Financial services can be extremely competitive. Companies seeking high organic visibility on Google and other major search engines must make every SEO campaign dollar count — and being in the finance business, you can well appreciate that.
Key Issues for Your Financial Services SEO Agency
The major challenge in financial SEO is the domination of large, nationwide organizations in areas such as banking, accounting, investing, mortgage lending and tax preparation. Whether your business is on the commercial side, personal side or both, if you are a small, midsize or even fairly large organization, you may be competing for organic rankings against organizations with six- or even seven-figure SEO budgets.
This being the case, your financial services SEO firm must devise a strategy that enables you to avoid head-on competition on keywords for which you cannot achieve worthwhile rankings, and yet drives enough traffic and inquiries to generate new client revenue — and thus justify your SEO investment.
Local, Long-Tail Strategies Work Well
The first step in avoiding a head-on confrontation with industry giants is to focus on local SEO. This is a natural course of action for firms serving a local market (or a basket of local markets), and carries big advantages in SEO by enabling you to leverage your physical presence in a market while also marketing only to people within your market area.
Local SEO is a specialized area within the SEO industry. Local SEO techniques are very specific and, in some cases, very difficult and/or time-consuming to execute. In addition, there are literally hundreds of SEO activities that can go into a local campaign, so your financial services SEO company will need to narrow the scope to the most important activities, selected and scaled to meet your budget. A few of the most important local SEO activities include:
- Implementing or improving a mobile-friendly website
- Making sure your name, physical address and phone number (NAP) appear on every page of your website
- Cultivating citations and positive reviews on relevant, high-authority websites while following SEO best practices at all times
- Developing high-quality backlinks from local, relevant websites
- Setting up and/or optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing
Of primary importance is targeting the right keywords. As mentioned earlier in this article, competition from big competitors makes it difficult to compete on high-volume keywords such as “financial services” or “mortgage loans”. A far more fruitful strategy is to target long-tail keywords — keywords that are more specific, include a local element, and have a high probability of converting. Long-tail keywords are terms such as “no interest 30 year mortgage loans in boise” or “how can I pay off my mortgage in 15 years”.
Selecting the right keywords, along with a strategy that leverages your local presence, is the best foundation for a financial services SEO campaign — but there is much more that needs to be built on that foundation to generate a dial-moving level of organic website traffic and conversions.