First, remember that there are two types of SEO: content and technical.
It is unlikely that a financial services company will have a website with millions of pages, and it will likely remain modest. Technical SEO means you don’t have to take as much of your SEO efforts. There should not be a monthly retainer as there is not enough work to do an audit every six months.
If you want to rank for your desired key phrases, you need to put content SEO into practice. Being really clear about the goals is crucial when it comes to this type of SEO. Is it to increase brand awareness, increase lead generation, or build trust? Naturally, you can do all three, but if you focus more on one of these three, it will be much easier to achieve the desired results.
Let’s say your business operates a trading platform. “What’s the trade?” Ranking for queries and “best trading platform” if generating leads is your main objective.
Why? For one thing, a person researching the former probably isn’t ready to use a platform because they’re just starting out in trading. On the other hand, if they look to the latter, they are likely “high intent” buyers.
These are your top prospects — people searching for these keywords recognize their problem, are aware of the solution, and are ready to make a purchase. If the goal of your SEO strategy is to generate leads, then these types of keywords should be your top priority.
Creating thought leadership or top of the funnel content when the real goal is lead generation is one of the main mistakes financial marketers make when it comes to content SEO.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to executing content SEO initiatives that will produce the desired results:
The ideal approach to creating an SEO plan is to start with keyword research using an SEO tool such as Ahrefs or SEMRush. Typically, this means going into your competitors’ websites, finding the terms they rank for, and sorting the results based on the highest volume. Select less competitive, and presto! You have a calendar of ingredients.
The problem with this strategy is that it’s the same one used by every other business, so you can only focus on the same key phrases as them.
As previously indicated, financial services face intense competition in SEO because they must contend with content websites that employ huge SEO teams whose primary goal is to rank for key phrases. Pursuing the same key phrases as everyone else will put you in direct competition with the big websites, which will significantly hinder your rankings.
A good strategy is to talk to your customers first, as opposed to conducting keyword research initially, because these content sites are not businesses that provide products to customers. What bothers them the most? What subjects pique their interest? Who are they equating you to?
If your goal is to acquire new customers, you should start by focusing on “bottom of the funnel” keywords, which refer to a person who is about to make a purchase. You’ll get far more clients with high-quality leads than a keyword that none of your prospects are searching for, even if your SEO tool indicates that there are only 20 searches per month.
Many content marketers will focus on keywords with big traffic, but those can take years to convert into sales (and you can’t impose that on content). For this reason, if generating leads is your main objective, start by focusing on key phrases that suggest a person is aware of a problem and actively looking for a solution.
Keywords like “best investment apps for kids” would be suitable if you are an app developer
By basing your content strategy on customer research and starting with the Bottom of the Funnel, you can make sure you’re getting your lowest hanging fruit first and targeting keyphrases that are a lot more likely to get you the results you’re looking for.
One of the biggest mistakes financial firms make is creating new content for an experienced audience. Let’s say you want to write about capital markets and private equity and your target audience is investors. A piece of writing such as “What is the capital market?” Or “Investing in Stocks 101” won’t wow your readers. They’re searching for more complex things, like “a new way to look at risk-managed index strategy performance” or “understanding the post-SPIVA scorecard.”
This is the situation where writing advice “for a 5-year-old” is ineffective. This may be true for business-to-business (B2B) content websites like NerdWallet, but if you’re writing for advanced readers or B2B clients, you need to write at their level of understanding. If not, you will create less readable information such as:
The problem with creating such broad content is that you invest a lot of time and energy writing for readers who will never buy from you or who may not be involved in your sector. Rather, make sure the person you’re writing for is your ideal client—you’ll be able to identify them if you conduct preliminary research.
A big problem with many SEOs is copying financial services content verbatim from other people’s work. As mentioned earlier, Google prefers information that is written accurately from an authoritative position, especially when it comes to financial services. Because of this, the authority of your content becomes more important.
We recommend creating content based on interviews with experts on your team to avoid creating copycat, regurgitated content that is not expert-based. This method has several advantages:
The question of whether tracking revenue generated by content is worthwhile is hotly debated in the content marketing industry. However, we do not consider logic to be important; Internal reporting of your business objectives and KPIs is what counts.
Based on our observations, financial services firms enjoy monitoring business outcomes such as MQL, SQL, and content marketing revenue. While this may not apply to other IT or SaaS companies, marketing is still relatively new in the financial services industry, so demonstrating results is even more important.
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