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In the highly competitive and saturated financial industry, banking and financial service providers face numerous challenges in attracting and retaining clients. Google values websites that provide helpful, unique, and relevant content to users, and for providing fantastic content to users, you need to focus on your SEO content strategy.
With the evolution of digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) has emerged as a crucial strategy for improving online visibility and increasing organic traffic to your website.
With a detailed content strategy, your financial services website will be able to rank higher on Google.
But apart from quality content, what should be a part of your SEO campaign? This article provides you guidance on SEO tips that will start ranking your website at the top!
Ready for a SEO game changer? Unleash the power of how to improve SEO for your website and watch your rankings soar!
26% of users seeking financial services find themselves on websites organically – Often as they scroll through the first few results on search engine results pages (SERPs). In order for your website to attract this sort of traffic, it’s necessary to concentrate your efforts on finance SEO and build a financial SEO strategy. If you do, your financial services or banking institution can reap many benefits, including:
This comprehensive guide walks you through each step of building a successful SEO strategy for your financial service’s website. By following these practices, your website can rank higher and reach more potential clients than ever before.
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The first step to implementing better SEO for your financial services is understanding your core business areas. By identifying the core areas, you can structure your website in a simple format before building it out. Building your website on a strong foundation increases the indexability of a website and the chances of Google indexing your site increases.
To begin, identify your main services and offerings. Simply put, what broad services do you provide? For example, your financial services company may offer services such as personal banking, business banking, and wealth management.
These services can then be broken down into more specific sub-areas. For instance, “personal banking” can be broken down into sub-areas like “checking accounts”, “saving accounts”, “credit cards”, and “loans”.
Making a table can help you organize your thoughts. Here’s an example:
| Core Service Areas | Extended List of Sub Areas |
| Personal Banking | 1. Checking Accounts 2. Savings Accounts 3. Credit Cards 4. Loans |
| Business Banking | 1. Business Checking Accounts 2. Business Savings Accounts 3. Business Loans 4. Merchant Services |
| Wealth Management | 1. Investment Management 2. Retirement Planning 3. Estate Planning 4. Trust Services |
Be specific and thorough – You don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to reach a potential market.
Keyword research can be broken down into three easy steps:
To do keyword research for your financial services or banking services website, tools like Semrush and Outranking can help you gather the data you need.
2. Exclude any irrelevant or outdated keywords.
3. Download the CSV file containing the relevant keywords for each core area and combine them into one file for easier management.
4. Repeat this process for each sub-group in each core area, such as “checking accounts” or “mortgage loans”.
Once the keywords for each sub-group in a core service area are collected, we can move to the next step of keyword analysis.
Keyword clustering is the process of grouping similar keywords together based on their semantic meaning and intent. This technique is used to streamline SEO content strategies and improve website ranking on search engines. Financial services or banking services websites can use keyword clustering to identify the most relevant and profitable keywords for their business. By doing so, they can create targeted content that resonates with their audience and drives more traffic to their website.
For instance, your financial services website can use keyword clustering to group keywords related to “personal finance”, “investment”, “retirement planning”, and “insurance”. By doing so, you can create separate content strategies for each group and optimize your website for specific keywords that are most relevant to your business.
To pick a primary keyword for each group of clusters, you should use tools like Outranking to analyze several factors, including the competitiveness of the keyword, the number of backlinks of your competitors, the knowledge gap or underserved area in the intent, and your topical authority. Outranking’s clustering tool can also simplify the process and provide accurate results as it analyzes large keyword lists and groups them by semantic terms and similar intent.
If your financial institution doesn’t have an in-house SEO or marketing team, consider hiring someone externally because keyword clustering requires expertise and experience.
Once you’ve compiled your list of primary keywords and groups, you can use Outranking’s keyword strategy topics and planner page to map out a plan and schedule for your content.
Prioritizing your keywords can set your content on the right path and help you create a content calendar that’s both effective and efficient. Outranking can make it easier with its three available priority settings: High, Medium, and Low:
| Priority | Keywords Containing | Why |
| High | Alternatives, Comparison | Can place your product or service among many competitors in the finance industry |
| Medium | Best, Top | Can define you as a thought leader and support your important financial services web pages for flow of information, but has less of an impact than “High” priority keywords |
| Low | How-to and Educational Guides | Can define you as a thought leader and support your important financial services web pages for the flow of information, but has less of an impact than “High” priority keywords |
By prioritizing your keywords, you can create a content calendar that’s focused on your target audience and their needs, while also ensuring that your content is optimized for search engines. With a complete list of keywords and a prioritization plan in place, planning a year’s worth of content for your financial services or banking services website should be a walk in the park.
For your financial institution, implementing SEO can be a daunting task. However, having a well-defined process in place can make all the difference in the success of your strategy. These two tips can help take the guesswork out of optimizing your process:
Before creating any content, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your target audience and their needs. By creating a solid SEO content brief, you can ensure that your content is relevant, informative, and engaging. Your content brief should include the target audience, the purpose of the content, the main message, and any relevant keywords.
To ensure that your content is being produced efficiently and effectively, it’s important to have a clear workflow in place. By setting up an optimal workflow, you can ensure that everyone involved in the content creation process knows their roles and responsibilities. Your workflow should include the steps involved in creating and optimizing content, such as research, writing, editing, and publishing.
Using Outranking’s content planner can also be a great way to ensure the success of your plan. Outranking offers predefined workflow status that you can customize to fit your needs. You can keep track of every document with a customized workflow and see what stage your documents are in at a glance. Outranking also offers a Kanban view, which allows you to create content and have a complete content plan for the next six months. Additionally, Outranking’s integrated tool can help you build content briefs or create content directly in your SEO content strategy.
Creating SEO-optimized content for service pages and finance blogs is crucial for financial and banking services to ensure that they’re spending money on content that will yield results. By optimizing content for search engines, you can increase your visibility and attract more organic traffic, leading to more leads and conversions, and ultimately resulting in increased revenue.
Outranking’s SEO content optimization and writing platform can help financial professionals write and optimize their pages to ensure the highest possible organic exposure. With features such as real-time optimization benchmarks, Outranking can serve as an effective SEO content checker, helping busy financial professionals save time and effort in optimizing their content for search engines. This can help them achieve predictable content success and improve their search engine rankings, ultimately resulting in more SEO presence, organic traffic, and revenue.
Optimizing existing pages with better internal linking can help improve the overall traffic of a website by borrowing the authority of pages that already rank and transferring it to the page that needs to rank for more keywords. This can be achieved by clicking on the internal linking icon next to URLs with a lot of light and dark green, which indicates that they’re ranking between 1 and 10. Financial services or banking services websites should look to optimize pages that have keywords in the top 4-14 positions, as these pages have some authority and can benefit from internal linking.
Outranking can connect to Google Search Console and identify pages that have keywords in the top 4-14 positions. It can then show internal linking opportunities by suggesting URLs that have light and dark green and displaying suggestions for internal linking. This can help you to improve your website’s performance by getting more internal links from pages that are already ranking and have some authority.
Acquiring local citations and backlinks is crucial for local SEO of financial services or banking services websites as the algorithm favors websites with citations and inbound links. Local citations are mentions of your business’s name, email address, address, and phone number (NAP) on other websites, while backlinks are links from other websites to yours or users coming to a website without searching for its domain.
According to a survey by Moz, citations are the fifth most important ranking signal for local queries. Similarly, “bank near me” searches rose to 60% in 2020.
There are two types of citations: structured and unstructured. Structured citations list the NAP of your business and are found on directory listings and social media profiles. Unstructured citations are contextual mentions of a business and usually show up in blog posts, forum posts, or as a result of press mentions. Your website needs both types of citations to establish your institution as reputable and trustworthy.
To build these citations:
Here’s a table with a list of data aggregators and websites you should get citations from:
| Data Aggregator | Websites to Get Citations From |
| Acxiom | Yelp, Yellow Pages, CitySearch |
| Data Axel | Bing, Yahoo, MapQuest |
| Localeze | Foursquare, SuperPages, DexKnows |
It’s important to optimize page speed and website experience for financial services websites for better rankings in 2024 as it directly impacts user experience, engagement, and conversion rates. A faster website also improves search engine rankings and helps in reducing bounce rates.
To quickly optimize page speed and website experience, financial services websites can use better and lighter themes from Codecanyon, and Nitropack-like WordPress plugins, and optimize various elements of your website. Additionally, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly as it’s beneficial for site SEO.
As a financial advisor, it’s important to connect to Google Search Console and track your website’s ranking data to increase organic traffic and improve your SEO content strategy. By using data to find pages that have SEO issues such as the need for better internal linking structure, uncovering new areas to create fresh content, and exposing underperforming pages, you can optimize your website’s content and attract more potential clients.
You should also use analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track and record your website’s and mobile app’s traffic. This analytics data provides personalization-based insights based on your website.
Use this table as a guide to know how to interpret the website ranking data and take appropriate action:
| Goal | Ranking Data | Action |
| Optimize Internal Linking | Financial services web Pages with keywords in the top 4-14 positions | Improve internal linking structure to improve Pagerank |
| Build Topical Authority | Pages with no ranking keywords in the top 20 positions that don’t align with the user’s search intent | Create fresh content that aligns with user’s search intent |
| Improve Underperforming Pages | Create fresh content that aligns with the user’s search intent | Improve or redirect underperforming financial services web pages |
By following these steps, you can effectively track your financial website’s ranking and take action to improve your SEO content strategy. This will ultimately lead to increased organic traffic and more potential clients for your financial services or banking services provider.
Google My Business account is a free service that allows you to provide more information about your financial services when it appears in search results, including photos, videos, business hours, and links to reservation services.
Take charge of your Google My Business account with these practical steps:
3. Include high-quality photos and videos of your office and team to humanize your brand and build trust with potential clients.
4. Respond promptly to customer reviews to demonstrate excellent customer service and improve your online reputation.
5. Use Google Posts to share updates, promotions, and events to engage with potential clients and improve your visibility in search results.
Most websites focus on organic traffic because it’s a cost-effective way to attract potential clients to their websites. However, focusing solely on traffic without considering leads and conversions can be counterproductive. For example, a short-tail keyword like “financial services” may bring in a lot of unrelated traffic, but a more specific keyword like “retirement planning for small business owners” may bring in a smaller audience, but it will be more targeted and likely to convert into leads and clients.
Ensure that your content contains long-term keywords so that the users close to the middle of the sales funnel can be attracted. It’s important to focus on leads and conversions because ultimately, the goal of a website is to generate business and revenue, not just to attract traffic.
When evaluating an agency to help with SEO for your financial or banking services website, it’s important to consider their expertise, reviews, and results. Here are some tips to help you make the right choice:
A good agency should be able to provide you with examples of their past successes and the results they’ve achieved for other financial services or banking clients. Look for agencies that can demonstrate a track record of improving search rankings, driving traffic, and increasing conversions.
Check their reviews and testimonials from previous clients. Look for an agency that has a track record of success in improving SEO rankings and increasing website traffic. For instance, ask for case studies of how the agency has helped other financial or banking services websites.
Evaluate their results. A good agency should be able to provide you with metrics that demonstrate their success. For example, they should be able to show you how they’ve improved keyword rankings, increased organic traffic, and boosted conversions for other financial or banking services websites.
Overall, when selecting an SEO agency for your financial or banking services website, it’s important to choose one that has a proven process and customized approach, is creative and innovative, and has real-world SEO experience in your niche. By doing so, you can ensure that you’re working with an agency that can deliver the results you need to succeed in the competitive world of finance and banking.
When evaluating an agency to help with SEO for your financial services or banking services website, consider the following:
A good SEO agency will adhere to a proven process and principles that can be applied universally when performing website audits and search engine optimization. However, they will also apply a customized approach to analysis and strategy design tailored to the unique competitive position of your financial or banking services website.
The best SEO agencies are highly creative and innovative. Ask prospective SEO firms what creative strategies they’ve implemented to help their clients stand out from the pack.
When evaluating an agency to help with SEO for your financial services or banking services website, it’s important to consider their contract durations and flexibility. Look for those SEO service companies that are willing to adjust their services to meet your changing needs.
By following these tips, you can find an agency that will help you improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your financial services or banking services website. Remember to prioritize flexibility, experience, and results when evaluating potential agencies.
With so many people turning to search engines to find financial services, having a strong online presence is necessary for your success. However, navigating the world of SEO can be overwhelming, especially if you’re not familiar with the latest best SEO practices and strategies.
If you’re serious about improving your financial institution’s online presence and attracting more clients, it’s essential to have a solid SEO plan in place. By working with Outranking’s SEO consultant and strategist, you can rest assured that you’re getting expert guidance and support every step of the way. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals.
