If you want your finance brand to reach new heights of success, then consider SEO as a vital part of your marketing strategy. Companies spend an extortionate amount of money to get their brands in front of prospective clients.
How Does SEO Apply To Financial Services Industry?
Finance SEO is certainly a long-term investment. It’s a flywheel that takes a lot of time to start, but it rewards your patience with a high return on investment. The finance industry has a real-world impact on the target audience.
Research from Brightedge suggests that 53% of traffic comes through search engines, and it generates above 40% of the entire online revenue.
In this article, we will be covering all the details about SEO in financial services, and how you can use it as a strategy to generate revenue.
What Are The Considerable Factors For Finance-related SEO?
Factors that impact your finance brand’s SEO content include:
Jargon-free content: Financial services SEO is often complicated. Even if you are well aware of all the technical jargon you need to ensure that your content is easy to read and accessible. It enhances the user experience.
The potential target audience: Knowing the requirements and specifications of your target audience is a must. Whether you are working with individuals who need to know the saving tips for a vacation or companies that need FP&A (Financial planning and analysis) solutions, determining the right audience helps you target the right people at the right time.
The competition: Competition in the financial industry is high. But you can set yourself apart from the rest by finding your niche and optimizing your brand’s website.
2023 SEO Guide for Financial Industry Success
Achieve online dominance in the financial industry with our comprehensive 2023 SEO guide.
- The guide offers proven SEO strategies to help financial companies boost their online presence and dominate the industry.
- It provides financial industry SEO techniques to increase visibility for financial companies.
- The guide presents digital marketing tactics to drive more traffic and generate leads for financial businesses.
- It offers online dominance strategies to help financial companies outperform their competition and establish themselves as leaders in the industry.
- The guide is designed for financial advisors looking to take their businesses to the next level with financial industry SEO.
- It provides expert advice on elevating a financial company’s digital strategy to stay ahead of the game.
The guide includes SEO keywords to enhance a financial industry’s online presence and skyrocket a business.
The provision of personalized experiences is essential for finance companies. By providing tailor-made solutions you can understand the psyche and search habits of potential customers.
Keyword Research And Targeting
Financial services SEO means discovering the right keywords and incorporating them appropriately in other areas of search engine optimization. It includes keyword integration in meta titles, meta descriptions, on-site blogs, anchor links, hashtags, and more.
Head keywords are optimum for top-level/navbar pages whereas medium/short-tail keywords are ideal for low-level pages, info pages, etc.
The ability to find and target accurate keywords is a key to coming up with a commendable SEO campaign.
- Finance-related head keywords are the competitive ones found on top of the user’s search funnel. If the head keywords are well-integrated into top-level content it does wonders.
- Both medium-tail and long-tail keywords are descriptive keywords. Searchers use such keywords for searching something specific like tutorials, tips and tricks, and more. The integration of medium/long tail keywords is ideally suited for blogs, informational posts, etc.
- Transactional queries and information queries are implied for an intended objective.
SEO With E.A.T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, And Trustworthiness) Content
Perceived legitimacy and brand authority are paramount in marketing financial services. Content is king, and financial service companies should aim to have E-A-T content.
Expert, authoritative, and trustworthy content helps in improving brand reputation, searching performance, and converting visitors into customers. A well-written premium-quality content based on the search intent of potential customers helps your finance company meet its objectives.
EAT content is imperative for navigation-bar pages, landing pages, guide pages, and long-form blogs. It helps in improving customer gratification and increasing shares.
image-source: linkbuildinghq.com
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines For Engaging Content
Finance brand SEO should always follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. Their guidelines help you understand ‘ how to write good-quality content ‘ and ‘ how to avoid bad practices that lead to penalties ‘.
- Write content that answers the problems of potential users, not primarily for search engines. Again, the best content will help your customers with their queries and guide them toward conversion. It could be in the form of creating an online account on your website or lead generation.
- Think of innovative ideas so that you can come up with engaging websites and unique content. Financial services SEO means standing out from competitors.
- Avoid unethical practices to improve the website’s ranking on search engines. Instead, opt for the SEO strategies that help your users clearly understand your business.
image by similarweb.com shows some search intents and keywords.
Did you know: 75% percentage of digital marketers use content marketing specifically to generate links. (Aira).
Blogs And Inbound Marketing
Blogs are one of the best ways of driving traffic to your website. By amalgamating long-tail keywords and EAT concept, your finance company can create high-quality, educational, and detailed content.
In addition, blogs also help in doing inbound SEO so you can determine the requirements/problems of your prospective clients and create content that responds to their queries.
- Blogs explain and describe the FSI technology in the best way possible.
- Practical guides that help customers with tax implications.
- Categorization of services for individuals and B2B companies.
- Explanation of finance-related processes, documentation, savings, investments, businesses, and a lot more.
- Step-by-step guides for creating accounts, closing accounts, and transferring funds.
YMYL (Your Money Or Your Life) Pages
YMYL websites are entirely based on heavily focused topics about people’s well-being, finance, health, and safety. Working on the search engine optimization of these websites is crucial as it is directly related to financial sector topics such as investing, banking, legalization, certification, taxation, etc.
If Google categorizes your websites as YMYL then quality, authenticity, and authority become even more important for financial marketing. This is why businesses that fall under the category of ‘ YMYL ‘ need to focus on the best practices for financial brands’ SEO campaigns.
- Avoid plagiarized and low-effort content. Content with errors and bugs ranks lower on search engines.
- Ensure that the primary purpose of content is to provide the best possible user experience. The content should be understandable, accurate, and has the intent of monetization.
- Content on the ‘ YMYL ‘ website should include the latest and up-to-date information.
- Avoid adding intrusive advertising to your content. Do not go against Google by using interstitial ads.
YMYL Topics as mentioned in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
Metadata Optimization (Meta Titles And Meta Descriptions)
It is the most successful strategy in finance SEO. Metadata includes tags and descriptions that are used for search engine rankings, click-through rates, and search snippets.
Engaging, descriptive, and authentic meta titles and descriptions with the correct length and optimization have the highest Click-through rates (CTR).
Good metadata should be inclusive of:
- Relevant keywords for better ranking. They should appear on the common target audience searches.
- Be transparent, and let users know what exactly the page is about. Inaccurate titles mean impractical SEO and increased bounce rates.
- Should be plag-free and written in a human natural language.
- The sentences should be clear, concise, and direct.
- Manage the keyword density (Avoid keyword stuffing).
Technical Seo And Indexing
Technical aspects of search engine optimization for financial websites need to be considered as well. It can be done by ensuring that URLs are found, understood, and indexed.
You need to ensure that the HTML website is error-free. Many marketers make use of various tools like Google search console to monitor the domain for indexing issues. Fixing and auditing the technical SEO can help in preventing errors and can increase the rankings.
- You need to ensure that your finance brand website is crawlable with proper sitemaps, robots, text files, URL canonicalization, and meta robots.
- The content of your website should not be hidden from Googlebot or bing bot with ‘ noindex ‘ or ‘follow ‘ commands.
- Audit all minor and major performance metrics such as website speed, mobile friendliness, site structure, and new core web vitals.
- Avoid bad ‘ black hat ‘ SEO practices for getting the website ranking higher on search engines. These unethical tactics lead to manual action penalties.
- Repair all the broken website links, and 404-page errors that reduce the SEO ranking authority.
Data And Analytics
The most commonly used data analytics tools are Google analytics, Google tag manager, and Google’s search console. The data collected from these tools can be used for measuring driven results.
It lets businesses monitor the number of visitors visiting their website, information about existing and new visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and even goal completion rate.
In addition, these tools give relevant information about search results impressions, click-through rates, and keyword rankings. Through analytics data, financial marketers can get to know which keywords perform well in the market and which do not.
Final Thoughts
The primary goal of finance SEO is to get as many organic visitors as possible, right? To see whether you are meeting your objectives or not, you need to monitor your brand’s performance in search engine result pages (SERPs).
A well-planned SEO campaign implementation can help you increase your ranking in Google and other search engines. It further increases your website’s traffic, and the return on investment is tempting.
Contact Digital Gravity Agency to know more about SEO for financial services. Fill out the form to connect with us, or check out our case studies.