Get a Quote!

SEO for Financial Services: Our Top 6 Tips

Earning organic traffic through SEO can be an excellent source of lead generation for financial services, with a great ROI and long-term results. But what can you do to get your business to page 1 of Google and other search engines?

SEO can be a beast to tackle, and you might feel overwhelmed. There is a lot to cover, on-page, off-page, local SEO and technical SEO each have multiple factors and tactics to consider. To keep it practical for you and your financial service company, in this article we’ll be covering 6 tactics that are most important to implement into your marketing strategy, to move up positions and get clicks.

1. Build Relevant Backlinks

Backlinks are any links from another website to your own. They are a form of endorsement, and help search engines view you more favorably (trustworthy and reputable). It’s worth mentioning that links from social media do not build a strong trust signal, so we aren’t talking about those. Some of the best strategies for link building in financial industries are:

  • Guest Posting: write an article for a well-known financial publication/blog, and ask for a link back to your website.
  • Press Releases: Have an exciting update or news about your business? Having an online press release that links to your site can be an easy but fruitful backlink to build.
  • Partnerships: working with other financial institutions (e.g. real estate agents), with guest posts or special promotions can be a way to earn a quality backlink.

2. Build and Optimize your Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is essential for local SEO. It’s the tool that allows your business to appear on Google Maps, and can put you at the very top of search engine result pages. It’s also free to sign up! When people search for ‘CPA near me’, having a physical address listed gives you the opportunity to pop up in the ‘local pack’. To optimize your profile, there’s a few things you can do.

A Google Business Profile can allow you to appear on the ‘local pack’ which often appears at the top of Google

Encourage your clients to leave reviews, as this is a local SEO ranking factor. You might include a polite request at the bottom of your emails, or add it to letters to your long-term clients.

Ensure your Business name, address and phone number are consistent on your profile and website (as well as any other websites). This helps in building your legitimacy and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines. 

Include your phone number, address, a link to your website and your services in your Google Business Profile

List every single service you provide, as these can be keywords that Google uses to recommend your website.

Post regular updates to your profile. This signals that its active, and encourage Google to recrawl your profile, potentially updating and improving your rankings.

3. Understand YMYL (Your Money Your Life) & E-E-A-T

“Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) is relevant to topics that can significantly affect a person’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. This includes medical advice, financial planning, legal guidance, and news about major events. Because these topics can impact people’s lives, Google holds them to a higher standard for experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness (‘E-E-A-T’). Information provided on YMYL websites and pages should be from reliable sources to protect users from harm caused by bad advice or false information.

So what can financial service companies do to satisfy E-E-A-T standards? You should aim to build quality backlinks (e.g., industry-relevant websites). When writing an article or using a statistic, cite credible sources. Create detailed author profiles that reflect your expertise and experience in finance, link to these in your articles. Gathering reviews from clients will also help build your trustworthiness. Make sure you have plenty of contact details available and accurate information about your business, including any certifications.

4. Audit & Optimize Your Content

Create a page for each of your services, as they will each target a separate keyword.

Start a blog, with articles that are interesting or useful to your target audience. You might write about general advice ‘Understanding the Basics of Mortgage Rates’, or topics related to your services ‘the difference between X and Y credit card’. It’s also a great idea to write about trending financial news/topics, which can land you on Google News or Google Discover.

If you have existing content, review it with both SEO and User Intent in mind. Have you included your keywords enough (without being spammy), have you used internal linking to direct traffic to other pages on your site? Is there proper use of headings, title, description?

Creating FAQ sections can be an excellent way to not only enhance user experience, but also target broader keywords.

Create ‘content pillars’, essentially, topics and subtopics for your financial services blog. This will help in establishing your expertise, provide opportunities for rich internal linking, and allow you to target subtopics in an organized, user-friendly way.

A chart displaying a sample of a content pillars and clusters for financial services
Content pillars and clusters are an excellent way to organize and categorize the content on your website

5. Review Your Mobile Site

Did you know Google crawls and indexes websites based upon their mobile site? While many of us browse the internet on our phones, it’s surprisingly common to have issues on the mobile version of a website. Make sure your mobile website is fast, everything ‘looks right’, and that its easy for your existing and potential clients to navigate (i.e. find what they’re looking for quickly). Test your site yourself, and look for any broken links, badly cropped images, or poor design (such as a font that looks too large or small).

If you notice your site does not work well on mobile and you think you need to edit or rebuild, Digiscaping provides responsive website design services.

6. Perform a Competitive Analysis

Look at your competitor’s websites that are ranking in the top 3 spots for the keywords you want to rank for. How often are they using a keyword (CTRL+F can be helpful here!), and where do they place them? How long is the written content, what are they writing about exactly? Are they using graphics or photos? What details about their business are visible? There’s a lot to check, but spending the time to learn from your competitors’ success is one of the best ways to inform your own SEO strategy.

Conclusion

Incorporating these six strategies can significantly boost SEO for financial services. While SEO might seem overwhelming, focusing on key areas like building relevant backlinks, optimizing your Google Business Profile, understanding YMYL and E-E-A-T, auditing your content, reviewing your mobile site, and performing competitive analysis will help you climb the search engine rankings and earn organic traffic. 

Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, but by implementing these tips, you can position your business as a trusted and authoritative source in the financial industry.

Need help with your SEO strategy for your financial service? Get in touch.