Most online guides addressing the topic of SEO in the financial services sector start by outlining how fiercely competitive the market is.
Show me a sector that isn’t fiercely competitive.
SEO is competitive by its very nature, but the level of competition isn’t what makes it a unique challenge in the financial services sector.
This guide outlines what makes delivering a successful SEO campaign in financial services unique.
The unique SEO challenges financial brands face
Topic complexity
Where there’s financial literacy there’s financial illiteracy. In mid-2023, financial advice and investments firm, Shepherd Friendly ran a financial quiz for 2,000 people across the UK; the result was that only 27% passed the test.
Most subjects are complex when you get into them, but few are quite as panic-inducing as finance. Alongside perhaps only health, finance is a subject that contains the potent mix of being both incredibly important and potentially very complicated to the uninitiated.
Financial services are complicated. They are complicated to explain, complicated to learn about and often complicated to access.
Topic complexity is the number one challenge when it comes to running an SEO campaign in financial services.
Successful SEO means reaching your intended audience with the correct information; when your intended audience doesn’t necessarily know what it is looking for, the onus is on you to understand the ill-informed questions the audience asks and steer visitors in the right direction.
You need to do this all while walking a tightrope spanning a moral and regulatory valley below.
Content quality and expertise guidelines (EEAT and YMYL)
Financial services is a topic that is held to a higher set of standards than most other sectors.
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is the name Google gives to “topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.”
Finance lands firmly in this category.
Google is fairly opaque when it comes to how it generates its search results, but one thing that it’s very clear about is how highly it values the concept of ‘trust’.
EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness; it’s these four factors that Google’s system is designed to look for when it’s assessing content.
If an article about the latest sports news needs to achieve ‘trustworthy status’ to surface in Google’s results, imagine how much higher the bar will be set for something that could significantly impact your financial health.
One of Google’s quality control mechanisms is to employ a team of search quality raters who “are trained to understand if content has strong E-E-A-T.”
All content needs to demonstrate a strong EEAT, but because financial services fall into the YMYL category, the need is even more critical.
Regulatory compliance (the rigid box)
“We exist in financial services marketing in quite a rigid box for good reason. Laid down by various regulatory bodies, advertising standards, the law and in some cases depending on where you’re working, the brand you’re working within.”
That’s a snippet from an interview I conducted with Patrick Muir. Patrick is an experienced financial marketer who has gone from supporting the launch of the UK’s first digital bank, Egg, to overseeing marketing functions for Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.
When I asked Patrick what makes financial services marketing unique, he described what he calls the ‘rigid box’.
The rigid box means marketers operating within the finance sector have zero margin for error.
The rigid box is defined by regulators, laws and brand values. Few industries have constraints quite as tight as finance.
Serving accurate information
SEO is all about serving information to an intended audience.
In most cases, serving the incorrect information is sub-optimal; an annoyance for your brand and your audience.
In financial services, serving incorrect information can be very problematic.
Just imagine how damaging the following scenarios could be:
- Your audience mistakenly lands on your annual report from three years ago, having asked Google for this year’s
- Google sends people to a policy document on your website that has been replaced by a new version
- Your products and services are surfaced in search results in jurisdictions they do not apply within
In each of these cases, search result mistakes lead to your audience accessing information that can leave them misinformed and can lead to poor and costly decision-making.
Proper SEO process management is critical to ensure that only the correct content is served to your audience.
SEO for discovery vs SEO for navigation
SEO isn’t just for ranking top of the search results.
Certainly, when the goal is ‘discovery’, then achieving competitive rankings is the aim, however, for a lot of finance brands, competition is secondary to navigation.
Search results are also many people’s first interaction with a brand.
When your target audience is looking for a specific piece of information about your product or service, making sure Google knows exactly where to send them is as important (if not more) than how high in the search results you are.
Specific SEO solutions important to financial services
Unpacking financial complexity with keyword research
Search data is one of the most brilliantly accessible forms of high-volume audience research. There are countless tools available from search engines to third parties that consolidate information on what people enter into search engines.
For finance firms, search data provide access to all of the questions your audience asks online. There are two reasons this is useful:
- It outlines all of the valid questions your audience asks, allowing you to tailor your content to match audience requirements
- It outlines all of the potentially flawed questions your audience asks
It’s the second of these examples that is perhaps most interesting. Imagine, for example, that your customer is asking a question about their workplace pension that only applies to a state pension.
In a case such as this, you can answer an incorrect question by explaining (and answering) the correct question.
This all speaks to the initial key challenge I outlined earlier in this article; financial services are complex, and people won’t always know what they don’t know. You can support them by finding the wrong questions and answering them with a piece of educational content.
Controlling information accuracy in the search results
One of the most common problems I spot finance firms having online is that search engines index and surface out-of-date PDF documents.
A PDF document could be something as innocuous as a brand brochure or something as critical as fund performance data.
It’s incredibly common for these documents to be loaded onto a website and for search engines to find and index them. From there, Google will start to serve them in search results when users search for related information.
It’s critical that when a PDF document is out of date it is replaced in search.
There are really two ways to control this:
- Manually stay on top of removing out-of-date PDF documents from your site
- Build a version control system that encourages search engines to index an HTML landing page
Option one, outlined above isn’t workable for most scenarios. If you use PDF documents to post regular fund performance data, these must remain accessible to users of your site.
Option two, however, is very scalable. We’ve delivered systems where PDF documents are managed via a content system that provides search engines with an HTML page to index.
A PDF document is loaded in, the HTML page contains an executive summary. The PDF document contains tagging to ensure that Google indexes the HTML landing page.
This means that every time a new version of the document is created, the HTML page continues to point to the clear latest version whilst also enabling users to access a library of past documents.
Using SEO for navigation
More than most types of organisations, the audience for a financial services website needs to visit the website regularly.
Unlike an e-commerce website (for example) where the audience visits, makes a purchase and leaves, a financial services customer may need to return often.
It could be to manage a pension scheme, oversee mortgage payments, view investment returns or anything else.
As a result, using search engines as part of your website’s navigation structure is a critical concept to get your head around.
Think of it like this; your audience will often begin their journey with you on a search engine.
For example, we work with a large workplace pension provider which every day has visitors who reach them by using Google to search for “Brand Name login”.
The same is true for various other types of navigational searches:
- Telephone number
- Email address
- Customer support
- Calculator
- Address
These are all examples of searches where a user is using Google to search for a specific thing from this specific brand.
Using keyword research, we’re able to understand what the audience is trying to navigate to, assess how well Google is currently handling this journey and then optimise content to make sure the correct information is shown at all times.
Setting an SEO strategy for financial services brands
Setting an effective SEO strategy for a financial services brand is obviously going to depend on the specific brand in question. There are, however, some common elements that are likely to be important considerations for any brand operating within the sector.
Content and subject authority
It goes without saying, but an effective strategy for a finance brand values content quality. No brand, regardless of sector should proceed to publish low-quality information, but a finance firm is even more likely to be punished for such a transgression.
If you’re deciding where you need to put your budget, ensure the quality of your content team is near the front of the line (Indulge, perchance?!).
Compliance
Considering the YMYL status of financial services, making sure you tick every compliance box is important. Your search strategy should factor in the need to make your website accessible.
This means taking notice of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Governmental websites need to achieve WCAG AA-level compliance, so that’s a good ambition to share.
Financial services SEO
We’re experts in this, we’ve worked with dozens of brands operating within financial services to manage and improve their SEO strategies.
From pensions to funds, investments, mortgages, banking and fintech. We’ve faced and overcome all of the challenges you’re likely to face. Want to speak with the specialists? Get in touch with us for a chat.
Read more about our SEO service here: indulge.digital/services/seo
