial industry continues to evolve and expand, businesses need to remain more agile than ever before. This is why it’s so important to explore the many ways to attract and retain customers.

Although people do turn to Google for financial services, this is only a snapshot of the countless marketing opportunities at your disposal. Since we’ve already covered the many reasons to pursue an SEO campaign, let’s shift our focus to digital marketing.

Social media marketing, YouTube SEO, and PPC advertising can all be excellent methods to complement an SEO strategy, as they place your brand in the direct eye of the customer. Blog articles, on the other hand, allow you to partner with professional content writers to share unique insights. In turn, these articles set the wheels in motion for you to start attracting more site traffic and boost the performance of keywords.
At Supple Digital, we can also analyse up-to-the-minute SEO factors and carry out in-depth audits of your website to determine which digital marketing strategies are likely to offer the most value.

What is SEO for Financial Services?

SEO for Financial Services include targeted activities that are used to help finance and banking sector websites get more visibility and traffic through search engine result pages. It helps financial companies drive organic traffic to their website by leveraging relevant keywords, useful content, valuable backlinks, and local SEO strategies.

Financial Services SEO also includes going the extra mile for security and accuracy in terms of content and information as there is a high level of scrutiny from users and search engines alike when it comes to websites that provide crucial information.

Tips to Improve SEO for Financial Services Websites

What are some of the best SEO strategies you can adopt to improve your financial service SEO? Ideally, it is best to opt for an SEO agency that specialises in SEO services for financial companies. They can help you in multiple areas including but not limited to the following factors.

1. Understand E-E-A-T

In SEO language, E-E-A-T is a term used to describe the experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of a piece of content. Google significantly emphasises E-E-A-T when the content falls under the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) category. When you’re providing financial pieces of advice, understand that it can have lasting implications on a person’s financial stability and personal life decisions.

Whatever content you produce needs to come from an expert, the writer needs to have the necessary authority and credibility before imparting any sensitive information to its readers. For financial services, these pieces of advice can refer to:

• Investments
• Taxes
• Banking
• Retirement Planning
• Loans
• Mortgage
• Insurance

There’s no easy way to establish E-E-A-T for SEO for financial services. It doesn’t happen overnight. Producing quality content consistently can surely help you start. Some of the other ways you can consider building E-E-A-T are:

• External links from trusted sources can boost your domain authority
• Having credible customer reviews on your site and Google Business Profiles
• Have author bios, pages, and social media profiles that back the authority of the writers
• Optimise your “about us” page to improve transparency and accountability

2. Choose a Niche

The finance sector is itself a vast one. It is best for financial services SEO if you pick a niche and build your topic expertise around that. It helps Google understand topic relevancy and even provides you with a fair chance to rank on limited but relevant keywords. A niche content strategy helps you follow the topic cluster model that increases the reader’s trust in your content.

In the pillar cluster model, each content topic has a pillar page that acts as the primary source of content and a cluster page comprising sub-topics supporting the pillar page. This model particularly helps Google understand your niche and your expertise in it. For example, you can target a topic within finance for a pillar page like “What is Wealth Management and Why do you Need it?.”

Following that, your clusters can include sub-topics like Asset Management, Tax advice, Financial Planning, and Investment Management which can link to the pillar page. You can choose other similar topics you can cover in your niche and organise them into content clusters. You can choose to outsource this part to a financial SEO agency as they have a concise understanding of how pillars and clusters can generate traffic from search engines.

3. Consider Publishing Visual Content

When you want to show financial data and graphs, infographics and pictures have a high value. They can engage users in what they otherwise might find boring to read and difficult to interpret in their minds. Visual content also has the ability to simplify complex information into intriguing graphics and pictures. It boosts the shareability of your content on social media and other platforms and improves your website traffic.

Videos are another great way to explain financial trends and information with a simple narrative and engaging visuals that are attractive to your target audience. An SEO agency for financial service companies can work towards making videos for how-to videos, case studies, review videos, tutorials, and Q&A videos that boost visitor engagement.

4. Smart Keyword Research

Keyword research is at the heart of your content marketing strategy that defines your search engine rankings. But as mentioned before, the FinServ industry is highly competitive with multiple companies targeting top-ranking keywords. Instead of following the hood, focus on taking a smart approach to keywords that can provide you with an opportunity to rank as well as isn’t highly competitive.

One approach you can take for keyword research is to target long-tail keywords. This helps you in many ways. Firstly, it helps you capture the target audience who are in the middle of the sales funnel since this set of visitors already have some understanding of your brand and what they’re looking for. Secondly, you can target local traffic, especially if you’re a small business and your service requires your target audience to visit your institution. It works best for banks and insurance companies. For example, you can optimise your site for keywords like “Top banks for personal loans in Brisbane” or “Top Financial Consultants in Melbourne”.

Lastly, long tail keyword usually has low competition, hence providing you with a better chance of ranking high on search engines. Besides, in the FinServ industry, keyword density shouldn’t be your primary focus. Studies on over 1000 banking terms concluded that top-ranked pages in the financial services industry included the keyword only once on average.

5. Create Educational Content for Users

Whether you’re a multinational bank or a  small business that is working towards SEO, you can always have an edge on search engines if your content has something valuable. Especially if your content contains important advice that is useful for the readers and doesn’t have direct selling intent.

By helping the users with their questions, you’re also improving your website’s credibility and ranking. It increases your chances of appearing on relevant searches, establishes your site as a thought leader, and increases your website’s chances of getting external links from authoritative sources. With this upfront value, you’re making it easier to convert your readers down the line.

6. Focus on Backlinking

All your efforts in creating educational content, keyword research, and pillar-cluster strategy fall flat if there isn’t a strong backlinking strategy to support these activities. Different types of backlinks can improve your domain authority and keep the traffic on your website for a longer duration.

For example, consider if a popular financial website like Fortune or Global Finance can link to your website in one of their topics that is related to your service offering. You can be assured of getting traffic from their readership and even improving your domain authority in the process as these backlinks are often considered as votes of confidence.

But this isn’t as easy as it seems. To attract websites with a high domain authority to link to your website, you need to ensure your content piece is worthy enough. Rope in an expert to write the article, have first-hand information backed with research and data and promote the content. An external link can help you build trust and authority with your audience.  Your financial service SEO agency can draft a comprehensive backlinking strategy that is inclusive of guest posts and publishing on sites with high domain authority.

7. Give Importance to Security

Website security is non-negotiable in general. But for a financial service that deals with sensitive customer information such as credit card details, and personal finance information of corporate clients and individuals, the website security needs to be top-notch. This also has implications for SEO as customers will not view a financial website that they don’t trust.

Google also wants to secure a site that is easy to crawl. Having a secure site means installing an SSL certificate. It would show “HTTPS” at the beginning of your URL instead of just “HTTP”. The SSL certificate encrypts the data being transferred to and from your site which reduces the risk of security breaches.

8. Review Technical SEO

Your financial service SEO agency considerably helps you with optimising your website’s technical SEO. Understand that SEO is an ever-changing game. There are algorithmic changes and updates that require knowledge of the impact it would have on your WordPress website, search engine rankings and on-page and off-page SEO activities.

Experienced agencies know how to navigate through these changes and still set your site up for success using the right practices. SEO agencies also optimise your site for indexing and crawling so that search engines can find your site first before they can rank it. Some of the other technical SEO activities include:

• Page loading speed
• Website security
• Optimising URL and site structure
• Set up necessary redirects
• Google Penalty recoveries
• Mobile page optimisation

9. Improve Local SEO

For local banks and small businesses, local SEO is a great way to target geographically closer traffic. Your only competition is the other businesses in the same area, hence your local SEO strategy would be very unique to your location. The first and foremost activity to improve local SEO is to optimise your Google Business Profile.

It involves providing accurate details, name, address and contact details, location on maps, and customer reviews, and keeping it consistent across all platforms. It would help you rank on keywords when someone searches for your business in a manner like, “Small business banks near me” or “Corporate and investment banks in Sydney”.