Why You Need SEO for Financial Services [Your Guide]

Every industry faces unique marketing challenges. When it comes to SEO for financial services, for instance, you have to be cautious, follow regulated practices, and use precise information to build trust. 

Not only is the financial services industry highly competitive—you have to be conscious of legal standards in addition to selecting strategic keywords.

Big Leap understands the challenges companies face. That’s why companies trust us to help them achieve success with SEO for their financial services. And so should you.

What Are the Greatest Challenges Regarding SEO for Financial Services?

Great SEO is all about steering the right traffic in your direction. You want to connect with people looking for your exact expertise, and that connection starts with great site performance. Tuning up your site will help you meet the following challenges in developing a successful SEO marketing campaign.

Get Seen

The financial sector is very competitive, which means it takes careful keyword analysis to discover the best opportunities for the best terms to improve your search engine presence. The more specialized your niche, the more critical it is to properly research and align the most effective keywords to your content.

Earn Trust

Earning trust builds authority and leads to higher search engine rankings. This is even more important when it comes to the financial sector. You must build trust with your visitors and search engine algorithms.

For instance, Google has rolled out a standard they call Your Money or Your Life (YMYL). Simply put, industries that deal with important topics like money and health are held to a high standard to provide accurate information as a credible source.

Build Authority

SEO can help you in the short term by improving your site’s indexing and loading speed and aligning content to search terms. But, rising in ranking positions happens steadily over time. Building authority doesn’t happen overnight—and that’s by design.

Google’s “E-E-A-T” standard emphasizes the engine’s preference for sites that represent Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Ensure All Content Is in Compliance

Financial services must comply with multiple regulations, from website content to what is okay to state in display ads. For instance, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) instructs organizations on the right way to apply existing consumer laws and regulations to online equivalents, including how services are defined and communicated.

Financial services have to follow Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) compliance and any rules that deal with each specialized niche.

Follow Strict Advertising Regulations

While you’re being careful with your website’s wording and all of your aligned content, you have to be just as cautious and responsible with your ads in your PPC campaigns. 

There are FTC regulations, multiple Acts you have to comply with, and Google’s layer of protections as well. Google strictly enforces their protections to make sure they don’t approve ads that fail to follow their standards.

What Does SEO for Financial Services Involve?

SEO marketing looks different for every company and every niche within the industry. The following are a few examples of how the messaging differs from one service to the next.

• SEO for banks will likely center around accounts and features, peace of mind, and opportunities to earn and save money. 
• SEO for accountants may cross over into the Software as a Service (SaaS) niche, where helping people understand how a software platform can make complicated accounting easier and faster is the central message. This can also be content for a trustworthy accounting firm.
• SEO for financial advisors is about personalization. People want to feel comforted by a familiar face and be ensured that they are instructed to make sound, long-term decisions with their savings and investments.
• SEO for cryptocurrency is an emerging niche that crosses multiple sectors. It deals with regulatory compliance around emerging technologies like blockchain but often is about new company startups that have to follow rigorous regulatory guidelines to be absolutely transparent about everything from fundraising to people’s expectations for profit.
• SEO for fintech is becoming increasingly focused on cutting-edge breakthroughs in decentralized technologies. An example is decentralized finance, called DeFi, where many standards align with banks and investment entities, but trust in institutions and people is being traded for trusting technology platforms.

Local SEO for Financial Services

Organizations with a physical location and aren’t only online can use search engine local listings. Every individual physical location needs unique listings, including current details about the address, phone, and operating hours.

Link Building

SEO involves building authority through familiarity. That starts with highly-targeted keywords matched with excellent content. But, much of how search engines define a site’s authority is based on how much others find your content valuable. Sharing on social media, positive reviews, local listings, and mentions on relevant websites all help give search engines context to how widely accepted and appreciated your content has become.

In addition to the organic shares you receive, SEO for financial services involves actively seeking opportunities to receive backlinks from other credible websites. Guest blogs, reaching out to other professionals, and maintaining a social media presence all help to boost your visibility and authority.

Reputation Management

Money can be a sensitive subject. Even though there are numerous specialties in finance, they all come with the potential that someone will leave a negative review. Additionally, with highly competitive fields, there is always the potential that competitors don’t play fair. In any case, SEO includes playing offense and defense to protect your brand and your services. Managing online reviews means professionally responding to negative reviews and seeking a path to turn them into positive ones.

PPC

SEO isn’t just about organic traffic any more. Pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns are a vital element of your SEO strategy, helping you target your audience, test out different messaging, and learn what demographics yield the best results.

PPC perfectly complements organic SEO traffic and allows you to personalize your messaging to unique landing pages and to try a different course of action for unique customer groups.

What Results Can You Expect When SEO for Financial Services Is Done Right?

SEO marketing is a careful orchestration with many important elements operating in unison. From research and analysis to formulating a strategy and carrying it out, when SEO for financial services is expertly crafted, you can expect the following benefits:

Increased Website Traffic

Choosing the right keywords and using them with precision throughout your website’s content helps your target audience find you when they enter those keywords in a search prompt. In direct correlation to better search results, you will see an increase in traffic to your site.

Better Search Engine Rankings

SEO is about consistency and quality. The most successful SEO strategies are long-term strategies. As we help you build authority and presence online, you’ll see your site rise in its search engine result rankings, but we’ll also continue to broaden the range of words you can rank for.

Increased Lead Generation

An essential element of SEO is being intentional about where you send your traffic. For instance, you can develop a landing page targeted for specific keywords that is the entry point for a sales funnel, helping your audience learn about your brand and services. From there, you can develop leads to convert into sales.

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Building trust goes hand in hand with familiarity. SEO helps you target unique keywords, while backlinks, social engagement, and PPC campaigns can further reinforce your brand’s trust, authority, and credibility.

Improved Conversion Rates

Multiple elements of SEO help improve your conversions. Properly matching your keywords to your audience’s intent helps ensure you are connecting with visitors interested in your services. 

Developing landing pages optimized for unique words can help you qualify leads and send them forward through a sales funnel, where you focus on visitors taking a single course of action.

Case Studies

When it comes to SEO for financial services, we believe in letting our clients’ successes do the talking. The following are some of our marketing campaigns we’re proud to share.

CORE

CORE is a payments and engagement software company. When they came to us, they needed advice for a path forward. They had an outdated website and little digital marketing experience. We launched a new site built for success from the bottom up.

Big Leap then developed a content marketing strategy that involved 26 original pieces of content, including landing pages and blog posts targeted at government, healthcare, and higher education target audiences. We optimized content from 30 existing pages to match our SEO strategy.

We aligned PPC with branded terms, remarketing, and funnel prospecting, resulting in better leads, lower CPA, and better clickthrough rates.

The Results

Round Sky

Round Sky offers personal and installment loans. They have a complex business structure that targets two separate audiences: publishers using their site and blog to drive affiliate sales, and lenders that purchase personal and payday loan leads.

We started by launching an in-depth competitive and search intent analysis. We developed an SEO campaign based on keywords, technical SEO, and content to increase their SERP results.

We resolved duplicate content, improved their Google indexing, shortened their site loading time, resolved internal links, and added proper metadata.

The Results

Power Finance Texas

Power Finance Texas specializes in personal finance loans. We partnered with them to help them establish a far-reaching digital presence. They especially struggled with Google’s “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL), which required sites in financial services to prove their authority and authenticity.

We helped develop a new keyword profile based on their specialty in fast, online approval of small loans. 

The Results

Canopy

Canopy provides accounting Software as a Service (SaaS) to businesses. We partnered with them through what they knew would be a challenging rebranding process for their website.

This was a combined effort as we ran our detailed keyword analysis, developed our messaging, and mapped out customer interaction. We worked to optimize their old content and created article outlines for their internal team to write.

We made technical updates to their site to optimize its loading speed, insert metadata, and link content throughout their site.

The Results

Tax Help MD

Tax Help MD needed help to attract the right visitors to their site. Big Leap started by providing technical SEO. We spent approximately eight hours implementing our 16-point technical site audit. This improved indexing, and we optimized their site to load faster. 

The Results

Instant Tax Solutions

Instant Tax Solutions is a tax relief business that came to us seeking help to grow their online traffic and social media presence. Big Leap partnered with them to boost their visibility and engagement on Facebook with a continuous publishing calendar.

Testing multiple successful approaches to content, we found that employee spotlights and sharing client reviews were instrumental in supporting ads focused on government debt, tax advisors, and the IRS.

The Results

 Let’s Talk about Your Financial Services Brand Today

Big Leap loves to take on challenging projects and deliver incredible results. We won’t shy away from the high expectations placed upon the financial services industry, and we’d love to hear from you about your challenges, needs, and goals.

Talk to one of our SEO experts today!