1. Gain insights and identify issues holding your website back in the organic search results

Improving your website's search engine optimization (SEO) can significantly benefit organic search results. It is a cost-effective strategy for marketers. To start, you can conduct a free SEO audit with an agency. This will help identify the issues holding your website back in the organic search results. Based on the audit findings, you can develop an actionable and measurable plan to address these issues and improve your organic search performance. By improving your SEO, you can expect increased traffic, better conversions, and improved branding for your website.

2. What are the challenges for your financial services SEO campaign?

As a marketer, you'll already be aware of the increasingly competitive landscape in which we operate. An increased focus on SEO for lead generation, topic complexity, and strict content quality requirements means that not just any agency is geared to help you on your SEO journey. SEO can be a very complex and time-consuming process, and choosing an agency with the experience and resources to help you achieve your goals is important. Continue reading for valuable tips on developing your SEO strategies.

3. How to optimise your website for efficient crawling and indexing to maximise your reach in organic search?

To help search engines crawl and index your website and to improve organic search engine rankings, your website and servers must be optimised for performance. A Technical Audit is so important that you should do it regularly, actioning critical tasks will remove technical issues that prevent your website from being ranked by search engines.

Benefit from improved user experience, higher conversion rates, and increased revenue.

Companies that design and implement performance websites benefit from improved user experience, higher conversion rates, and increased revenue. However, performance is often neglected until a crisis arises, such as a competitor's website gaining ground and impacting business.

A marketer's job is to persuade stakeholders that having a fast site is about making money. They can do this by explaining how speed impacts the business and framing performance optimisation in financial and core business terms.

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4. How to create a content strategy specifically for Financial Services?

A targeted finance content strategy can help drive relevant inbound traffic to your financial services website. The key is to ensure that your content is of high quality, provides value, and addresses your Google users' questions.

One way to achieve this is by understanding your search engine rankings on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs. For instance, what queries and content are you already ranking for?

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5. Understand why a Performance Content Strategy is important.

5.1 Search query

A search engine aims to return relevant results by establishing the user intent behind the query. Search engine language models will match the most useful content to your keyword or phrase.

If you search for trending keywords, the engine will show the latest results rather than older pages and recognise local intent for nearby results.

5.2 Relevance

A basic signal of relevance is when your content contains the searched keywords. If those keywords are contained in the headings, the returned search result may be more relevant.

Interaction use data gets aggregated and anonymised to assess a page for other relevant content beyond the keyword, such as pictures (correctly labeled), videos, or lists.

5.3 Quality

Your content will be prioritised if it is helpful. Search engines identify signals to determine the content that demonstrates expertise, authority, and trust. This is achieved if high Domain Authority (DA) websites link or refer to the content.

5.4 Usability

Search engines will also consider content usability by assessing the page experience. Therefore, high-performance websites can outrank competitor websites if all other things are equal.

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6. Follow our 10-step Performance Content Strategy for the best SEO results

  1. Check the search queries for your website using the Google Search Console
  2. Use these queries as a stepping stone for comprehensive keyword research (positive and negative keywords)
  3. Create keyword and synonym clusters to improve your finance SEO strategy
  4. Audit the search volume for each keyword and subsequent cluster
  5. Review competitor listings for each search term to better understand user intent
  6. Review your competitor's organic traffic, metadata, including title tags and related keywords, and content
  7. Create your content plan based on all of the above
  8. Consider your linking strategy
  9. Write SEO content
  10. Regularly request indexing on the Google Search Console for each page you change or publish

7. Why is link-building hard for financial services companies?

Link building is hard, but your website needs to rank high on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). By ranking high for a specific piece of content you can attract users that are likely to convert into Marketing Qualified Leads, which in most cases is the most important metric to consider.

Consider your financial services company’s expertise and the topics that your competitors are not covering in sufficient detail.

To develop an effective strategy, consider your financial services company’s expertise and the topics your competitors are not covering in sufficient detail. Creating the primary source of high-quality content for specific topics is a strategy that will drive engagement and encourage organic backlinks.

Finding legitimate opportunities is why link-building is hard, although you may try to

  • Be a trusted source of relevant information for natural link-building
  • Create authoritative content that answers the questions that users are asking
  • Find and approach relevant websites and offer reciprocal link-building opportunities
  • Develop relationships through your PR agency or team to create effective, high-value backlinks
  • Join relevant trade bodies and guest post for backlinks
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8. Setting SEO KPIs that matter: what to measure for SEO success

When 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. (BrightEdge), and only 0.78% of Google searchers click on results from the 2nd page (Backlinko), it has never been clearer that SEO for Financial Services Companies is essential for growth.

SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media (BrightEdge)

Setting KPIs is industry-specific and very targeted toward your business. The value of metrics is that they provide a high-level view of where you are winning and where you can make improvements, and identify new SEO opportunities. Here are our top 5.

  1. Goal conversion: Is your organic search strategy performing well over time?
  2. Content efficiency: How many content items do you publish vs content that meets your goals and target ROI?
  3. Average engagement time: How long does your website visitor spend engaging with a specific content item? Use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as it collects both event-based data instead of session-based.
  4. New and Returning users: How many users convert at what percentage rate? at a far higher rate than new users, even though new users tend to heavily outweigh returning users.
  5. Brand visibility in SERPs: How much of the SERP is dominated by your brand assets, including content, such as social media posts, profiles, images, videos, and everything else that drives sales and awareness?

9. Trust and accuracy are increasingly important for SEO

Writing content for digital financial promotions and adverts is often the most contact a consumer will have with your financial products or services. Therefore, staying on the right side of the FCA for financial promotions and adverts is essential. This will include your website and any social or paid media channels you use for advertising. Stay on the right side of the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) by checking the FCA regulatory requirements and looking at this social media and customer communications guidance.

10. Our digital experience in financial services markets

GrowCreate is a technical SEO Agency for financial services companies, working with clients with over £200 billion in key accounts combined with AUM. GrowCreate Group delivers services, including GrowCreate strategic consulting, UX design and development, Invessed wealth platforms and client portals, lead generation, paid media, PPC, and digital marketing. We help financial marketers develop an SEO strategy that converts.

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About Adam Weston

Adam is a founder of the GrowCreate Group of companies. Schedule your free strategy call and ask for an SEO proposal.

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Client portals and websites for Asset and Wealth Management

Next generation digital

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