SEO for financial services is your fuel for growth. Learn how to use search engine optimization (SEO) for your firm with this definitive guide to financial services SEO!
What is SEO for financial services?
SEO for financial services is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on improving a finance company’s website in the search results of a search engine like Google or Bing. It involves techniques like keyword research and targeting, creating custom content, improving page load speed, and more to help the site appear at the top of the results.
Why is SEO for financial services important?
Financial services SEO is important because people look to search engines to research, troubleshoot, and solve problems, whether that’s finding a bank, getting a mortgage, or opening a CD.
With search engine optimization for financial services providers (whether small businesses or franchise locations), you can meet consumers and businesses where they’re at — online. Otherwise, you leave valuable search real estate (and potential clients) to your competitors.
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What are some challenges in SEO for financial services?
Compared to other industries, finance SEO has some unique challenges, including:
- Regulations: Regulated markets, like finance, insurance, or healthcare, will need to ensure their SEO efforts — like content — adhere to these standards. This is where an industry-specific SEO specialist is invaluable.
- YMYL: Google developed Your Money, Your Life (YMYL), which emphasizes the need for websites to have an authoritative reputation to speak on these sensitive topics, like making financial decisions.
- Strong competition: If you’re a local financial advisor, you likely face stiff competition in the search results from large, national corporations. Many national banks and insurance providers have a strong local SEO presence.
Because of the above considerations, it’s critical for businesses investing in professional SEO services to partner with an agency that has experience in the financial industry. (If you’re wondering, yes, we do have that experience).
How to do SEO for financial services
Learn how to get started with SEO for financial services with these best practices:
- Use HTTPS
- Build content around your specific services
- Earn authoritative backlinks
- Optimize your page load times
- Make your site mobile-friendly
- Claim your Google Business Profile
1. Use HTTPS
The very first change you should make for your SEO program is to use HTTPS on your website. HTTPS is a version of the standard HTTP website protocol that adds an extra layer of security to your site to guard against malware and hackers.
It’s always good to have a secure site, but it’s especially important for finance companies. Depending on your services, you may store many people’s financial information on your site. If a hacker got into your site and obtained that info, the results would be disastrous.
Of course, you should take more steps than HTTPS to secure your site.
But HTTPS is a starting point. And it’s not just good for financial services SEO because it helps people trust your site more, though that is true. On top of that, Google favors sites that use HTTPS, so you’ll rank higher.
2. Build content around your specific services
While it’s true that you work in the finance industry, you don’t want all your website to be about broad financial topics. You also want some of that content to focus on the specific niche you occupy within that industry, and the services that you offer.
Are you a lender? Answer common questions about lending. Are you a credit union? Write a page about how credit unions work. Do you offer financial consultation services? Build out some content about what your consulting process looks like.
That will help you attract more relevant traffic to your website as a part of your financial services SEO program, giving you a better chance of converting that website traffic into customers or clients.
3. Earn authoritative backlinks
Another surefire way to improve finance SEO is to earn backlinks. Backlinks are links that lead from a third-party website to your own. One reason backlinks are beneficial is that they help drive traffic to your site from elsewhere online.
But even more importantly, backlinks can improve your Google rankings. How?
Because if you earn a backlink from a reputable site, Google will assume that you’re reputable, too. And since Google favors reputable sites in rankings, it will then rank you higher in search results.
For that reason, you shouldn’t aim to get backlinks from just anywhere — you should try to earn them from reputable websites in the finance industry. To do that, you can search for broken or missing links on those sites. When you find some, alert the site owners and recommend that they replace them with fresh links to your content.
4. Optimize your page load times
Your page load speed is a make-or-break element of your website.
If your pages load too slowly, they could drive users to hit the “back” button because they get tired of waiting. But on the other hand, if your pages load quickly, you’ll retain more traffic and rank higher in Google.
That’s because page speed is a major ranking factor in Google.
By optimizing your pages to load in a shorter time — ideally, three seconds or less — you’ll significantly boost your rankings and drive more traffic overall. You can improve your page speeds with the following steps:
When it comes to SEO marketing for financial services, page speed is important, but often challenging since it requires help from other internal teams, like web development. That’s where a full-service SEO agency can help.
5. Make your site mobile-friendly
When Google ranks websites, it doesn’t rank the desktop versions of those sites, even in searches performed on desktop computers. Instead, it uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it ranks sites based on their mobile versions. That means that any website without a mobile-friendly version won’t rank very well.
For that reason, it’s imperative that you optimize your website to be more mobile-friendly. The best way to do that is to use responsive design, which is a type of web design that rearranges the elements on each page to fit the shape of the screen they appear on.
That means the desktop and mobile versions of your site will look slightly different:
Optimizing your site for mobile will not only help you rank higher in Google, but it will also help you retain more traffic. After all, it’s not unlikely that many of your site visitors use mobile, so optimizing your site for those users helps you keep them around.
6. Claim your Google Business Profile
Finally, you can elevate the quality of your finance company SEO by claiming your Google Business Profile. That’s a profile containing a variety of information about your business, including your location, contact info, hours, and more.
Why set up your Google Business Profile? Because when people in your area search for finance companies in Google, Google will usually display a local 3-pack, which is a collection of three relevant Google Business Profiles in their area:
If you claim and optimize your profile, it could be one of those three. That means you’ll have a shot at appearing right at the top of relevant local search results, earning you much more visibility and traffic as a part of your financial services SEO program.
Grow your firm with SEO for financial services
Whether you’re a bank, accountant, wealth management firm, or another financial organization, WebFX (the team behind SEO.com) brings millions of hours of experience to SEO for financial services.
Discover how our award-winning team can help by contacting us today!
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