SEO for Financial Services: The Complete Guide

What is SEO for financial services?

SEO in the financial services sector is subtly different to most other industries. Where most SEO campaigns are focused on visibility alone, SEO in the financial services sector is as much about the accuracy of information as it is about rankings.

Why SEO for financial services is different from any other sector

The financial services sector is comparable only to the health industry in terms of search marketing. It is a heavily regulated sector where the accuracy and efficacy of information are closely monitored and tightly controlled.

“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.

SEO in the majority of other sectors is about growing visibility. That means chasing the number-one position in search results and driving traffic. This remains a part of SEO in financial services, but there is an equal weighting given to the accuracy of search results.

If a consumer is searching for a savings rate relating to your brand’s product, it is a matter of importance that the search result that a search surfaces provides them with a route to accurate and up-to-date information.

SEO in financial services is of as much importance to your compliance team as it is to your marketing and communications teams.

The financial services industry operates within a rigid set of rules; SEO within the sector must operate accordingly.

YMYL and E-E-A-T: Google's higher bar for "Your Money or Your Life" content

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a name given to information that covers topics that can impact upon a person’s financial wellbeing or health. The concept is simple; poor advice delivered within these areas can lead to negative outcomes for those accessing it.

If your content and/or information falls within the scope of YMYL, search engines are designed to hold you to higher standards.

This triggers the application of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). These are the four pillars a financial services brand and its information will be measured against.

Experience - Does the brand and/or author have a well-documented track record in the area they are addressing?

Expertise - Does the brand and/or author have the relevant level of expertise to address the topic in question? For example, is the information coming from an as-yet unknown blogger, or is it from a writer with a CV to back up their position of expertise?

Authoritativeness - Is the brand and/or author well referenced online? Do other publications cite their expertise?

Trustworthiness - Do the claims made within the content bear scrutiny? Are they verified, and is evidence provided?

In short, in SEO, financial services brands and professionals are held to higher standards than other non-protected industries.

Regulatory compliance shapes what you can publish, and how fast

SEO campaigns in financial services can, and often do, cost more and take longer than in other sectors. There are, generally, two key reasons for this:

1. The stakes are higher, so getting it wrong can cost more

2. There are usually more people and departments involved

Taking point one, when inaccurate information finds its way into the search results, a financial services brand or the professional behind the inaccuracy is put at genuine regulatory risk. For good reason: where inaccurate information remains in place, consumers can be put at risk.

As for point two, in simple terms, an SEO project within any other sector is most often the sole domain of the marketing team. In financial services, the compliance and/or legal team has an equal seat at the table.

For every meaningful recommendation that requires implementation, be that a technical SEO update, a content change, or a supporting promotional endeavour, both marketing and compliance teams need to scrutinise the plan.

This means that SEO in the sector need to clear a higher bar, so the thinking behind every element needs to be evidenced and tested with care.

Topic complexity and the financial literacy gap

In mid-2023, financial advice and investment firm Shepherd Friendly ran a financial quiz for 2,000 people across the UK; the result was that only 27% passed the test.

Financial services is a complex topic. It covers a huge scope: from everyday consumer banking to insurance and investments. It is fraught with complex language and covers concepts that can take years to master.

‘Advice’ in financial services is strictly protected. Only those qualified to deliver advice in the sector are permitted to do so. By extension, brands and professionals who are not qualified financial advisers must never deliver what can be misinterpreted as advice.

The average consumer lacks financial literacy and, as such, brands operating online must address the topics with care. SEO teams operating within the space must understand these challenges, must respect the complexity of the topic, and never take shortcuts in delivering a strategy that impacts how information lands.

Trust signals matter more here than almost anywhere else

The accuracy of search results is as important, if not more so, than the ranking position in financial services.

For example, imagine the below scenarios:

• 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 three cases, your consumer may not identify the error and as such, may act upon the incorrect information. An out-of-date annual report served to a user who thinks is reading the latest may make an ill-judged investment decision.

A user who seeks to make a claim on an insurance policy and is accidentally referring to outdated terms of service may suffer a negative outcome.

Financial services brands, more than perhaps any other sector, must take special care to control the information that exists in the public domain. Leaving outdated PDF documents on a server can be a legitimate compliance risk. Anything that undermines trust is important here.

SEO for banks, wealth managers, insurers and fintechs isn't one strategy

Banks and building societies

SEO within the banking sector is characterised by the requirement to manage legacy information and deal with slower campaign lead times, driven by stricter sign-off workflows.

Banking brands, whilst not unique in this, often share a common challenge in dealing with so-called legacy information and systems. A bank that has been in operation for decades will, in some cases, operate upon a technical patchwork of technologies.

Likewise, with an evolving regulatory and economic landscape, long-standing banking brands will have a long history of changing products and terms of service.

All of this results in a digital footprint that requires deliberate management and pruning. Annual report documents stretching back decades can usurp search results for those seeking up-to-date information.

Alongside this, managing the money of consumers and businesses requires care and regulatory oversight so strong that sign-off loops within these brands will typically require more people and a longer lead time.

Wealth and asset managers

SEO for wealth and asset management is typically a tale of fragmentation. It’s a sector within which a brand will typically have multiple tier 1 target audiences.

A wealth management firm will often need to attract and communicate with high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) and intermediaries alike. HNWIs will be the source of funds, but intermediaries will often be the source of the clients.

SEO in such situations requires a strategy that addresses both pathways.

Insurers

The insurance sector covers a wide range of insurance types, but certainly at the consumer insurance level, it’s a sector that has been characterised by a heavy focus on comparison services.

This has been driven by two market forces: a captive audience, for example, drivers, who are mandated to purchase vehicle insurance, and a heavy focus on upfront cost over quality of service.

The result is a sector that battles in a highly commercial space. In search, this requires operating using a strategy that is mindful of cost comparison, but sympathetic to a brand’s need to sell the benefits as well as the cost of a product.

SEO in this space is as much a matter of demand generation (for your particular product) as it is demand fulfilment, for the category itself.

Fintechs

Where incumbent brands in, say, the banking sector are required to work with legacy context, SEO in the fintech space can be characterised by its ‘standing start’ position.

Fintechs, by definition of being relatively new entities, have a smaller digital footprint than the brands they find themselves competing with. This requires a different approach to SEO; it’s less about domination and more about finding and owning the gaps.

Likewise, a growing fintech will often have fewer resources with which to operate. It requires an efficient approach to SEO that perhaps other brands don’t need to think about.

Building a financial services SEO strategy, step by step

Step 1: Audit your current visibility and technical health

A successful search strategy has always reduced to management of three elements:

1. Technical integrity

2. Information

3. Promotion

That is a model that is as true across financial services as it is across any other industry. What does change, however, are the stakes.

Take, for example, technical integrity. It’s important for any brand to operate an accessible website; that is, a website that complies with at least the WCAG AA standard. A financial services brand serving consumers needs to take this more seriously.

Not only is WCAG compliance actively encouraged by the FCA, but it is also a prerequisite for successfully delivering against the demands of Consumer Duty.

Likewise, at the ‘information’ layer, the audit process is as much about finding what needs to be suppressed as it is about finding what needs promotion. An outdated annual report that keeps popping up in search results for this year’s report is a negative outcome that your audit needs to find. This is a challenge other sectors don’t have.

There are three key questions a financial brand must ask itself at this stage:

1. Can our target audience and search engine crawlers access everything they should be able to, and nothing of what they shouldn't?

2. Does our website contain all of the information that we are duty-bound to share as well as want to share, and is it organised as efficiently as possible?

3. Does our SEO strategy think beyond the ‘walls’ of our website domain to how we support our brand across the web?

Step 2: Research keywords, your audience, and your competitors

The purpose of research is fundamentally about understanding your audience. Yet again, the stakes here are high. Most sectors benefit from understanding how their audience understands and searches for information online, but in financial services, it can help you navigate a tight regulatory pathway.

Particularly in consumer finance sectors, research will reveal the ‘incorrect’ questions your audience asks online. “How much balance should I leave on my credit card each month to build my credit score?” is an example of a technically ill-informed question a user may search for; it’s a user, however, that a brand may like to address.

Research should reveal the correct and incorrect questions being asked and form a strategy to pick up on them all. It should gently divert the misinformed questions, outlining the correct questions to be asked.

This sort of subtlety, whilst present across other sectors, is a key part of SEO in the financial services sector.

Step 3: Build a content plan, roadmap, and E-E-A-T signals that your compliance team can approve

Financial services brands usually have three different types of content or information they must publish online:

1. Content that exists for regulatory compliance

2. Content that exists to communicate and operate your services and/or products

3. Content that promotes your brand, products, and services

There’s crossover between all three, and all three must pass compliance. A successful financial services content strategy starts at the macro level. That is to set your communication strategy using the website’s sitemap first.

What content is in scope of your website, and where online does it live? Further to that, you must know how different types of content serve different roles, and how each piece of information relates to other pieces of information. Some will refer to this as entity mapping.

Trust signals can, for the most part, be solved at this stage. Where a financial services brand makes claims, building in a mechanism to solidify those claims at the strategy level is always more effective. Tactically, this means attaching guidance articles to named experts who have their credentials clearly displayed online.

As for compliance sign-off, certain things help here. Firstly, a tone of voice documentation that is pre-approved by compliance helps to set the guardrails. At the production level, a process must be established that enables drafting, compliance review, marketing review, editing, and another compliance loop.

Step 4: Fix the technical foundations specific to FS sites

Given the regulation-first nature of most parts of our industry, financial services brands often have an obligation to publish annual reports and other regulatory-relevant documentation.

This creates a content overhead that most non-finance brands never need to consider. An annual report PDF published online each year will create a lasting online library. How you handle version control becomes a relevant matter in the scope of SEO and compliance.

Should your 2026 report directly replace your 2025 report? If it does, what happens to an audience that has bookmarked your 2025 report URL? Do they redirect straight to 2026? What if the compliance team stipulates that 2025 needs to remain accessible via an archive?

These are all real situations that need careful consideration, and they are quite unique to regulated industries like financial services. Fix these from day one.

Step 5: Consider the different uses for search

SEO isn’t just for ranking at the 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.

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.

Step 6: Track outcomes that matter, not just rankings

Financial services won’t always need to track just rankings; accuracy is of equal, if not more, importance.

If your audience searches online for your current 5-year fixed rate, what happens if the search engine still references last month’s rate?

Likewise, what happens if a search engine leads a customer to policy wording for a related, but incorrect product?

SEO reporting should be considered in the scope of your Consumer Duty reporting; search results are in many cases the very first interaction a consumer has with your brand. Monitoring outcomes from this very first stage is a demonstrable way to prove positive outcomes, and an early warning system for anything that’s going wrong.

Technical SEO for financial services websites

Schema markup and structured data for FS content

Schema markup isn’t the silver bullet some may have you believe; however, it remains a helpful tool, particularly in the regulated finance space.

‘Organization’ Schema, for example, offers a brand the opportunity to collate and officially document the full organisational context of a brand and the company through which it operates.

Accurately implemented ‘Organization’ markup affords you the opportunity to document official details of your brand, such as:

• The legal entity name

• The HQ address

• Satellite office addresses

• Contact points

• Associated brands

• Associated third-party profiles

• Official credentials

Adding this markup won’t automatically improve your standing in search, but it will provide a ‘when all else fails’ outline of the key trust signals for your brand.

Outdated PDFs and version control

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:

1. Manually stay on top of removing out-of-date PDF documents from your site

2. 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.

Ask yourself questions such as: do I want Google to send people to this information, or would I only like it to remain accessible to people who explicitly navigate to our archive?

SEO for financial services in the age of AI Overviews and AI search

SEO is being joined by the new discipline of GEO (generative engine optimisation). This is the process of controlling and optimising brand visibility in AI-driven tools.

This can include:

• AI features within classic search (such as Google’s AI Overviews)

• AI chat tools (such as ChatGPT)

GEO only ups the ante for financial services brands. The nature of an AI-driven search result is that it is oftentimes conversational. Search results become ‘facts’ and snippets of information. Where once a brand would optimise a web page to appear in search results, now brands must optimise pieces of information to appear in chat results.

The risk of misinformation is greatly increased; a large language model (LLM) that misrepresents a piece of information or a brand is a big problem in financial services.

Like SEO, the task for financial services brands is to push visibility but also closely monitor accuracy. We see this as the key battleground moving forward, so much so that we have built Corrik, our tool for monitoring GEO visibility and answer accuracy.

The rules of optimising in GEO remain much the same as with SEO, with the crucial difference that you are no longer dealing with discrete web pages. Now, you are attempting to control the perception of your brand and information in the search results.

The concept of ‘entity mapping’ is a growing part of this discipline. It’s about understanding the entities that make up your brand, product, and service, and managing how these entities relate to each other.

Think that Brand X offers Product Y to Customer Z. That’s the level at which you need to communicate.

The Consumer Duty connection: why content quality is now a compliance issue

Consumer Duty, driven by the FCA in the UK, is about ensuring positive outcomes for consumers. It is our view that the user journey begins in search.

The moment a consumer searches for something in the financial services sector, they have started their user journey. At the stage of search results being presented, the user begins to see your brand and form an understanding of your information.

Your search results are as much a part of your digital real estate as your website.

Search results are trackable and testable. If a consumer searches for your ‘online banking app’, but the search engine guides them first to your business banking app, that’s a blocker your team should know about.

Search is a direct interface with your consumers; it should be considered in the scope of Consumer Duty.

How much does financial services SEO cost, and how long does it take?

Financial services SEO is by its nature a more complex undertaking than in other unregulated industries. It requires experience of the industry and a compliance-first approach that just isn’t the case with other sectors.

• How long it takes and how much it costs will depend upon a few factors:

• The part of the financial services industry you are operating within

• The history of your brand and digital presence

• The audience you are targeting

• The scope of your regulated activity and the internal safeguards you have in place

A large financial institution won’t necessarily pay more for SEO because it’s large; it’ll usually cost more because the cost of failure is higher. Large internal teams, each with subtly different priorities, will ensure the process takes time to pass through compliance. This all adds to complexity.

A new-to-market fintech won’t necessarily be at a disadvantage. If operating in a market of incumbents, the ability to innovate creates opportunity.

Getting results from SEO at the macro level usually takes time; think months, not weeks. Despite that, an effective brand-wide strategy should split into smaller campaigns, and those campaigns can and should deliver results much more quickly.

A well-researched and positioned piece of content can and should deliver for your brand in the short term whilst building a foundation for the long term.

SEO compounds, and this is how it is best viewed.

Ultimately, the answer to how much and how long depends on the brief and the context, but you should really be budgeting anywhere from £3K to £10K per month.

What financial services SEO success actually looks like

Put simply, SEO success in financial services delivers two things: visibility and accuracy of information.

It’s not about ranking number-one. It’s about reaching the right audience, at the right time, with the correct information.

Choosing an SEO partner for your financial services business

We believe a specialist sector needs a specialist provider; it’s why we choose to focus only on the financial services sector. There are, of course, many things a partner learns from working across different industries; however, the barrier to entry in financial services is so high that we believe being specialists gives our clients a true advantage.

Financial services deals in complex language and topics; things only experience can teach you. Financial services operates in a uniquely strict regulatory context; something only a specialist with experience can understand.

Ultimately, in order to support a brand in communicating online, an SEO partner must understand the brand and the industry; specialists win.

Frequently asked questions about SEO for financial services

What is SEO for financial services?

SEO in the financial services sector is about delivering information visibility and information accuracy in online search results for finance brands.

Is it worth paying for SEO in financial services?

Yes, whilst a brand may be able to achieve online visibility, financial services also require information to be accurate and defensible. SEO in the financial services industry is as much about managing accuracy of information as it is about rankings.

How long does financial services SEO take to show results?

At the macro strategy level, you should be planning in months (think 6+). At the micro campaign level, you should expect content to make an impact as soon as it’s published.

What's the difference between SEO for banks and SEO for fintechs?

A bank is likely to have decades of legacy content and systems that require technical SEO initiatives that a newer fintech simply won’t need to concern itself with.

Do I need a specialist agency, or can our in-house team handle this?

If you can afford the in-house team, that’s a beneficial asset to own. Most brands can’t justify this, however. Recruiting and maintaining a specialist team is expensive and outside the comfort zone of most financial services brands. A specialist agency, like Indulge, maintains the team and the expertise for you and can deliver with a much lower budget than an internal team would require to maintain.

Financial services SEO case studies