In the era of digitalization, it is very important to have a strong online presence for businesses, especially in the sector of financial services. The role of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is appreciable in improving visibility, driving traffic, and attracting potential customers to your financial services website.
Additionally, today, financial services customers expect self-serve options at every stage of their journey, from discovery and comparing their options through consultation, transaction, and service. SEO can help financial service providers to keep all the options just a search away from customers.
In today’s world, approximately 66% of all financial services companies are finding SEO difficult. Terakeet says that the challenges for these companies are increasing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) compared to five years ago. In this blog, we’re going to explore the basics of SEO for financial services and how you can influence it to grow your business and enhance your online presence.
What is SEO for financial services?
As we all know, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) using relevant keywords and phrases.
SEO for financial services helps your website show up at the top of search results when someone looks online for financial products or services.
Effective SEO strategies can help you attract qualified leads, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive conversions.
It is a digital marketing strategy in the sector of finance and banking. SEO for financial services helps prospects find their websites through search engine results pages (SERPs).
In simple words, SEO for financial services helps to get traffic to your financial services site through relevant organic searches. By providing informative, and relevant information you can rank your website.
Additionally, ensure your site is healthy and secure to earn valuable backlinks from high-authority sites.
However, in the case of a financial services provider, you will face a bit more inspection from visitors and search engines. Therefore, you have to make sure SEO content is up to the mark with relevant information.
What are the benefits of improving SEO for financial services?
There are a lot of benefits to improving SEO for financial services. A few of them are listed below:
Growing traffic
Growing organic traffic is one of the most fortunate results of a successful SEO strategy. When you rank your articles through high-volume keywords, large numbers of people will come and visit your website.
Making conversions better
With increasing traffic, you can expect to convert more of them to paying customers. SEO relies on attracting the interest of the right people who are there for information rather than attracting them with paid ads.
Improvement of branding
Your site will gain more attention after increasing the number of searches for your financial services. Eventually, your brand will rise as one of the major players in the field of financial services. Then later on you can build up your brand credibility stronger by delivering reliable and relevant content.
What are the SEO challenges within financial services?
Within the financial services industry, SEO faces several challenges which are listed below:
Increasingly competitive landscape
In the recent decade, the financial services industry is booming. As various small players enter the market with more and more organic traffic, that shows no signs of slowing the growth within the industry. These small players provide reliable and relevant information holding a large number of organic visitors.
High topic complexity
Sometimes it could be complicated and time-consuming to decide how you can invest your savings or which relevant insurance plans to choose.
Therefore, it becomes essential for the content on financial services to rise well above so that the customers get the important details.
As a financial services provider, Your main focus should be to make sure you’re explaining all the important and difficult concepts in simple words.
Additionally, your SEO success will be dependent upon how you acknowledge the complex concepts that require deep understanding.
Authoritarian content quality requirements
“Your Money Or Your Life” (YMYL) is the umbrella under most of the financial services content falls. Wrong content may affect a person’s health, safety, happiness, or financial stability.
If you choose the wrong health insurance after getting an idea from poor content, that might cause several impacts.
Therefore, financial services companies have to put in extra effort when it comes to content quality. The best quality content will rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
How to improve SEO for financial services?
A recent study showed that 85% of Americans like to do their banking online, and 55% specifically prefer using a mobile app.
So, businesses should focus on a digital-first approach and they have to work on optimizing their website and having a mobile app is a must for any financial services provider.
Here are a few tips on how you can improve SEO for financial services provider.
Check your current SEO
With the help of your site’s current state of SEO, you can get an idea about the requirements of work in your existing pages and identify new opportunities as well.
You can handle this manually but using an SEO checker tool will make it a lot easier. This will automatically tackle the problems and let you know where and when your work is required.
Perform a content audit
Here you have to examine the content of your current website. Check whether this is up to date and give all the information in detail. The content should be easy to read and well structured; so that your target audience finds it truly helpful.
Creative and crispy meta titles and meta descriptions always attract the attention of users. So, try to make it unique and engaging, so that users pay a visit to your site after seeing it on Google. These are the quickest ways you can rank your website upwards in search.
Do your keyword research
After improving your current site, you can work on your keyword research. To make your keyword search easier you can use a third-party DIY SEO tool.
You should check the volume and intent of your keywords during research. Check whether the people are buying specific services or they’re just finding the relevant information on how a particular financial concept works. After doing this research you will be able to make your content plan more effective.
Make a competitor analysis
Next, you have to find out who your real competitors are. You may find out a few vendors are competing against your services. They are ranked on Google by using relevant keywords which have high volume and intent.
After collecting or making a list of your competitors check their content and see what better you can provide to your customers.
Check if they are using long-tail keywords that you haven’t. Review if their content is more relevant and provide the exact information that the viewers are looking for in simple language.
Check if their content is up to date and deliver every minor information that the users need to be aware of.
Create educational content for your users
Most of the sites have only company-focused content that only provides service-related information. For an average user, it may be difficult to understand the provided information.
However, if you provide educational content with detailed information, it will be very helpful for the users seeking guidance and advice.
As SEO focuses on delivering in-depth content that the users don’t have to return with half knowledge; so by doing this, you’ll also improve your SEO for financial services as well.
A few benefits of focusing on educational content are listed below:
- Google will easily rank your website based on relevant searches.
- Your website will get a position as a reliable source in the concerned field.
- Your content will become knowledgeable for not only providing sales and services but educational information as well.
Improve your E-E-A-T
You will also have to focus on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, also known as E-E-A-T. It is a terminology of Google that reviews or evaluates the website’s quality.
According to the guidelines of E-E-A-T, you must provide accurate and verifiable information. You can not improve your E-E-A-T in a single day, this is a gradual process. You have to keep providing quality content to earn people’s respect and trust.
Here are a few ways to improve your E-E-A-T standing:
- You have to provide your Contact details or “About Us” details so that the users find it helpful.
- Share organic customer reviews on your website so that the users can rely.
- Do insert links from reliable sources for educational content.
- Include a well-crafted author bio for each article, highlighting the author’s credentials and expertise in the subject matter. This builds credibility and reassures readers of the content’s reliability.
Check your technical SEO
Technical SEO stands for the crawlability and indexability of your website. It is a broad field but mainly concerned with improving the design and architecture of your website.
A few ways to improve your Technical SEO are listed below:
- Create a sitemap that interlinks all of your top content
- Make the navigation manure easier for the users
- Interlink the pages to create a channel between pages.
Focus on speed and mobile optimization
In the era of 5G, 6G users have become very impatient with the internet. They want the online pages to open quickly. If a page is taking too long to load, people leave that page and switch to another one which is fast.
Therefore, it is important to fix the loading problems as soon as you find any. Additionally, mobile optimization is also very important for financial services websites. It increases the number of users that can access the internet from mobile devices.
You have to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and quickly loads on smartphones and tablets. You can use responsive design techniques that can adapt your website’s layout and content to different screen sizes. It will ensure a seamless user experience across devices.
Pay special attention to Core Web Vitals, which are essential metrics from Google that measure key aspects of user experience, including loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Optimizing for core web vitals helps ensure your site meets the high standards of speed and usability that modern users demand.
Improve your local SEO for financial services
Sometimes it is seen that users often search for local companies near them for information and purchase. For that, you need to focus on specific location-centric keywords to rank. For example “Best Financial Services in Lower East Side Manhattan”; using this keyword will provide you with the financial services in nearby areas.
If your company has multiple branches in different cities, you should have a “Google Business Profile” for each city separately. This lets you have control over your company’s information, and contact details and also helps you to have customer reviews to increase your rating. E.g. have a look at how JPMorgan Chase & Co. has multiple Google business profiles serving different locations.
Track and improve your off-page SEO for financial services
Off-page SEO stands for the outside activities that may affect the search rank of your website. You cannot directly control these factors. You need to have a close eye on off-page SEO activities and if you find any make sure to direct the necessary steps to improve it. In case your brand is listed on a website without a link, contact the site owner for a backlink.
Link Building
Link building is also an essential aspect of SEO for financial services. Here you have to acquire inbound links from other websites to improve your website’s authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines.
Building high-quality, relevant backlinks from authoritative websites within the financial services industry is highly advisable. This includes guest blogging, contributing to industry publications, or participating in online forums and communities.
Content Marketing for Financial Services
Content marketing is one of the important tools for attracting and engaging potential clients in the financial services industry. Create high-quality, relevant, and informative content that fulfills all the required information your target audience is seeking.
This includes blog posts, articles, case studies, infographics, etc. Share your content across your website, blog, and social media channels to increase traffic and attract inbound links from authoritative websites.
Stop AI tools from stealing your precise research data
If your data is unique and not available anywhere else, then you should not share it with AI Bots. To stop ChatGPT from using your unique and precise research, financial services websites often post articles, industry trends, and reports.
AI bots like ChatGPT gather this information from the internet and use it to answer questions and generate content. Then, other website owners might use these answers on their sites.
To keep your latest research from being used by competitors, add this code to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
SEO KPIs for financial services
SEO KPIs, also known as Search Engine Optimization Key Performance Indicators are specific metrics that are used to check and review the performance and effectiveness of an SEO campaign. To keep your SEO strategy successful, you need to focus on some relevant KPIs.
They are as follows:
- The SEO rank of your pages is identified during keyword research.
- The impressions or number of visits to your pages by the users.
- Organic traffic to your website through search engines.
- Pay attention to Engagement metrics that include the user’s time on your site, pages per session, etc.
- Check your SEO score for improvements.
Conclusion
Effective SEO has a very important role in the field of financial services businesses. If you want to improve your online presence and attract potential clients, SEO is something you need to be aware of. In this blog, we have listed various strategies that you can use to improve your site’s overall performance to grow your business in the competitive financial services industry.
