What does a successful SEO strategy for financial services look like?

As a financial services business, you’re already well aware of the challenges you face in terms of industry regulations, specific guidelines and conduct standards. SEO is no exception to this rule. As with every other aspect of your business, the path to great SEO is a little more complicated for a finance company – but if you get it right, you can reap all the rewards.

We take a look at what a successful SEO strategy for financial services looks like, from the standard SEO principles to the industry-specific strategies that enable you to climb the rankings with ease.

Why does SEO for finance companies matter?

SEO matters for finance in the same way it does for any other business. In an increasingly digital world, it’s more important than ever that your company is seen by your customers via search engines on their laptops, phones and tablets. Compound this with the growth of AI search, and a significant percentage of brand discovery is accomplished through platforms like Google, including Gemini.

Achieving better visibility for your business is even more key in an industry like finance, where potential leads will use search engines to directly compare competitors. If your business isn’t even featured on the front page, you’re likely out of the competition entirely.

SEO is also important for zero-click searches. Up to 60% of Google searches end in no click at all, where all the information the potential customer needs is listed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). For example, your customer may search ‘finance company for loans in Birmingham’ and find your phone number on the SERP, with no need to visit your website.

SEO enables you to have that all-important touchpoint with your lead, whether it’s a snippet with your phone number and email or a direct click-through to your website and contact form.

The key principles of SEO for the financial industry

The finance industry has two key principles that are essential considerations if you want to create great SEO. These are:

YMYL

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a key principle you will need to take into consideration when working on SEO for your finance business. YMYL is a concept introduced by Google in 2013 and expanded over time to be more stringent, requiring a higher degree of quality and accuracy from relevant webpages in the financial and healthcare sectors.

In essence, it’s a set of guidelines that applies specifically to websites where misinformation could be harmful – as Google describes it, ‘low-quality pages could potentially negatively impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.’ Effectively, as a financial service, you are held to a higher standard for page quality.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is an abbreviation of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, four of the elements that Google holds in high regard to define the quality of your website. This framework is vitally important for finance businesses, as achieving a high PQ (page quality) for YMYL relies on the effective implementation of E-E-A-T.

Let’s break down what each part of E-E-A-T stands for:

• Experience: The writers’ first-hand experience with the subject matter they are talking about
• Expertise: The extent of knowledge shown within the page on the specific subject matter
• Authoritativeness: The reputation of the website, including links to other high-authority sites
• Trustworthiness: The safety, accuracy and trustworthy source citation within the subject matter

What is included in a successful SEO strategy for finance?

So, what do you need to help your finance business stand out? A successful SEO strategy is made up of individual building blocks that work together to improve your visibility in a highly competitive sector. Here’s what we’d include to craft a successful finance SEO strategy:

1. Auditing

A thorough SEO audit is the best foundation for creating a great SEO strategy. An audit gives you the chance to take a look at the bigger picture and see what’s working and what isn’t on your current website. From there, you can identify key areas for improvement. For example, an SEO audit from Sherbet Donkey includes, at minimum, a full inspection of organic positions, keywords, technical issues and competitor analysis.

2. Keyword and content strategy

Once you know where you stand, the next step is deciding where you want your SEO to go. For example, looking at competitors and the specific services you’d like to focus on can help you conduct effective and targeted keyword research. Using these keywords, you can then plan your content strategy, including page updates, new pages and blogs to help you climb up those rankings.

3. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is all the optimisation carried out on your webpages to help them rank higher. This could be creating high-quality, optimised content that aligns with E-E-A-T and YMYL, improving title tags to be more relevant and appealing, updating your meta titles and descriptions or using header tags properly to make your content more readable. High-quality on-page SEO has the benefit of improving your rankings while also boosting your chances of being seen in SERPs and AI snippets.

4. Local SEO

If you’re looking to target customers local to you, whether it’s a specific town, a county or even a country, local SEO should form a part of your strategy. This is particularly important if you are qualified or licensed to offer financial services in one location but not others, streamlining your enquiries and allowing you to focus more on relevant audiences.

Optimising your Google Business Profile can also be beneficial as part of your local strategy, getting you seen by people close by and allowing you to show off your positive reviews. Local SEO won’t be applicable in every case, but it’s important to not leave it out if it may be relevant.

5. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is everything ‘under the hood’ on your website – while you may not be able to see it, it’s making a big difference in the background if implemented properly. A well-organised site map, optimised web page speed and a seamless mobile-friendly design are all elements of technical SEO that are vital for getting your business seen. As an added bonus, they also make your website more enjoyable to use.

5 Ways to build a successful SEO strategy for your finance business

Now that we’ve covered the technical side of an SEO strategy and the key elements you need to consider, let’s turn our attention to how you can upgrade your SEO from just average to exceptional. Here’s the key information you’ll need to build a successful finance SEO strategy:

1. Understand your audience

If you don’t know what your audience wants, it’s not going to be easy to create an SEO strategy that targets them effectively. Personas are an ideal way to get an in-depth idea of what your customers are thinking and what’s most important to them. In the financial sector, that’s typically trustworthiness, authority and credibility.

2. Explore new opportunities

When it comes to your SEO, there’s nothing wrong with a little experimentation. Thinking outside the box can give you opportunities to connect with your audience in ways your competitors aren’t. For example, targeting younger demographics with tailored, query-driven language. This is even more important in the age of AI, as the way people search is changing week by week, with up to 58% of 25-34-year-old consumers using voice search daily.

3. Look at your competitors

Examining what your competitors are doing can accomplish two things. Firstly, you can identify areas where you can directly compete on high-value keywords with a solid SEO strategy. Secondly, you can look for areas of SEO they haven’t focused on, whether that’s upgrading the user experience of their website or implementing blog posts, which enable you to raise your profile and improve your visibility.

4. Optimise your Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals, or CWV, are a set of three metrics that Google uses to determine how interactive, visually stable and fast your website is. The better your score in these metrics, the higher the chance your website will be more visible in search rankings. The three metrics are the following:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long your website takes to load the largest element of a webpage (under 2.5 seconds is ideal)
• Interaction To Next Paint (INP): how responsive your website is to clicks and other interactions (less than 200 milliseconds is ideal)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much your page layout moves around when loading (less than 0.1 score is ideal)

Effectively, if your website responds quickly to your customers using the site, has a speedy loading time and doesn’t shift around when opening, then you’re golden.

5. Work with an experienced SEO agency

If you want to build a successful SEO strategy, there’s no better solution than putting your SEO in the hands of the experts. An experienced specialist SEO agency can do all the work for you, handling every abbreviation from E-E-A-T to CWV to design a tailored, effective SEO strategy that helps you achieve your goals.

Our team at Sherbet Donkey is well-equipped to handle your SEO as a finance company, leaving you to focus on other aspects of your business while we put in the effort to deliver customers to your virtual doorstep. Contact us today to book your SEO audit in with our team.

How does SEO for financial companies differ?

There are a few key differences between SEO for finance companies and SEO for your average business. These include:

YMYL standards for content

As we mentioned above, YMYL specifically applies to pages where medical or financial information is covered. As a financial services business, this puts you firmly in the YMYL-relevant camp, which means all of your content will be held to a significantly higher standard.

Following E-E-A-T is integral to avoid drops in organic traffic – or, in rare cases, a poor SEO strategy could even lead to de-indexing, which means you won’t show up in searches at all.

Compliance requirements

As a finance business, you’re already familiar with the guidelines you need to adhere to from regulators such as the FCA. It’s important that your SEO content reflects these compliance specifications properly.

Accuracy, disclosures and alignment with specific language requirements form the backbone of finance industry SEO content, providing strong trust signals that are beneficial to search engine results and potential leads alike.

Trust and legitimacy

Offering a trustworthy and legitimate service is integral to the success of financial businesses. Overreliance on strategies that generically push sales alone can hurt your success as a financial services provider when, in reality, it’s trust and credibility that help convert searchers to customers.

Using trust-led language, leveraging your accreditations and making use of existing positive customer experiences can be a powerful tool for both AI and search engine snippets to encourage click-through, while your SEO strategy helps you to reach those top spots.

Supercharge your SEO with Sherbet Donkey!

At Sherbet Donkey, we design effective, successful SEO strategies built on a strong understanding of your business, your goals and your audience. If you’re after a team that’s straight-talking and all about achieving results over fluff, we might just be the right fit for you. Get in touch with our team today for an SEO audit to get the ball rolling.