A solid SEO strategy can help your financial services site gain the attention and trust of your target audience. At the same time, neglecting to stay on top of the ever-shifting SEO world can mean that your site struggles to bring in organic traffic.
What’s different about SEO for financial services sites rather than your run-of-the-mill company or blog page? What are the trends for 2023 that you should keep an eye out for?
In this article, we’ll answer these questions and more.
When you invest in SEO for your financial services site, you’re making a long-term investment. Though it can take longer to start seeing a return on your investment than it does with PPC campaigns, the overall ROI is much greater with SEO.
It’s important, though, when you’re diving into optimizing your site for organic search, that you understand how financial sites are unique compared to other niches.
One thing that requires that you pay extra attention to your SEO efforts for a financial site is the 2019 Medic Algorithm Update. Though it might sound like the focus here is largely on healthcare sites, this update specifically targeted sites and industries they deemed “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL).
At the same time, the quality raters over at Google started to hold these sites to higher standards in terms of their Page Quality (PQ) ratings.
Google says that any sites that might impact a reader’s current or future well-being (whether their health, safety, finances, etc.) need to be more carefully vetted for E-A-T. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Financial services sites can fall into the category of a YMYL site, including those that cover insurance, investing, banking, and more.
In the spring of 2019, Google also updated its Quality Evaluator Guidelines so that E-A-T was no longer a separate entity from the PQ standards but listed as a factor within the rating.
What this means in plain English is that your financial services site should be written by an expert and trustworthy in order to receive a high ranking on Google search results.
All of this means that you need to have a careful and thoughtful approach when creating a content marketing campaign for financial services sites. Otherwise, you will consistently find yourself outranked by online publishers that are prioritizing the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of their site.
Some of the more straightforward aspects of SEO are the technical aspects. You can start the process by running a complete audit of your website to identify any problems that could impact your site’s usability and crawlability.
You’ll want to particularly look at the following aspects of your site and prioritize any technical issues you find that impact them.
You’ll want to strike a careful balance when considering privacy as a part of your SEO efforts.
Of course, any financial service site will need to value and protect privacy to succeed in the long run. On the other hand, your SEO results will be severely negatively impacted if you put all of your content behind a firewall, as Google won’t be able to crawl your site.
Financial services sites need to go the extra mile when it comes to security. The typical security efforts by most SEO audits simply don’t get the job done– you need to go beyond updating your CMS software and ensuring that you’re using HTTPS.
You will also need to do a Google SERP analysis and full site crawl analysis in order to check for indexed subdomains and pages that shouldn’t be showing up in response to branded searches.
When you’ve taken extra steps to ensure the security of your site and its visitors, it can be good to advertise this in your global footer. This can help enhance trust among your audience, as they can rest a bit easier when they know you are doing what you can to make your site invulnerable to data breaches.
One of the Google SEO ranking factors is page load time. If you want to rank as high as possible in the search results, you’ll want to make sure that your page load speed isn’t holding your site back.
At the same time, you simply don’t want to make your visitors wait for your page to load. People are busy, and there are likely a number of other competitor sites where they can find similar information. They are, therefore, very likely to bounce off and head to another site rather than waiting for your pages to load.
Beyond that, user trust and usability are impacted by page speed. When you’re presenting financial information to your audience, slow loading times can indicate to them that your site and company aren’t legitimate or trustworthy. If they have been relying on your company for banking or other financial needs, slow load times can lead them to find another business that doesn’t steal so much of their precious time.
You’ll also want to look at your site’s URL structure. Are your URLs easily understandable to search engines and humans, or are they a mix of jumbled letters, numbers, and symbols?
It’s easy to forget about your URL structure when thinking about so many different SEO factors, but you’ll want to make sure it’s clear to both Google and people if you want to improve your ranking.
Beyond technical issues, there are a number of ways that you’ll want to optimize your site and content to help boost your search result rankings.
The list of tasks can be quite long when it comes to optimizing your pages, including:
Content creation needs to be something you approach methodically, not just a random collection of pages that have been created with the hopes of ranking in search results.
One of the best ways to both boost trust and convey your brand voice is to invest in high-quality content.
When people realize that they can turn to your site for information they can trust, it can tremendously impact your search rankings, traffic, and business as a whole.
There are a number of signals that your site can send in order to convey trust beyond the quality of your content. These include things like memberships, awards, and seals that show that your site is legitimate and highly regarded in your field. You can also include any mentions you’ve received in major publications using the logo of the publisher.
There are likely some trust signals that are specific to your sector when you work in financial services. For example, you can help to provide additional trust to your site visitors by adding a link to FINRA’S BrokerCheck if you have a network of financial advisors.
You can also convey trust with user-friendly web design and navigation, active social media accounts, and easy access to useful information like reviews, data, and testimonials.
Financial information can come off as dry and difficult, but you can help set your brand apart by writing in a way that your target audience can understand. No matter how data-driven your primary visitors are, all humans are more compelled to take action when the information we’re reading actually evokes an emotional response.
SEO isn’t just about metadata and URLs– it’s also about how valuable and compelling your content is. If your content is useful to the people visiting your pages, you’ll see that you start climbing in page rankings. So, it’s important not to get lost in the technical aspects of SEO and to humanize your brand in ways that appeal to your target audience.
One major challenge for any financial services site is ensuring they comply with the rules set by FINRA and other regulatory bodies. FINRA has an entire Advertising Regulation Department that exists to protect investors by ensuring that communications from broker-dealers aren’t misleading and are fair and balanced.
For this reason and many others, it makes sense to hire an experienced SEO company that is well-versed in compliance issues that are unique to the finance industry.
Of course, you don’t want to solely focus your efforts on your on-page SEO and forget about helping to boost your rankings by expanding your site’s presence elsewhere on the web.
There are a lot of opportunities to gain backlinks in the financial services niche– if you’re creating content that is helpful to people, you should be able to build up a solid number of backlinks. It’s also a good idea to think about creating content portals, interactive tools, and guides, all of which can attract backlinks from other sites.
Custom visual content is another great way to attract other sites to link to your financial services site. For example, you could create data visualizations and analyses, infographics, videos, presentations, and much more.
In order to gain backlinks, consider reaching out to influencers and publishers within the financial services and related industries. Ask them if you can write a piece for their site or point out a page where your link might help enhance their own site. Another option is to offer an interview with someone from your company on a topic that is relevant for their purposes.
Finally, look at some of the biggest financial services SEO trends you’ll want to watch out for this year. SEO is a constantly evolving world, so it’s important to never get too comfortable with old SEO practices lest you want to see your rankings start to fall.
Though this isn’t a new trend, it’s a strong enough one that it bears repeating.
Google has confirmed that every single search query is judged based upon E-A-T, so if you haven’t sat up and taken notice yet, it’s time.
The revenue of Google Ads has been increasing at a decreasing rate, which signals that budgeting for paid advertising is being reduced in many companies. This is likely because there have been many predictions about a recession in 2023, and organizations are playing it safe by pulling back on their ad spend.
At the same time, people simply prefer to click on organic results than paid promotions and ads. It’s predicted that many companies will focus more of their marketing budget on SEO than paid advertising because it is a long-game strategy to expand their organic positions.
In organic search results pages, zero-click snippets get the highest number of clicks and views.
This means that many financial services site owners (and other website owners, for that matter) are optimizing their pages to take advantage of this SERP feature.
Yes, we know. It’s hard to get away from chatter about ChatGPT and AI these days. While AI content writers seem to be getting better every day, they still can’t take the place of humans. While there might be a place for using AI to help generate outlines or produce first drafts that will need to be fact-checked and heavily edited, it’s particularly important to be skeptical of AI in the financial services sector.
After all, the recent Google Helpful Content update focuses on ensuring that content that appears in search engines is high-quality and therefore penalizes low-quality content. Beyond that, with finance being a YMYL niche, the last thing you want to do is publish lazy AI content.
Blue Pig Media is a full-service SEO and digital marketing agency that specializes in helping YMYL sites increase their online visibility. Whether you’re looking to create a content strategy, incorporate SEO, launch social media and PPC campaigns, redesign your website, or all of the above, we’re here to help.
If that sounds good to you, contact us to get started today.
