SEO for Financial Services: What You Need to Know in 2024
If you’re doing research on SEO in the financial services industry, you may be facing the following issues:
You want to focus more on SEO as a channel, but aren’t sure where to get started.
You’re experienced with SEO and want to understand how it’s different for the financial services industry.
You’ve tried to implement SEO yourself and it hasn’t given you the results you were hoping for.
In this article, we’ll go through what’s unique about SEO in the financial services sector, as well as a step by step of how to best implement SEO and get the best results.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Looking to work with someone who’ll help you implement SEO and content? Learn more about how we can help you.
What’s unique about doing SEO in financial services?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a practice that helps you get your website on the first page of Google. If you rank for the right keywords, it’s an incredibly powerful way of attracting customers who are not aware of your brand, but are looking for a solution like yours.
For example, if you’re selling trading software for brokers and you rank on the first spot for “best selling trading software for brokers”, you’ll get a lot of clicks and will be able to generate a good number of leads and customers.
Having said that, the financial services industry is a particularly interesting sector for SEO, here are a few reasons why:
1. There’s a big opportunity to build trust and acquire customers
We aren’t taught much about taxes in school — or for that matter, anything that is money related. Which means when a large life event like buying a house or saving for retirement, people now turn to Google to get advice.
Money is still a taboo to talk about. Most people don’t know how much their closest family and friends are making, mostly because it’s taboo. So where do they go instead? Google. And that means there’s a lot of opportunity for financial services companies and financial advisors to fill that financial education gap.
This is why financial services content sites like NerdWallet and Money Saving Experts work well as businesses alone: they build customer trust by educating and informing readers, and turn that into revenue by partnering and recommending financial institutions.
Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, there’s a lot of opportunity for financial services companies to build customer trust with SEO.
2. However, there’s a lot of competition with other content sites
Since a lot of people rely on Google search to understand better their personal finances, other types of websites have filled that gap that don’t sell a product or service: their main objective is creating content and answering people’s questions. These are the NerdWallets, Credit Karma’s and Forbes of the world: publications and blogs that are dedicated to personal finance.
These content companies’ sole objective is ranking on Google for keyphrases like “best business bank account” and “mortgage refinance options”, so they usually have large financial SEO teams dedicated to that purpose.
Which means that as a financial services company with fewer SEO resources, it’ll probably be a lot harder for you to rank high for these well known, in-demand keyphrases.
That’s why as a company, it doesn’t make sense to execute the same SEO strategy as everyone else – you’ll just end up competing with large websites and not ranking as high as you’d like. In order to succeed at financial services SEO, you need to think outside the box and be a lot more strategic about the keyphrases you want to rank for.
3. Authority and trustworthiness is even more important than for other industries
Google describes finance content as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, this is because if the content is incorrect (e.g. the searcher ends up getting the wrong type of mortgage), that decision can severely impact someone’s life.
Google’s EAT (Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) guidelines were also adjusted a couple of years ago to include another E, which is “Expertise”. Although these are guidelines and not ranking factors themselves, a piece of content that is clearly not written by an expert might have a harder time ranking for a keyphrase.
For this reason, financial services content is under even more scrutiny than other types of content, and creating SEO content that isn’t expert-based can cause a lot of issues. We’ll discuss how to overcome this down below.
4. Finance topics are complex to write about, so the effort to create great content is higher
Whether you’re writing about savings accounts, payment gateways or identity fraud, financial services topics aren’t the easiest to write about. For B2C, you’re covering personal topics that can be very nuanced and where it’s hard to give advice. For B2B, you need to be able to write about technical and commercial topics at once. Financial services also tends to be quite abstract, so you want to make sure you’re including diagrams and images that support your content.
The complexity of finance topics means that creating high quality content is more of a challenge – however, that means it’s also easier to stand out since most companies don’t make the effort to create high quality content for a complex topic. This is why it’s important to work with writers who have the right background and can write advanced content.
Many financial marketers make the mistake of working with generalist writers who don’t have a background in financial services. This leads to a situation where a lot of the content itself is generalist, not to mention the hours you spend having to rewrite and re-edit the content yourself. We describe down below the approach we take to write specialist financial services content.
5. Compliance plays a key role in marketing, and your compliance team must be involved from the beginning
If you’ve been a marketer in financial services for more than a year, you’ve probably faced this challenge before: spending a lot of energy creating a piece of content or campaign, only for compliance to say you can’t publish it.
Not having a good relationship with your compliance team can drastically slow things down for your marketing efforts, making it hard to publish the content you need to succeed in your marketing efforts. You also likely have less flexibility to experiment and test your messaging, while likely having to deal with a more complex review process.
We’ve gone into more detail about how financial marketers can work with compliance teams when it comes to content creation here: How to Navigate Compliance and Content Creation as a Financial Marketer
How to implement financial services SEO that gets results
The first thing to know is that there are two types of SEO: technical and content.
Technical SEO is site speed, meta tags, XML sitemaps, Google My Business (also called local SEO) and other technical items that will ensure your website is in working order.
Content SEO is the practice of creating high quality content that helps your website and certain web pages get ranked for specific keywords.
As a financial services company, it’s unlikely you’ll ever have millions of pages and your website will probably remain small. For this reason, technical SEO won’t need to play such a large role in your SEO efforts. One audit every 6 months should be enough as there isn’t enough work to do that justifies a monthly retainer.
In order to rank for your target keyphrases, you’ll need to execute on content SEO. The key with this type of SEO is to be very clear on the objective: is it to help generate leads, increase trust or to improve brand awareness? It can be all three, of course, but it’s a lot easier to get the results you’re hoping for when one of those three is a bigger priority.
Say your company is a trading platform. If your objective is lead generation, then it’s a lot more important to rank for the search term “best trading platform” than “What is trading?”.
Why? Because someone who researches the former is just beginning their trading journey and is unlikely to be ready to use a platform. Whereas if they are researching the latter, they are “high intent” and probably very close to buying.
People who are searching these keywords have identified their problem, know what their solution is and are ready to buy — in other words, these are your best prospects. These types of keywords are your absolute priority if your focus is lead generation with SEO.
This is one of the big mistakes financial marketers make when it comes to content SEO: creating thought leadership or Top of the Funnel content, when the actual objective is lead generation.
Here’s a step by step of how to implement content SEO campaigns that’ll generate the results you’re hoping for:
1. Base your SEO content strategy on customer research
The typical SEO strategy approach is to start first with keyword research via an SEO tool like Ahrefs and SEMRush. This usually entails typing in your competitor websites, seeing what keywords they rank for and then sorting it by highest volume. Pick the ones that have lower competition and ta-da ta-da, you have a content calendar.
The issue with this approach is that this is the same strategy that every other company executes, and you’ll therefore just end up targeting the same keyphrases as everyone else.
As mentioned above, SEO is a very competitive space for financial services because you’re competing against content websites with huge SEO teams whose sole job is to rank for keyphrases. Going after the same keyphrases as everyone else will just end up with you competing with large websites and make it very hard to rank.
Instead of doing keyword research first, a better approach is to do what these content sites can’t because they are not a company selling products to customers: talk to your customers. What are their pain points? What topics are they interested in? Who are they comparing you to? We’ve written a guide on how to do this type of research here: How to Do Research for Content Marketing
If your objective is customer acquisition, then you want to start by targeting keyphrases that indicate someone is close to buying – what we call, “Bottom of the Funnel”. Even if your SEO tool says that only search volume is just 20 searches per month, if the quality of the leads coming in is high then you’ll get a lot more customers than with a keyword that none of your prospects are looking for.
A lot of content marketers will target high traffic keywords, but it could be years before these turn into customers (and you won’t be able to attribute it to content). That’s why, if your goal is lead generation, start off by targeting keyphrases that indicate someone is aware they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution.
If you’re a payment API company, that may be keyphrases like:
Split payment API
Faster payments solutions
If you’re a small business bank for rural businesses, that would be keyphrases like:
Storage financing
Solar farm financing
If you’re an investment app, that would be keyphrases like:
Top investment apps for beginners
[Competitor A] vs [You]
By basing your content strategy on customer research and starting with the Bottom of the Funnel, you can make sure you’re getting your lowest hanging fruit first and targeting keyphrases that are a lot more likely to get you the results you’re looking for. You can read more about this strategy here: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
2. Create content for the level of your reader
One of the biggest mistakes finance companies make is creating beginner content for an advanced audience. Say you’re targeting advanced investors and want to write about capital markets and private equity. Your readers won’t be impressed with a piece of content like “What are capital markets?” or “Investing in stocks 101”. They’re looking for more advanced content, such as “Understanding the SPIVA After-Tax Scorecard” or “A new way to look at risk managed index strategy performance”.
This is where the advice of “write for a 5 year old” doesn’t work. It may apply to a B2C content website like NerdWallet, but if you’re a B2B company or targeting advanced readers, you need to write for their level of understanding. If not, you end up creating content like this that few people end up reading:
The problem with creating this type of generalized content is that you then spend a lot of effort writing for people who might never buy from you and might not even be in your industry. Instead, make sure you’re writing for your best customer (who you should know what that is if you do the initial research).
3. Create content based on interviews with experts
A big issue with a lot of SEO financial services content is that it’s regurgitated from other people’s content. As mentioned above, Google prioritizes content that is clearly written from a point of authority, especially in the financial services space. That’s why it’s even more important that your content is authoritative.
To avoid creating copycat, regurgitated content that isn’t expert based, we advocate for creating content based on interviews with experts on your team. There are many benefits to this approach, including:
Your content will contain original content that only your expert employees know and makes you stand out as a Subject Matter Expert.
You can add important features of your product so that you stand out from competitors.
Your content Is advanced and can be written for a more technical audience, which will enable you to be seen as an authority to your target audience. This also helps avoid the mistake of creating beginner type content.
You can read more about how to do execute on interview based content here: Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts
4. Track the results of your content
There is a big debate in the content marketing industry as to whether it’s worth tracking the revenue generated from content. But to us, the debate is irrelevant: what matters is what your company goals are and how you report internally on metrics.
In our experience, financial services companies like to track business results like MQLs, SQLs and revenue from content marketing. This might not be the case for other companies in the tech or SaaS space, but marketing is still relatively new to financial services and therefore proving results is even more important.
We recommend using tools like Hubspot to track first and last click attribution of new contacts as well as new deals generated from content. Having the right tracking and reporting in place allows you to prove content’s contribution to the business (and never get your content efforts questioned again).
For example, with our client Zai, we were able to prove that we were bringing enough deals per month to cover the cost of our agency (and more!). Having that reporting at hand helps empower you as a financial marketer and gives you the leverage to ask for more budget, direct your digital marketing strategy towards revenue and be more confident in your content marketing.
We’ve put together a guide of the top Hubspot reports you can set up to get better visibility on the results of your content here: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 4 Hubspot Reports]
Putting it into practice: How this B2B financial services company used content SEO to bring in multiple deals per month
Let’s use a case study so you can see what this looks like in practice. Zai is a B2B payment orchestration company, and is the sister company to B2C payments company CurrencyFair.
Zai focuses on helping fintech and non fintech companies to leverage payments orchestration technology to improve operational efficiency. With their API, Zai’s customers can collect, split and make complex payments, as well as reconcile and manage custom payment workflows.
As Andrea Linehan, their CMO explains: “We decided to invest more heavily in the 5%-10% of potential customers that are ‘in-market’, those that are actively searching for a solution to a pre-defined problem. And the way to do that is with BOFU content.”
We started off our engagement with Zai by doing in-depth interviews with salespeople, their CEO and product managers. This gave us a good understanding of who their best customers, their pain points and what they would be searching for online.
We then used our Bottom of the Funnel strategy to target technology and product managers who were a lot closer to becoming a customer: in other words, people who understood their problem and were actively looking for it. The keyphrases we were targeting had low organic traffic, but that was fine because our main objective was generating new contacts, not website traffic. We cared more about the quality of who was coming through, not how many.
Examples of keywords we target include:
Split payments API
Top direct debit solutions
PayID API
Finally, we created in-depth, advanced content by basing all of our articles on interviews with internal experts on the Zai team. Since the content we were writing was targeting Heads of Product, tech leads and commercial leads – people who knew their stuff – we had to make sure the writing was at their level.
With our methodology we were able to:
Write comprehensive, in-depth payments content that couldn’t be found anywhere else online.
Write in detail about how the Zai product worked, along with diagrams and examples.
Include case studies and success stories to illustrate how a specific feature worked.
Within one year of our engagement, our content was bringing in multiple six figure deals per month, and we were bringing enough revenue to cover our costs (and more!).
By taking the time to first figure out which were the right keyphrases to target and then create in-depth content for the right audience, our SEO content strategy was able to bring many of the results we were hoping for.
You can read more about how we did this here: Case Study: How We Helped Zai Gain Multiple SQLs Per Month with Content
We’ve executed this strategy for multiple other clients as well, and you can read about those here: Results
Why work with Mint Studios to implement your SEO for financial services?
If you’re keen on SEO and content marketing to help you get your product in front of the right people, one of your best options is to work with a specialist content marketing agency like Mint Studios. Here are a few reasons why:
1. You won’t have to edit, and re-edit content – we know financial services inside out
We specialize in the financial services industry, which means we know the industry inside out. We’ve written on many different financial topics including:
Payment processing
Invoice financing
Identity fraud
Banking
Capital markets
Open banking
And a lot more!
We understand the nuances of financial services: such as avoiding absolutes, or adding the right disclaimers.
Thanks to our background, we can also gain a better understanding of certain more complex topics, whether it may be trading options, Open Banking or how payment processing works. We also have a lot of experience working with compliance teams, navigating those relationships and ensuring that content that gets published is compliant.
As a company, this means you can hit the ground running with content while also creating content that is high quality and for an advanced audience.
2. You’ll get customers and revenue, not just blog posts and SEO audits
If your key objective with content is to acquire customers, then we’ll take you on in a strategic capacity and focus on the real objective: revenue.
Whereas a lot of SEO agencies will focus on rankings, traffic and number of blogs, we’ll help you with customers, MQLs and SQLs. Again, why rank higher for “top savings tips” if your target market isn’t looking it up?
If you’ve read the above sections, you’ll see how our methodology works when the focus is lead generation and customer acquisition. You can learn more about it here: Our Method.
We’ll do the reporting, set-up and tracking as well as execution on a strategy that focuses on getting customers, not just traffic.
3. You’ll be able to free up time to focus on other work
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to content marketing and understanding the Google algorithm:
Strategy
Writing
Interviews with experts
Publishing
Optimising content (meta descriptions, title tags, on-page SEO etc)
Distribution
Backlinks and link building
Tracking and reporting metrics
It really takes a small team to do content marketing correctly. With a content marketing agency, you essentially have an extension of your marketing team that can take care of all the aspects of content marketing. With a freelancer or SEO company, they might only be able to do one part of it and then you’ll have to do the rest (or hire another freelancer or SEO agency).
A full service content marketing agency like Mint Studios takes care of everything from strategy, to writing, publishing, distribution and tracking the ROI. You’ll get a report every month with the results from your content, and won’t have to worry about how your content marketing is doing.
SEO for financial services: don’t copy everyone else’s strategy
We hope this article was useful and informative, and that you now have a better understanding of SEO and content marketing in financial services. Organic search is an incredibly powerful and high ROI online marketing channel, but that’s only the case when done correctly — and it’s very easy to get wrong. SEO is incredibly competitive in the financial services world, which is why copy pasting what everyone else does won’t get you the results you’re hoping for.
Make sure your strategy is based on customer research, you’re targeting key phrases that your best customers would actually be searching up and your content is based on expertise. With that in place, you’ll have the foundations to have SEO campaigns that give you the results you’re hoping for.