The world of financial services is complex, and only a handful of people know how to navigate it. Moreover, people are very cautious before seeking financial assistance from a company. All of these factors make financial marketing more challenging than most businesses.
Luckily there is one strategy that continuously delivers the desired marketing results, even for financial companies – SEO services. Financial SEO is one of the best ways to generate more leads and conversions for your business.
What Does SEO Stand for in Finance?
Every modern financial company has an online presence, and SEO means the same for every business organization with an online presence. SEO means Search Engine Optimization for any financial organization with an online presence. As the name suggests, SEO involves optimizing your website and its content so that search engines like Google can quickly find your business online.
Financial service marketing uses many marketing strategies, and SEO is integral to their marketing efforts. Google holds an outstanding 92% market share among global search engines. Hence, most companies base their SEO efforts around the best SEO practices for Google’s search engine.
Financial organizations must also use Google’s best SEO practices to ensure their company turns up when their target audience searches a relevant Google search. The SEO best practices also help to show Google that your website is trustworthy and reliable for Google’s users. SEO involves targeting keywords and phrases your target audience searches for in Google.
You must then create quality and helpful content around the keywords or phrases. Ideally, your website should pop up on the top of Google results when the target audience searches for these keywords or phrases. In reality, numerous companies are fighting for this first spot on Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page), and only a handful can even make it to the first result page.
Why is SEO Different for Financial Websites?
Ever-growing Competitiveness
One of the most significant challenges in implementing effective SEO for financial websites is the ever-growing competitiveness. Financial SEO is still growing, but it is only a matter of time before it becomes mainstream.
Every day, more and more small businesses and SaaS providers are entering the financial market. Gaining organic visibility is already becoming a challenge for financial services. Therefore, the sooner you optimize your financial website for SEO, the better its effect on your business.
Prioritizing Lead Generation
Complex Topics
Financial topics are often complex. The only thing more difficult than understanding a complex economic issue is explaining it so that the other party can understand it. Moreover, people don’t trust just anyone with their financial advice.
You must earn the audience’s trust before conveniently presenting a subject to your financial audience. In other words, you must have a holistic understanding of the subject matter to ensure the desired SEO results for your business. You must be able to explain complex concepts so the average joe can understand them.
Uncompromisable Content Quality
Industries like finance and healthcare must maintain the superior quality of their content. Any wrong information you convey to the audience can have a real-life impact and potentially ruin your company’s reputation.
You may be familiar with YMYL or Your Money or Your Life, and financial content comes under this category. The SEO content on your financial website could affect individuals’ safety, happiness, and financial safety.
Moreover, Google has a separate, higher-quality standard for YMYL pages. Only the best quality content ranks high in Google results regarding YMYL pages.
Benefits of Improving SEO for Financial Services
Boost Visibility on Search Results
The most significant advantage of improving SEO for a financial business is boosting its visibility. Currently, Google first displays its paid results. The local listings come immediately after Google ads, often referred to as a “three-pack” because they come in groups of three, followed by the organic results.
Ideally, your business should appear on this local listing. It significantly increases the chance of your target audience noticing your business. A quality SEO is a must for accomplishing this. Not to mention, it also helps get the number one spot on organic results too.
Boost Online and Offline Traffic
Effective implementation of financial SEO can boost online and offline business traffic. The data from Forbes suggest 70% of mobile searches result in a desired action within an hour. But you must ensure that you provide every essential information to the user, such as the contact details, website URL, address, hours of operation, etc.
Provide the necessary details to avoid your prospective audience turning away from your brand. Financial SEO allows you to use local SEO to ensure your audience can always find relevant information about your business. It also lets customers effortlessly get in touch with your financial business.
Pro Tip: Include more information on the knowledge panel, which can enhance brand trust. (Knowledge panel is the card visible on the right side of the results page)
Boost Trust and Customer Loyalty Via Brand Experience
As you know, customers can manage most of their financial operations using smartphones now. The brand experience of a financial company is now mainly through digital interaction. Hence, you must provide a seamless brand experience in the digital platform.
It means optimizing every touchpoint so the customer can always find the information they are looking for with the help of local SEO. By doing so, you can provide the customers with a consistent experience online and offline and optimize every aspect of the customer’s journey.
Top SEO Strategies for Financial Services
Evaluate Your Current SEO
Conduct A Content Audit
Conduct A Keyword Research
Another essential financial SEO strategy to implement for your business is conducting holistic keyword research. Ensure that the user actively uses the keywords you intend for your SEO in their online research.
You must also ensure that the keywords are relevant to your core business. Additionally, keyword research must ensure that your firm can reliably answer customer queries and provide a reliable solution.
Analyze Your Competitors
Competitor analysis is a must to understand the prevailing trends and understand what works for your target audience and what doesn’t work for them. Start by identifying your primary organic competitors.
These competitors may sometimes be different from your industry competitors because these are the companies that rank above your company on Google result pages. Once you have a list of competitors, you can check their content topics and identify gaps to optimize your content in the future.
Focus on Educational Content
Adopt an E-A-T Approach
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
Evaluate Your Technical SEO
Analyzing or evaluating your technical SEO involves assessing factors such as the indexability and crawlability of your financial website. You can better optimize your website for technical SEO by indexing all your primary website pages.
Consider using an XML sitemap listing your primary pages and using canonical tags. But these are just some preliminary measures you can take to optimize your technical SEO. It would be best if you had an SEO expert like Rainmaker.UNO to make any significant progress with your technical SEO.
Mobile and Speed Optimization
Another effective financial SEO strategy you must consider for your business is mobile page speed optimization. As you can guess, it involves optimizing your financial website for mobile users because more than half the online traffic comes from mobiles.
Rainmaker.UNO can ensure your website quickly loads on mobile networks and scales to the appropriate screen size. It makes your financial business and its services easily accessible to the user. Proper SEO ensures no one navigates away from your site because of slow loading speed.
Optimize Your Local SEO
Local SEO is a crucial part of financial SEO because most customers use nearby firms to access financial services. It involves identifying highly targeted and location-specific keywords and ensuring a high ranking.
You must ensure your local customers always get relevant information if you have multiple branches. It gives you better control over your business operations.
Analyze and Optimize Off-page SEO
Your off-page SEO should involve every SEO effort outside your financial website that can impact your rankings.
It can include everything from external source backlinks to any social media mention of your financial company. Off-page SEO is any SEO effort other than the ones you can directly control.
However, the experts at Rainmaker.UNO can help you optimize your off-page SEO to maintain a high SERP ranking for your website.
Utilize Content Clusters
Utilize Visual Content
Repurpose Existing or Previous Content
At some point, you may reach a situation where you find difficulty finding or producing quality content. If you have an extensive collection of content, consider repurposing and updating your old content. There are different ways you can repurpose existing content on your website, and they are as follows.
- Update content to the latest standards and republish them.
- Repurpose content to suit new sections of audiences you want to target.
- Create unique content from a well-performing piece and interlink the original content.
Adopt a Smart Approach to Keywords
Enhance the Trustworthiness of Your Brand
- Provide clear and detailed contact information
- Get rid of 404 errors
- Ensure robust site architecture
Latest Trends and Search Features Driving Financial Services Success in Google Results
One of the reasons financial SEO fails for many companies is that they take a one-time approach. Many companies just set up their financial site with an initial web optimization or continue to follow the same process indefinitely. But, this approach needs to be corrected.
You must learn the latest SEO trends and search features in financial SEO to drive the desired results. Some of the popular trends and search features you should know for financial SEO in 2023 are as follows.
Highly Targeted and Data-driven Content
The success of every SEO effort is in identifying relevant pain points and providing appropriate solutions for the same. You can better accomplish this by combining your inbound marketing and SEO efforts.
In other words, you must ensure that every piece of content you produce has a clear-cut purpose. Your content must target a specific customer persona and meet their search intent.
It would be best if you had a data-driven approach and an SEO expert like Rainmaker.UNO to help you with this.
Go Beyond Keywords
Financial SEO is no longer about targeting some remotely relevant keywords and focusing all your efforts around them. Your customers and search engines expect a clear path to the correct information they are looking for relevant to the context of their search.
In other words, the search result must match perfectly with the search intent and answer specific questions the customer needs answers to. Hence, it would be best if you focused on solving the customer’s problem while ensuring the best SEO practices. The use of keywords must go hand-in-hand with overall content quality, including its readability and structure.
More use of AI and Algorithms
In 2023, AIs and algorithms will have a significant role in financial SEO, especially in providing personalized user experience. Voice searches (including voice assistance like Siri and Alexa), predictive technology, and other tech are essential to SEO now.
Financial businesses must ensure that their SEO efforts keep up with the changing technology. Moreover, you must adapt content that is better suitable for conversational queries. This approach must still consider Google’s latest algorithm update.
SEO KPIs for Financial Service Companies
SEO Rank
Impressions
Organic Traffic
Engagement Metrics
Organic Traffic Conversions
Unique SEO Challenges Within Financial Services
Insufficient Digital Governance
Broken Internal and External Links
Keyword Salience
It refers to keywords highly relevant to the target audience, their noticeability, and their significance in the search.
The good news is that Google lets you use its Natural Language API to compare your content with high-ranking content to measure keyword salience.
However, an expert like Rainmaker.UNO can help you eliminate this problem with an advanced keyword research process.
Tips to Hire an SEO Company for Financial Services Brands
We know financial SEO is no walk in the park, and there is no easy way to master it. The best and most convenient solution for financial brands is to choose a reliable SEO company that can meet all their SEO requirements.
But how do you know which SEO company to hire for your brand? The following tips can help you find the answer to this question.
Identify Your Primary Goals
Request a Free Consultation
Consider the Past and Existing Clientele
Wrapping Up
Financial SEO can be challenging and complex without the right SEO partner for your business. It is crucial to analyze your SEO requirements and ensure your SEO team or partner can meet them. The ideal financial SEO company is one with proven expertise, like Rainmaker.UNO.
We offer our clients a holistic financial SEO process that covers all aspects of your business. Our experts work closely with numerous projects in the financial industry. We help financial companies grow sustainably.
Our finance experts can help you formulate a tailor-made SEO plan for your business. We use advanced tools and compliant tech to ensure safe and secure SEO campaigns for your business. As a result, you can protect customer data and sustainably grow your financial business.