From industry compliance to high levels of competition, increasing visibility in the organic search results for finance companies certainly presents unique challenges that come with the territory.
Not only do finance companies face challenges posed by their own industry, but they also fall under the YMYL category (where web content can impact ‘Your Money’ or ‘Your Life’), which poses additional barriers when trying to climb the ranks in the search results.
So, with that in mind, how do you approach SEO for finance companies successfully?
Do All Finance Companies Need SEO?
As with all things SEO – it depends! But if you’re looking to widen your reach to those searching for the services you provide (and not just through your brand), then the answer is yes. Enhancing your organic visibility through the search results enables you to tap into a wide breadth of users searching for your services who might not otherwise have reached you. And by enhancing your visibility, you increase clicks and ultimately, conversions!
But before you go ahead, there are certain challenges to keep in mind when it comes to search engine optimisation for finance companies…
Fierce Competition Levels
Due to significant players in the field dominating the search results for both finance and its peripherals such as insurance and accounting, authority will pose a significant challenge in enhancing your organic visibility in the search results when it comes to SEO for finance companies.
Intense Compliance Scrutiny
Regulations and governing bodies such as the FCA, while essential and ultimately beneficial, can present additional barriers for finance companies. Whether this is through limiting the type of sales copy that can be used on page or simply extending timeframes of approval, strict compliance levels in the finance industry can be a challenge. Therefore, you want to make sure you have experts behind your content creation.
Your Money, Your Life
An SEO-specific consideration for finance companies is ‘Your Money, Your Life’. YMYL is a concept derived from Google’s Search Rater Guidelines which defines content that could have an impact on someone’s money or life. Naturally, financial topics fall right under this umbrella.
With YMYL content – Google’s main concern is the author and publisher behind it – namely their expertise and authority on a subject matter. To measure this, Google looks at E-E-A-T, otherwise known as Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness – this is something finance companies must be aware of.
“Our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society. We call these “Your Money or Your Life” topics, or YMYL for short.”
Best-Practice SEO Considerations for Finance Companies
1. Consider how viable your keyword strategy is
As with any good search engine optimisation strategy, a keyword strategy must be carefully considered to identify viable opportunities for your site, and that’s never truer than for finance companies. Keywords are the basis of any SEO strategy, helping you identify which search terms you wish for your site to appear for in the search results. Outside of relevancy and volume of search per keyword, there are two core factors to consider when approaching a keyword strategy: competition and intent.
Competition
As the finance industry is hugely competitive – considering how competition plays a part in your SEO strategy is a must. When identifying potential keywords to target, you should consider whether it’s realistic for your company to rank for them.
For example, searching the term “what is PAYE” shows numerous government bodies and legacy brands such as Hiscox and Which?. These websites hold authority in the search results, so if you’re a smaller brand that hasn’t built up a large web presence, you may struggle to rank.
However, you can also use SEO tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to determine how competitive a keyword will be through monthly average search volumes and understanding how authoritative your competitors are.
One way to determine authority is by leveraging DA/DR metrics. DA stands for Domain Authority® and DR stands for Domain Rating. These are metrics used by SEO tools MozPro and Ahrefs to provide guidance to SEOs about the quality of their backlink profile.
Most SEO tools have metrics that work similarly to these – and whilst they aren’t something that Google looks at, they are great indicators for how you stack up against the competition. So, if you’re a DR10 website and the page one search results of your keyword is full of DR50s and above, you’ll probably struggle to rank.
Once you have this clear picture, you can refine your keyword choices in line with this. If you are looking at your keywords and panicking, a) don’t and b) consider longer tail keywords. These are more specific keywords that are often less competitive, but people still search for them! If you’re struggling with identifying the right keywords, an SEO agency like MRS can help you to identify keywords you have the potential to rank for.
Search Intent
Easily overlooked for higher volume and lower volume keywords alike, understanding search intent is crucial to any successful SEO strategy. For example, a user searching for “life insurance quote” is looking for a ‘product’ here, however, a user searching for “how does life insurance work” is looking for information or an answer to their query, therefore is considered an information-led query. Understanding the difference is crucial to ensure you’re targeting the right users and ultimately giving them (and Google!) what they’re looking for.
If in doubt – search your keyword! From our experience, intent isn’t always what you’d expect it to be. What results is Google showing you? Is it all review blogs? Is it all guides? Google will show you what it is expecting to see, so if you find the results to your desired keyword match your target page – then this matches your intent.
2. Don’t be afraid to sprinkle ToFU into your content strategy
Satisfying top-of-funnel (ToFU) information-led content, as well as service-led content, is a vital part of SEO to capture wider search on your speciality, whether you’re an insurance broker, financial advisor or mortgage provider.
We know that hesitancy can come about from content that isn’t there solely to sell, or perhaps content that is more top-level than you’re used to, but building up that bank of topically relevant content will broaden the reach of your brand.
Let’s say you’re a mortgage advisor. Does your competitor have a resource hub about all things mortgages? Make sure you’re the go-to for users and Google on info-led content, and a content hub is the perfect way to do so.
3. Build link magnet content
An important part of enhancing Google’s trust of your site, and essentially helping it rank better, is building up a network of backlinks pointing to your site. Having a profile of both reputable and relevant site links to your content helps build Google’s endorsement of your site.
Link magnet content is content that is so useful/informative/original that it gets links without you needing to outreach it. Are you sitting on valuable insight from industry data? Do you have the ability to create and manage a tool others would find beneficial? With the rise of AI and low-code platforms, it’s become easier to make platforms that provide information in a beneficial manner. If you have a unique and trustworthy story to share on your industry, then producing content to share your data research or unique viewpoint is a great way to attract links and send those all-important signals to Google.
4. Enhance your E-E-A-T as much as possible
As referenced earlier – enhancing E-E-A-T is a crucial consideration when optimising your site as a finance company. As part of Google’s push to create ‘helpful, reliable and people-first content’, E-E-A-T, or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust is the way to do it.
There are multiple ways you can enhance this, including but certainly not limited to:
- Enhancing online reputation – whether through reviews or social media profiles, ensuring Google understands you as a brand across multiple sources (not just your site) is essential to send those trust signals.
- Introduce authorship – Google wants to see people behind the content as part of this push to people-first. Are you a mortgage expert? Authoring content by an expert with a bio to demonstrate this is a must to enhance your authority on a subject. Are your experts also contributing to external publications?
- Incorporate real-life personal experience – demonstrating experience through real-life experience is required and one easy way to do this is through your on-site content, such as case studies.
- Utilise expert data, statistics and quotes – it might seem obvious, but this is so important for a YMYL site to demonstrate E-E-A-T to both Google and users alike.
5. SEO is more than just keywords
As important as an effective keyword strategy is to building your organic visibility, SEO is more than just keywords these days. Entity SEO should be considered in every SEO strategy – but it can be a complex subject at first.
Put simply, entity SEO is where search engines attempt to connect intent, context, and the relationship between words. It’s all about relatedness. Think of it as a topic – Google will build a web of interconnected entities for one singular topic.
The key difference between keyword optimisation and entity optimisation is how we treat language. Keyword optimisation focuses on the prevalence of a keyword (NOT keyword stuffing!) in SEO elements such as the H1 or title tag, whereas entity SEO focuses on the relationship between words and context, and specific entities’ salience in the copy. Salience is not based purely on the number of times an entity is mentioned, but rather on its importance and weighting in the entire content.
For example, as a mortgage provider, you might be missing a salient entity such as ‘provider’ or ‘home’ for example, which might be a very salient entity across the top 3 results for your target keyword. So, consider enhancing your entity SEO to stay ahead of your competition – it can be a powerful tool when trying to rank amongst authoritative competitors.
6. Consider an integrated approach
Whether it’s saving time and resources or creating better ROI, you should consider an integrated search approach to enhance your SEO efforts for your finance company.
Let’s face it, SEO takes time. While it has greater longevity than PPC in many respects, it’s not an overnight solution to improving your visibility online. That’s where PPC can come in and support SEO efforts, by running alongside it to increase traffic and valuable leads.
Not only that, but by running both SEO and PPC together for your finance company, you’re able to leverage visibility for keywords that you might struggle to naturally compete for in your industry (highly competitive keywords for example).
Ready to Improve Your Finance Company’s SEO?
Look no further. MRS Digital’s award-winning SEO services will help take your finance company’s organic visibility to the next level. Discover how we can help today – get in touch.
