You have an opportunity to distinguish yourself from the competition as a financial services professional. To establish equity in your company, you must be able to stand out among the crowd, which sometimes necessitates aggressive marketing.

When it comes to money, the ability to build trust and legitimacy comes from a financial services marketing campaign with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In this post, we’ll look at the advantages of SEO for financial firms and financial advisors, as well as best practices, tried methods, and why you should never overlook this source of potential finance consumers.

Finance SEO can be really beneficial to your lead funnel, and it may make the difference between success and mediocrity in the financial industry. Let’s get started so you can start utilizing this powerful marketing tool.

What is SEO for Financial Services?

The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The goal of search engine optimization is to improve a website’s match with a user’s query and make it more appealing to search engines.

Google’s algorithm assigns more weight to relevant search queries, meaning that when relevant keywords are entered into Google, the pages optimized for those terms appear higher in the results. The more prominent your website appears in relevant search results, the more visitors it receives.

Google controls search traffic with a 86 percent market share and no meaningful competition in sight, according to Google. Each day, users explore Google an average of 5.6 billion times. That’s 63,000 Google searches per second! There are a lot of folks looking for financial assistance or guidance through Google search every month—certain financial search phrases are entered millions of times each month into the Google search bar.

However, to really profit from these millions of searches, a top ten position is necessary when you consider that 75% of searchers will not browse beyond the first page of results.

The gap in click-through rates (CTR) between the first organic search result on Google and the second is enormous. The top of the list has a 28.5% CTR, while the next one only has a 15% CTR.

This is a significant drop in traffic for the website that ranks #2 in Google search results. This information indicates that obtaining a high ranking on Google’s second page will not produce much traffic, and achieving a top ranking for relevant keywords is the goal.

This is where financial services SEO comes into play. Financial service marketing should include a thorough financial SEO analysis. It begins with keyword research, which will give you vital information about your target demographic and their search practices.

This will allow you to use tried-and-true onsite optimization strategies that will entice potential finance consumers to your website. When potential financial customers search for “mortgage refinancing,” they might be looking for anything from a quick quote, to a list of refinance companies near them.

SEO can increase website traffic by two, three, or even four times, allowing all those precious clicks to become income. That’s just the beginning of the incredible advantages of SEO for financial services. There’s so much more.

Benefits of SEO for Finance

There’s no doubt about the massive return on investment that comes from optimizing your financial services website for search engines. Let’s take a closer look at how investing in financial SEO can help you compete with your rivals.

Increased Authority and Trust

Security isn’t a marketing slogan in the financial services sector. You understand how crucial it is to your customers’ security. On the internet, fraud happens on a daily basis, and finance data breaches are common.

When money is a factor, establishing trust with your potential financial clientele is critical. The easiest method to establish authority and trust on any subject on the internet is to rank highly in Google.

Google’s strong search algorithm seeks to build confidence between the end user and the platform by ensuring that each query results in safe, relevant, and helpful information.

Users have grown to trust the top-rated websites more since Google is now known as one of the most dependable sources of information. If you own that website, you’ve already established a trusting connection with your financial customers.

Organic rankings, in contrast to sponsored or paid advertisements on Google, create trust. According to research, organic search results (unpaid) account for 94% of clicks on a search engine result page as opposed to 6 percent that goes to sponsored advertising.

If you want to harness that trust for lead generation, the ability to rank high in the search results.

Increased Traffic

It’s a simple calculation. If your target audience is looking for a finance term that receives millions of monthly searches and 94 percent of the clicks result in organic search results, you can only imagine what type of traffic volume the top result receives.

The goal of finance SEO is to draw that traffic and point visitors to sites that promote your services for lead generation and sales. You’re building a natural, consistent stream of highly targeted visitors made up of the people who most closely match your ideal finance consumer profile.

You Can Beat the Competition

The financial services market is oversaturated, making it more difficult to stand out. Financial SEO, on the other hand, can assist your finance company in standing out among the competition.

By strategically using SEO to establish your firm as a strong contender in the industry, you can get that traffic before your competitors do. Financial SEO may help you overcome your rivals and take control of the online world.

Proven SEO Strategies for Financial Services

It’s time to look at how we optimize our website for search engines now that we’ve praised the virtues of financial SEO for some time. Here are some of the most effective financial SEO techniques for finance firms.

#1: SEO Keywords for Financial Services

The lifeblood of financial SEO is keywords. Understanding what your potential clients are looking for when seeking for financial services or guidance, as well as producing pages that answer these queries or desires so that Google may include your URLs in the organic results page, are how you build an organic funnel.

Search engines will use your keywords and titles in the content they display, so placing them strategically is key. Using the correct finance term is critical, as it aids in targeting the sort of search user who may be looking for your specific financial services.

While “financial management” is a relevant search made by users that ecommerce your sector, it’s tough to compete with websites offering only knowledge on the financial topic, and narrowing down your focus onto keywords that are ready to convert (rather than simply attract more visitors) will improve your results.

A financial consultant who just serves finance clients in Los Angeles, for example, will have a higher return on investment if they specialize in “financial management Los Angeles.”

A page that ranks for this phrase will be shown to Google searchers who are looking for a financial management service in your area. You’ll also want to double-check that you’re using keywords with sufficient search traffic before spending too much time developing these sites.

Using free keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, you can find out how many searches are conducted for a certain finance term. You may also get more comprehensive information on average search volume and the ranking difficulty of keywords using a paid tool like Ahrefs.com.

#2: Content is King

In 1996, Bill Gates coined this phrase when he spoke about the future of the world wide web and how it will inevitably become a marketplace for content. He was right.

The internet is a content-driven environment, especially with regard to financial SEO. Google uses your financial information as a guide to describe what your site is about. It also adds value to the visitors of your website and may serve as an important component of finance lead generation.

The more high-quality financial information your website offers, the more helpful it is and that’s how search engines see it, too, awarding authoritative financial material with greater rankings and targeted traffic.

#3: On-Page SEO and Technical SEO

The content and code of your financial services website’s are optimized for search engine crawlers, making each page Google friendly. Googlebot is an automated program that scans the web for content and indexes it, adding or updating it in the Google search results.

The more inviting your site is to Googlebot, the more effective your SEO efforts will be. Technical expertise will help you with your on-site technique.

Here are a few On-Page SEO elements you should assess to get started:

  • Ensure relevant keywords appear in page titles.
  • Have important keywords appear in headings.
  • Make sure each page has enough content to crawl. It’s best to have more than 300 words.
  • Ensure that content is relevant and includes the SEO keywords for financial advisors in a user-friendly way.
  • If you serve a specific area, make sure that city, state or region is listed on your website.
  • Finally, make sure each of your website’s pages is readable and useful to your audience.

#4: Improve Your “EAT”

EAT is an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which are three Google criteria that determine the quality of a website. The source’s credentials are referred to as expertise.

In a search for legal matters, Google would want to feature results from educated attorneys. Websites authored by skilled chefs will have a higher ranking in the results for recipes. The more effectively you can demonstrate your expertise, the more weight it will be given in search engine results.

On your about page or bio, you may indicate your expertise, honors, and other distinctions to establish authority. Obtaining links with equity to your material might also help you increase your authoritativeness.

Links that are relevant to your topic and come from authoritative websites will have higher link equity. Higher link equity equals more links pointing to you, which means that the more links that pass on their link equity to you, the more links you have pointing back at them.

Trustworthiness can be established on your website through security measures, privacy policies, terms of service and other features that make your website feel safe.

Verify that your website is error-free, and that it contains citations where necessary. Clickbait, grammatical and spelling mistakes, as well as other blunders on your site can hurt your reputation.

The best way to improve your EAT score for your website is to produce a user-friendly website that is helpful, accurate, and informative for your target audience.

This is why Google returns these types of outcomes to its clients: it wants to make sure they are happy with the results and that they continue to use the search engine.

Best of all, a user-friendly website with expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness is a website that converts. Especially in the financial services industry, this means more business for the website owner.

#5: Optimize Your Meta Data

Tags in your website’s code that are meant to communicate with search engines are referred to as meta data. These tags provide Google with important information about your finance website.

For instance, the meta description tag tells Google what to display in the search results under the page title. The page title, along with the rest of your finance website’s metadata, is considered by search engines to be a component of your site’s ranking and traffic.

Here are some quick financial SEO tips for writing your meta description and title tags:

  • Your meta description should contain your targeted finance keyword or key phrase.
  • The description should be between 50-160 characters so that it won’t be cut off in the search results.
  • Don’t stuff your meta description with finance keywords. It should be aimed at the user, so prioritize readability and drawing the end user in.
  • Your Title tag should also contain your main finance keyword or key phrase.
  • Titles should not exceed 60 characters.
  • Readability in the Title is important, so write it with the end user in mind.

#6: Site-Speed Score

The site speed of your website refers to how quickly it loads. Google’s PageSpeed score is a number ranging from 0 to 100 that indicates how quick your site runs.

The faster your site works, the better. A high score will result in a quicker loading of your page. Page speed is one of several aspects that influence your ranking. The primary goal for Google is to provide users with a great user experience when using their search engine. As a result, it will give higher priority to websites that load quickly.

A slow site speed will also raise your bounce rate, which will harm your rankings. Slow websites are irritants that get in the way of their own usability, reducing lead generation rates. People will leave before they even realize what you have to offer.

It’s simple to understand how well your site performs in terms of speed. Simply go to Google PageSpeed Tools. You may use this tool to analyze the speed of your website, discover how to optimize the performance of each page, and locate free open source tools to improve its speed.

If you find that your website has a poor PageSpeed score, here are a few tips to improve it:

  • Optimize your images – large image sizes can slow your website down significantly.
  • Enable browser caching – when your browser caches a web site, it downloads and temporarily stores the files associated with it so that the next time you visit the site, none of those items need to be loaded again, speeding up that website’s load speed.
  • Check your hosting provider – if you’re on a shared hosting server, this can have a negative impact on your website’s overall speed. It might be worth it to look into VPS hosting or a dedicated server to increase your site’s response time.

#7: Mobile Responsiveness

A responsive website is intended to adapt to a variety of devices on which it might be seen. When someone views a responsive website on a mobile browser, for example, the site may notice this and provide a design that is optimized for the smaller screen.

It also increases the amount of time users spend on your website. This improves the usability of your site, which means that people are more likely to stay there for longer periods of time. Google takes this into consideration when assessing the quality of a website. The longer visitors spend on a site, the better it appears to be.

Mobile-friendliness is a major element in converting visitors to revenue in the financial services industry. More than half of all internet usage will be mobile by 2021, thus ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is critical.

Take the time to ensure your website is user-friendly when accessed on a mobile phone. Here are a few things to consider:

  • Is the navigation menu easily accessible in a mobile browser?
  • Is your phone number clickable so mobile users need only tap it to call you?
  • Do images fit neatly within the dimensions of a mobile browser?
  • Does the textual content wrap, so users don’t have to scroll sideways to read it?

These minimal characteristics may be the difference between turning visitors into money-making customers.

#8: Your Local SEO Optimization

When your financial company operates in a particular geographic location, local SEO is essential. Google makes use of location technologies to establish where its users are looking from. With this data, the search results may be tailored to that region.

This means that someone looking for financial management in Chicago may get different results than someone searching for the term in Sydney, Australia.

You’ll also notice that the search engine results pages display Google My Business results, which are the listings that display phone numbers, hours, maps and directions.

The first step in optimizing your website for local results is to register your company on Google My Business if you haven’t already. Make sure to complete all of the fields available, including hours, contact numbers, photos, address, and more.

The more information you provide in your Google My Business profile, the better it will perform from a financial SEO standpoint as well as a user-friendliness standpoint.

Next, you’ll want to include your physical location on your web pages, so that Google search bots know where you are in the world. This allows them to determine where and when to return your website in the search engine results. Popping your address into the footer of your website so that it appears sitewide is a great way of accomplishing this.

#9: Understand SEO KPIs

SEO KPIs are key performance indicators and they include metrics such as organic sessions, keyword ranking increases, how many pages a visitor hits while on your website and many more.

Keep an eye on these numbers with free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Keeping track of these metrics will provide you with comprehensive insights into the efficacy of your financial SEO efforts.

Make sure you look at your website’s organic sessions, which are hits to your website from the organic (unpaid) search results on a search engine like Google. Organic traffic may be monitored with Google Analytics. Tracking keyword ranking improvements with Ahrefs is a good idea.

When these figures improve, it’s a sign that your financial SEO efforts are paying off. However, if you don’t notice any changes or even decreased performance in these areas, you’ll know you’re doing something wrong.

#10: Hire an SEO Agency

Financial services SEO is a complex maze of data, technical knowledge, and content creation. It doesn’t help that it’s always changing and staying up to speed on the newest methods might be a full-time job in itself.

That is why so many financial company entrepreneurs choose to employ a financial SEO firm. Hire a competent SEO consultant and you’ll be able to reap the benefits of an informed SEO audit service, which will allow you to avoid having to figure out what your financial SEO specialists know about current procedures and the intricacies of search engines.

It takes time and resources to develop an effective search engine optimization plan for finance companies, so unless you have the time to spend on it, hiring professionals to do it for you will save you valuable time.

Final Advice Before Investing in SEO for Financial Services

It is critical for any business, especially a financial firm, to optimize its online presence. It may be critical for any company seeking to generate money on the internet.

In a saturated market such as financial services, distinguishing yourself from the competition and setting yourself apart from everyone else in finance is the path to success. Whether you pick an SEO company or do it yourself, getting a solid SEO strategy is just as essential as your phone or email.