SEO For Financial Services: 6 Strategies Firms Actually Need

Most financial service companies stop improving beyond a functioning website and half-dead social media accounts — that’s not going to land you any serious clients. Marketing with great ROI in this complex sector requires a deep understanding of your audience and keeping up with ever-changing trends. That’s where SEO comes into play.

SEO accounts for over 61% of the marketing efforts in the financial services industry. Why? Because financial services revolve around complex, technical topics. If you’re too boring, people will lose interest. And then you have to race against the giants with large SEO teams already settling down at the top Google spots.

But—as a financial services SEO agency, we can safely say that small and mid-sized finance companies taking over the top ranks is not unheard of. It’s possible if you know the right tactics. And we aren’t talking about publishing a stream of content on your website and paying for spammy links (that do more harm than good). From intent-driven keyword research to authoritative content development, striking the right chords can get you high traffic, better leads, and a growing number of high-paying clients.

Let’s Start With the Basics: What is SEO for Financial Services

First things first: What is finance SEO

SEO financial services, or search engine optimization, is an inbound marketing technique to increase the quality and quantity of search engine traffic on a financial services website.

There are more than a billion websites out there. The number of financial websites in the U.S. alone is more than 11,000. Whether you deal with mortgages, wealth management, or personal loans, it’s safe to assume that the competition is fierce.

The primary benefit of financial SEO services is better visibility on search engines. But that’s just the start, because over time, better visibility translates into more substantial and measurable advantages:

• The top result on the SERP enjoys a whopping 40% click-through rate.
• SEO-powered content marketing earns 54% more leads than traditional marketing.
• SEO for financial services companies provides better ROI and increases lead conversion rate by almost 13%.

Want the lion’s share of these benefits? SEO is your friend.

Why Should You Invest in Financial SEO Services?

SEO for financial service companies isn’t just an option. It’s the need of the hour. Why? Because search engines drive 2.2 billion organic visits to financial websites each month. And if that’s not shocking enough for you, here’s a twist: “finance” is a YMYL category.

YMYL stands for Your Money Your Life and refers to topics that can actually affect people’s lives, money, or future happiness. Finance is one such topic.

Google says, “Where our algorithms detect that a user’s query relates to a ‘YMYL’ topic, we will give more weight in our ranking systems to factors like our understanding of the authoritativeness, expertise, or trustworthiness of the pages we present in response.”

It’s harder to rank with YMYL content, particularly finance, because Google looks at this content more closely for quality and accuracy. This added scrutiny makes it much more difficult to rank.

If you own a financial services website, you can’t get by with sales-y information stuffed with basic keywords. And if you publish inaccurate or misleading content, that’s your death.

To rank high, you need two things: Content that aligns with Google guidelines and a tailored SEO strategy to get more leads. Sounds hard? Well, knowing some financial SEO tactics can definitely make the job easier.

How to Do SEO for Finance Companies: 6 Strategies to Get More Clients

When it comes to SEO for financial services providers, the usual tactics aren’t going to cut it. If you need to excel, here are 6 proven strategies to earn a higher ranking and get more clients.

Don’t Disregard the Relevance of E-E-A-T

Google follows the E-E-A-T framework when evaluating your website content. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and it helps Google understand how much trust it can place on your content.

How do you demonstrate E-E-A-T with your content? Here are a few tips:

• Prioritize people-first content. Instead of running behind the search engine algorithms, figure out what your audience wants and focus on their needs and problems.
• Establish expertise. Google looks at your content with a magnifying glass, so it’s recommended that you bring in an expert who knows about the topic instead of copy-pasting and re-writing.
• Invest in the process. Include original information and provide substantial and comprehensive topic descriptions. Be insightful and interesting, but don’t be obvious.
• Provide a great page experience. This includes secure protocols, mobile-responsive websites, and a good Core Web Vitals score. Don’t hide your content behind a bunch of ads.

If you think your content demonstrates E-E-A-T but the SEO audit shows rank drops, you can self-assess your content and improve accordingly.

Dig Deeper for High-Value Keywords

A big problem for many financial websites is finding the right keywords to target. Finding high-volume keywords with low competition is like striking pure gold, but it requires a great deal of mining.

Find keywords related to your services using tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, SERanking, or Moz.

For instance, if your company offers loans, you can find keywords for each loan category, such as car, home, or personal loan, to build your content around. If you are a new company, you want to target keywords with low competition and average search volume.

Next, find long-tail keywords that fit the category, such as “home loans for young professionals” or “how to apply for a personal loan.” Make sure you target longer phrases that are less competitive but have high search volume so that you can tackle them easily. Each category of keywords should go into one cluster, which will help you create a keyword map. 

Use Blogging to Build Topical Authority and Trust

Dedicated service pages highlighting your financial solutions and informing the audience about your offerings are great, but not enough. All the keyword research and topic mapping we learned will go down the drain if you don’t have a powerful blog segment on your website.

Instead of writing another complex page about a technical finance topic that is too hard for an average person to understand, simplify your content for the audience so that your blog turns into a lead-generating machine.  

Here are a few ways to do that:

• Utilize keyword mapping and topic clusters to plan your blog pages and dive deep into each topic.
• Understand customer intent when writing blogs. Remember who you’re writing for.
• Be simple and conversational yet authoritative – think like an approachable expert.
• Provide in-depth informational content without any selling intent.
• Write educational posts to help Google better understand and rank your site for semantically relevant searches.
• Highlight your authors’ credentials, experience, and other contributions to build trustworthiness.
• Use meta tags, alt tags, and meta descriptions.
• Add images and infographics in your blog (Content with images and graphics has up to 650% higher engagement).
• Keep at it. It’s not easy to rank, but continuous efforts tend to generate more and more results over time.

Remember, a little preaching goes a long way to build trust.

Improve UX Through Core Web Vitals

Did you know that bad UX can hold back your SEO success? Factors like slow load times, unoptimized images, and non-responsive designs can result in a negative page experience ranking signal, which means users aren’t having a good experience interacting with your web page. And it’s not something you can take lightly.

A good user experience can be a game-changer in SEO for financial websites because search engines look at how users engage and interact with your website to rank your web page. While relevant and value-driven content does play a role in user experience and engagement, technical SEO is also a huge part of it.

So, how can you improve user experience? Let’s start with Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals are a set of factors that Google considers when determining the user experience of your webpage. Optimizing your website for these vitals can help increase your chances of ranking high on Google. Core Web Vitals have three metrics:

• Loading
• Interactivity
• Visual stability

You can check your website’s Core Web Vitals score by generating a report on Google Search Console.

Harness Local SEO to Attract Maximum Nearby Traffic

If your finance company has local branches, Local SEO can be a golden goose for your business. And no, Local SEO does not stop at claiming your Google Business Profile. What you really need to get maximum local traffic is to create a targeted online presence for your branches in different cities or states.

Here’s a 3-step formula for boosting your connection with local communities and driving maximum nearby traffic:

• Location Pages:Create dedicated location pages for each of your services, such as “personal loans in Dallas, TX” or “Car loans in Houston, TX.” When writing a dedicated location-specific service page, add high-quality, relevant content that informs your audience about your experience and expertise, and target localized keywords. 
• Google Business Profile Optimization: Add accurate information about your branch on your Google Business Profile (GBP), including address, phone number, business hours, and website. You can also add services with keyword-rich descriptions to attract more visibility.
• Review Management: No one likes to click on a business with no reviews, but the worst thing that can happen to your business is if your GBP is filled with negative reviews. An important aspect of boosting local presence is encouraging local customers to leave reviews and responding to their reviews to keep the conversation going.

Develop a Strong Backlink Profile to Secure Your Site’s Credibility

Backlinks are links that direct readers from third-party websites to your website. That’s good for engagement and traffic, right? But more importantly, backlinks also impact your search engine rankings. How?

Backlinks act like a vote of confidence. If you get a backlink from a reputable site, Google assumes you are also reputable and favors your rank in the SERPs. So, focusing on backlinks is not the solution. The real goal should be to focus on high-quality backlinks specifically, even more so when doing SEO for financial websites. Here’s why:

• Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors in the financial industry
• It’s very hard to acquire backlinks for a financial service website

Find directories of finance businesses and websites, and get listed. You can also look for high-DR blogs in your niche using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Other link-building strategies include finding broken links, creating niche edits, and investing in digital PR assets.

Invest in Data Collection to Improve Continuously

Data is your most valuable asset. It’s one of the most important elements in financial SEO decision-making. If you don’t know where you went wrong or why a certain strategy is not working, you can always rely on data to provide answers and ignite your growth engine.

Despite this, many financial websites rely on legacy systems. Instead of relying on obsolete, dated technology to find answers for you, you should focus on extracting data from your website and/or app to find out what’s working for your customers and what can be improved.

At the very least, here are a few settings we recommend:

• Set up Google Analyticsto track conversions
• Set up Google Search Consoleto check indexing status, search queries, and crawl errors
• Conduct periodic SEO audits using Ahrefsor Screaming Frog

Remember, SEO is not a quick fix. It takes time to work, but when it does work, it tends to snowball. The efforts you put in today will generate more and more results over time and lead to exponential growth of your financial services business. The outcome? More traffic, more clients, more money.