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For businesses that operate in the financial services sector, improving and optimising their websites for search engines requires a unique approach. Regular optimisation techniques for both on-page and technical SEO won’t be effective for financial search terms both for the search engines and users themselves. Whether you’re in insurance, banking, real estate or investment services, you’ll need a more careful, detail-oriented approach to your SEO.
With over a decade of experience working alongside financial services businesses in both national and international markets, we’ve learned the nuances and technicalities required for success in financial search markets. We’ll share the knowledge we’ve gained as a financial services SEO agency, along with the challenges and strategies you should use when targeting organic search for finance.
How Can SEO Help Meet Financial Business Objectives?
Organic search remains one of the key channels for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) research. In a digital space that is increasingly plagued by ad fatigue, potential leads still have a high level of trust in organic search as a platform that “waits to be discovered” rather than taking up users’ attention and time unsolicited. Whether they are simply seeking information about a problem they have, or are willing to convert or engage services, organic search’s multifunctionality allows it to always meet user needs.
For financial services businesses, search covers all forms of your business funnel. Achieve greater awareness of your brand and educate users or leads on how your products or services can help them, while appealing directly to the people who are willing to engage financially with your offering. Investing in SEO can directly expand awareness of your product, as well as improve demand and lead generation. But achieving this requires a careful hand and attention to how financial service search markets and customers differ to regular SEO.
How is Financial Services SEO Different to Other Search Markets?
Unlike most other search markets, financial services means working with other peoples’ personal wealth or other businesses’ corporate wealth. By proxy this means working with their financial health and sensitive personal information and, with all of these protected or regulated by compliance bodies and both international and national law, operating in this space also requires a sensitivity to the regulatory compliance and legal implications of their activities. The bigger the potential fallout, the higher scrutiny you are under.
As such, users, leads, and search engines will all have a higher threshold for trusting you. Whether you want business or the top positions in the SERP, you must demonstrate that you are an experienced and trustworthy provider of the services you are offering.
Your SEO must take all of this into consideration.
Specific Challenges with Financial Services SEO
YMYL & EEAT Guidelines
YMYL is an acronym that stands for “Your Money or Your Life” and, along with EEAT (experience, expertise, authority & trust), they are Google’s guidelines for rating content. While EEAT is used to assess page and site content across all searches, YMYL is applied in search markets and businesses that deal with personal or business wealth and money (“your money”).
Your content should already follow the first set of EEAT guidelines, demonstrating your expertise and experience in your chosen topic, as well displaying your authority and that you are a trustworthy source of information. In YMYL topics such as in financial services, all of the above EEAT criteria need to be met to a higher standard – especially trust and experience. Your site content needs to be designed to incorporate this all while being expressly helpful to your users.
Dynamic & Competitive Market
More than most sectors, financial services are a constantly evolving and increasingly competitive space. The organic search markets for financial topics mirrors this. New competitors are constantly appearing, while technical capabilities and topical complexity are continuously evolving and improving. To be on top of the search rankings, you must also be on top of these facets.
Your website must offer a clean and seamless experience from a user perspective, with features that are attractive and easy to use, while providing easy-to-consume content that dissects the complex topics of your sector in digestible formats at a consistently excellent quality.
Regulatory and Legal Compliance
Everything you publish and display on your website – as well as all the data you collect from users that explore it – are all subject to legal and regulatory scrutiny. You must ensure your site collects user data correctly through the use of a cookie-management platform and handles it accordingly to relevant data privacy laws (in the UK and EU this will be GDPR). Your site content must also follow the relevant compliance laws for your sector or service.
How to Improve Your Financial Service Website’s SEO
Improving your organic visibility, as well as your ability to generate leads from organic search, requires a more intricate approach. The strategies we’ve included are all relevant and effective when optimising in finance search markets.
Making the Right First Impression with your Homepage
Trust is a vital factor for FinTech and Finance, and gaining (or losing) trust begins the moment a user enters your site. This makes your homepage, the main artery from which users will be entering the site, key for establishing trust with your users and giving them a clear idea of your services while being engaging and attractive. It is also a vital part of your site from the perspective of search engines.
To be on par with your competition in the search engines, your homepage will need to provide users with an overview of your services, key navigation links, and information around your organisation – all in a visually engaging format. Video content is a must as it is stimulating and boost engagement. Surfacing your newest news or resource content is also good practice as it provides key expertise signals and will be updated regularly, helping freshness.
In-depth EEAT Analysis
As we have already established, the presence of YMYL makes EEAT for financial services critical, and in particular you should be working to establish trust with your users through conveying your experience and authority around your services and topic area.
Building both trust and authority is best achieved through third-party accreditations, rewards, reviews, testimonials or relevant organisations or groups your business is part of. Display your finance business’ reviews or overall rating, the logos of awards you have won. Ensure all of these are linked to third-party pages that validate these accreditations. These should appear on your homepage, your “about us” page, and ideally on your core service or product pages as well with accreditations relevant to them.
Technical Mastery for Clean Experience
Technical SEO can often be overlooked in favour of on-page optimisations that are seen to have quicker effects and a disconnect between making these changes and impact on rankings. First of all, do not overlook technical improvements and prioritise those that will have an effect on user experience.
Review your page speeds first of all – slow page speeds or large, obstructive layout shifts can heavily impact page experience and leave users frustrated or dissatisfied. Look for issues with pages that can’t be found (404) or redirect issues (301) where users aren’t being redirect to relevant pages. You also need to focus on page indexability and crawlability. Your website’s sitemap needs to list your key pages, and these pages must not have ‘noindex’ tags that would prevent google from displaying them on search result pages.
Navigational experiences are also important – your site needs to be logically structured and organised to be easily navigable. A good rule of thumb is that users should be able to navigate to their destination within 3 clicks.
Focus on Content Quality & Depth
When writing content – whether that’s for your service pages, products, about us or just on your blogs – your content needs to be of the highest standard. Do not use AI or LLM tools to write it.
Make sure your content is both approachable for customers but conveys a level of expertise that reaches the depth your competitors’ pages reach – if not deeper. Striking a balance between delivering the complex information that your financial expertise holds and conveying it in an approachable manner is not easy, but it is essential for content that will rank highly. Consider using visuals such as images and infographics to help achieve this.
Eliminate Spam & Low-Value Pages
The key to successful sites in fintech and finance is that there is no bloat and no spam. Your site should not contain anything that is light in value or content – pages that would make users frustrated to read or come away with no additional insights – or content that is outright spammy and frustrating. If users are frustrated, search engines will be too, and you will see this reflected in your ability to effectively gain or climb ranks.
Get Ahead on Compliance
Regulatory compliance is essential for your business already – don’t ignore it when you build your site. Build-in compliance for financial regulations as well as data and privacy protection through the use of tailored cookie management platforms. Be aware of the difference between data privacy laws in different regions, countries and states and set up different data consent modes for each region. If you are compliant, then shout about it. Include copy, for instance in your site footer, that lets users and crawlers know that you are compliant and include the name of the regulatory body you are regulated by, for instance in the UK this will be the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority).
Powering Your SEO with an Agency Experienced with Financial Services
While this guide contains insights which can guide you to improving your financial service or fintech business’ SEO, implementing this and achieving the results you’re seeking is extremely difficult without the assistance of an experienced partner who has already done this. POLARIS is that partner.
We have over a decade of experience working with several financial services businesses from the FTSE 100, DOW 100 and other international financial markets – powering SEO for some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Whether you have a Fintech product that you need to improve visibility around, or want to improve your lead generation, working with an experienced partner gives you assurances in concrete results. Explore our specific expertise and services for finance and fintech or get in touch to discuss your project.
