10 Fintech SEO Strategies That Drive Leads
We all know using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can effectively grow your fintech business online. Driving organic traffic to your business’s website is invaluable.
You want your fintech business to be able to drive traffic without paying for increasingly expensive ads. To do that, you must implement SEO techniques to boost your site’s ranking on Google and other search engines.
For that reason, we’re going to dive deep into each fintech SEO strategy that’ll have a direct impact on any fintech company’s growth.
A Quick Overview of Fintech & SEO
Before we get into any of the fintech SEO strategies that you leverage for your inbound marketing efforts, we should first walk through what fintech is and what SEO is. Understanding both independently will give us a solid foundation for when we combine them.
Fintech is the coming together of the financial services industry and the technology industry. While most traditional financial services companies offer many products and services, fintech companies often offer a slice of that and make it easy to use and affordable by leveraging technology.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method of improving the discoverability of a web page on particular search engines for a particular keyword. For example, you might have found this blog post on Google search, which would make sense because I used some SEO techniques to help you find it on Google. That’s the power of organic traffic, which accounts for over 50% of total website traffic.
Combining fintech and SEO is natural because fintech companies are inherently internet-based businesses, and effective fintech SEO tactics can help market these businesses better. Unlike financial services companies, they were born online and provide their services to customers using websites, apps, dashboards, and all types of different online interfaces.
Using even one SEO strategy can make the difference for an online business, so why wouldn’t a fintech companies use it? Well, not everyone knows about SEO, let alone how to implement effective strategies. So let’s take a look at ten of the most effective SEO techniques any fintech company can take advantage of.
10 Fintech SEO Strategies To Grow Awareness, Leads, & Sales
We’re going to look at one fintech SEO strategy after another in a way that’s easy to digest. By understanding the most important strategies, from keyword research all the way to content marketing, you’ll be able to start growing your website’s organic traffic in no time.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Implementing quality research for specific keywords is the first step in executing an effective SEO strategy. In a nutshell, keyword research is discovering what your target audience is searching for in search engines. This is called search intent. Knowing this allows you to tailor your content strategy around those specific keywords so Google, Bing, etc., can start ranking your website.
The easiest way to go about keyword research is to know your target audience. If you know your audience and the pain points they’re trying to solve, you can find good-quality keywords. Sometimes these keywords will be low competition long tail keywords, like “SEO for fintech lending companies in the US,” and sometimes these keywords will be highly competitive short tail keywords, like “fintech SEO”.
The best paid SEO tools to help you get started in your keyword journey are SEMrush and Ahrefs. I’ve used both of these tools extensively and still use them today to help me find keywords that I know my audience is searching for and that I can hopefully rank for.
There are also free research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, AnswerThePublic, Google Search Console, and others. You can even use Google by typing in possible keywords and see what it suggests. In this case, Google shows you search intent using their keyword suggestion algorithm, so it’s quite powerful.
2. On-Page SEO Is Key
Strangely one of the most commonly overlooked strategies is using on-page SEO. It’s one thing to discover a great set of keywords, but it’s entirely another thing to use those keywords on a page effectively and ensure other SEO tactics are implemented on the page. Basically, on-page SEO is a set of optimizations you can perform literally on the page that’ll improve that page’s search rank.
Even simple strategies can boost search traffic to your fintech brand. Whether it’s a blog post, service page, or even the homepage, using on-page techniques is critical. Here are some easy on-page wins:
- Place the target keyword in the first 100 words
- Place the target keywords in your H2 headings
- Make sure your page loads fast
- Title and headings have to be descriptive
- Link to other pages on your website
- Have a valid schema markup
- Your content should be informative and readable
These are essential to a solid SEO strategy. Some involve technical SEO and some involve content marketing, which is an important point to make because a successful SEO strategy requires a holistic approach. Taking your SEO efforts seriously will be a major boon to your overall fintech content marketing strategy, and that includes a well-rounded technical SEO approach.
3. Get Your Technical SEO Dialed In
Improving the technical aspects of your site’s SEO strategy is crucial to a successful fintech SEO strategy. To actually increase your website traffic by ranking on Google, you need to address core web vitals like website speed, crawlability, and other aspects that help search engines find and categorize your site properly. This is how Google and other search engines find the best content to present to their customers.
The best methods to address technical SEO issues on your site start with the low-hanging fruit. But before you fix these issues, you’ve got to find them first. And the way you do that is with an SEO site audit.
Here’s what you’ll most likely see in your SEO site audit:
- Site speed
- Improperly formatted robots.txt file
- Duplicate meta tags
- Duplicate content
- Broken links
- Missing XML sitemap
- Missing header tags
- Not enough content
Without actually seeing your SEO site audit, I can tell you if you’ve never had one that close to half of these are relevant to your site. The reason is they’re extremely common mistakes, but thankfully they can be fixed. Once fixed, you’ll have a better foundation for your fintech business to grow.
4. Don’t Skip on EAT
E-A-T has nothing to do with food and everything to do with Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Of all the fintech SEO techniques to implement, this one has an outsized impact on your SEO performance. The reason is that the financial services industry is primarily based on trust, and Google and other digital marketing channels using search use it as a basis for evaluating companies in the fintech industry just the same.
The Google EAT score is incredibly important for websites, especially those that are dealing in the financial services field. To improve your site’s relationship with search engine algorithms and improve search results, displaying your expertise and authority builds trust.
How you can do that as a fintech is straightforward. First, ensure all of your site’s content is consistent in terms of topics you write about and target keywords. You’ll also want to make a killer About Us page which puts your company’s team and credentials on full display. Another great EAT tactic is showing everyone who visits your site who your partners are and what customers say about you through testimonials.
In the end, having a good EAT score is all about your content, so having a dialed-in content strategy is so important. EAT is less technical than other SEO metrics, so there’s no quantitative measure used to evaluate it. Because of this, it’s wise to max out the credibility and transparency of your fintech business as much as possible on your site and invest in high-quality, relevant content marketing.
5. Create Awesome Content
No one wants to read over technical, boring content, and in the fintech space, that’s quite common. The issue is that when you combine finance and technology, creating content from complex, technical topics that are easily digestible to the average person is a challenge. Especially when that person doesn’t have a ton of time to spend trying to understand what they’re reading in the first place.
Search engines also want to read good content because their algorithms are trained to find the best. The reason is they want to present the best content to the people searching. If you create entertaining and informative content, you’ll keep more people on your site, a larger percentage of them will convert, and your site will have more activity on it. All of that makes Google and other search engine algorithms happy.
A simple way to go about this is to publish good blog posts every week on your website of a decent length (in my opinion, no less than 1000 words). It helps to have a content strategy in place before kicking this process off, but starting right away and getting good content published is more important. You can always plan and optimize your content later using various SEO tools.
6. Link Building & More Link Building
An effective SEO strategy has embedded an SEO campaign focusing on link building. Often referred to as backlinks, a major part of optimizing your fintech company’s SEO campaign is to have as many high-quality links pointing to your site as possible. The more of these links you have pointing to your site, the more credible your business is in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Gaining backlinks shouldn’t be overlooked. While you can build links organically by simply creating good fintech content with good SEO in place, a focused effort on building links manually is always a high ROI activity in improving your organic search.
There are a few simple ways to go about this. The first is to respond to inquiries from news reporters who need quotes for a piece of content they’re writing in your fintech company’s space. If you give them a quote, they’ll point a link to your site. Another way is to find websites that want free content to publish on their blog in the form of a guest post, write the guest post, and include a link to your site.
An important note to building out backlinks: make sure the relationship attribute (“rel”) used in the link is NOT set to “nofollow”. If it’s set to “nofollow”, your site won’t get any additional boost to its SEO performance.
7. Optimize for Click Through Rate
When someone sees two blog posts on a search engine, one yours and the other your competitor’s, and that person clicks your competitor’s blog post, what do you think that tells Google? It’s obviously not the end all be all of Google’s decision to rank your competitor over you, but it’s no doubt a ranking factor.
Similar to other SEO ranking factors, click through rate (CTR) is not technical and is a rather opaque ranking factor. Still, understanding how you can improve your CTR will positively affect the search traffic to your fintech’s web pages.
The best way to increase your CTR is to ensure whatever you want to rank has a good title. You definitely want to avoid click bait titles since search engines are also monitoring bounce rate (i.e., people leaving your site almost instantly). A good title will be fully readable and entice the reader to learn more. That means telling what the reader will learn using no more than 60 characters.
You can easily check your CTR using your Google Search Console. In the Performance tab, you’ll be able to see your total impressions, total clicks, average search result position, and average CTR.
8. Optimize Your Site for Mobile
One of the most important fintech SEO methods you could implement is making your website mobile-friendly. With over 60% of global website traffic coming from mobile phones, any business ignoring this aspect is incredibly short-sighted. It most definitely adds developmental overhead to implement a mobile-friendly website, but thankfully it’s getting easier to accomplish by the day.
There are several ways to improve the core web vitals of your mobile site. One is using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open-source framework, which helps you create simple mobile websites quickly that load almost instantly. Another is ensuring your fintech website is built using a responsive web framework, which allows your site to work optimally on a desktop browser and a mobile browser with very small changes in the site’s code.
Ensuring your site is responsive in a mobile environment is critical to improving your site’s organic search, domain authority (DA), and other search engine optimization metrics. With over 60% of users browsing the web with their phones, ensuring your new and existing content gets in front of them in a clean and efficient manner removes a potential pain point in their user experience.
9. Offer a Great User Experience (UX)
User experience (UX) is incredibly important to any fintech SEO strategy. The way your customers interact with your product or services in any possible way is how you define UX. Understanding your customer is vitally important to making your UX 100% dialed in, so learning how to optimize for ease of use, utility, and efficiency are great starting points.
As we’ve learned, implementing SEO the right way requires a holistic approach. It’s a mix of quantitative and qualitative. When it comes to UX, it’s mostly qualitative but can directly affect your quantitative results.
For example, if your fintech website’s design is something that came out of the 90s or is using outdated user interface (UI) designs, your visitors might not stick around too long. This would have a negative effect on your SEO because visitors would spend less time on your site.
How you ensure your UX/UI are tip top is by knowing your customer very well and being able to give them what they want. That requires a continuous conversation with them so you can get actionable insights that’ll keep your UX up-to-date and your customers happy. A great way to do that is to have awesome Product and Design teams.
10. Create Distinct Content Silos
Effective content strategies require you not just to write good content but that’s well organized. By offering your potential customers a clean, organized structure of your written content, you’re not only able to improve their experience when exploring your content. You’re also helping search engine algorithms cluster your marketing content into the correct categories.
How you do this is simple: create categories on your blog and create non-generic content that fits into each of those categories. Siloing your content this way gives your readers easy access to specific topics, and it can also help your content marketing team strategize more effectively on what topics need more content.
Another important aspect of properly categorizing your content is interlinking. Whenever you write a blog post, you want to add links to other posts or pages that are related. With content silos, you can more easily manage this and also ensure that your “SEO juice” or “link juice” is circulating between relevant content, which will help boost your organic search results.
Some Challenges You Might Face in SEO for Fintech
Similar to financial services in the non-digital world, fintech companies have to adhere to up-to-date legal and government regulations. The strict guidelines Google imposes on websites when it comes to SEO is one thing, but it’s entirely another thing when legal and regulatory concerns are at play.
Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory compliance regarding SEO for fintech companies is really the same for any company, which is to follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While this mostly pertains to European countries, not having a GDPR cookie consent form or not including it in your privacy policy page could negatively affect your SEO.
Security Concerns
Hackers are known for exploiting websites with poor security. A study showed that over 73% of hacked websites are hacked for SEO purposes. The most common tactic is called “SEO spam”, which overruns your website with SEO violations in an attempt to lower your search engine ranking or, worse, get your site blacklisted. Long story short, have good security in place.
Final Thoughts
All types of companies can take advantage of SEO, most especially those in fintech. SEO for fintech doesn’t have to be complicated and can be highly effective if done correctly. The great part is there are some simple, straightforward steps anyone can take to truly boost their business’s organic growth.
The highest ROI activities in SEO include performing keyword research, dialing in your technical and on-page SEO, backlink building, making your fintech website fast and user-friendly, and, ultimately, creating amazing content. That’s how you’ll be able to generate highly qualified traffic resulting in high-quality leads.
While investing in SEO can take some time to see returns. However, once the flywheel is spinning, search engines will recognize your inbound marketing efforts and reward you by ranking your site for the search queries that matter the most.
Author
Grant's a fintech content marketer and SEO strategist who works 100% remotely. With years of professional experience working alongside the largest fintech brands and marketing agencies, he's well-equipped to help grow his clients' businesses with effective content and SEO strategies.