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If you’re in the business of fintech content marketing, you’re in the business of SEO. Or at least, you should be if you want to remain competitive and grow your company. Think about it this way: improving your SEO strategy means increasing your ROI. The more keystrokes that find your website means more eyes on your business and, as such, more customers. And those customers are likely to trust in your marketing skills if you’re employing the very strategies in your own business that you’d advise them to use in theirs.
The problem many content marketers face is how to keep up with Google’s ever-evolving SEO best practices. How are you supposed to play the game if you don’t know the rules? Or worse, if the rules keep changing? While we can’t promise Google will become an easy-to-read, static entity anytime soon, we can promise that you’ll level up your SEO for fintech content if you follow these six tips.
1. Create High-Quality, Original Fintech Content
While this might seem obvious, it actually means a few different things. Of course, you want to create content that informs your reader, establishes you as a fintech marketing authority, and utilizes SEO keywords (more on that in a bit). But there are other elements to creating quality content you might not have considered.
For example, pages on your site that are too similar can be bad for business. Google is very judgy. And websites that host duplicative content will necessarily rank lower on the SERPs (search engine results pages) because Google will split the link metrics between the pages.
So if your site hosts pages that are either identical (perhaps you have printer-friendly versions of a few blog posts) or cover the same topic, you have a couple of options. One is to perform a simple 301 redirect of the duplicate pages to the desired page by adding a canonical tag (“rel=”canonical”) within your HTML code. The other option is to revise the content. It’s always better to modify existing content than it is to delete a page because you don’t want to mess with the existing ranking of that page. Instead, reframe the main argument or add content to distinguish the pages. Google will be happier and so will you.
2. Research Target Keywords
Now, for the keywords. No article about SEO would be complete without discussing them. Strategic use of SEO keywords is crucial to creating high-quality fintech content and ranking high on the SERPs. It’s like hailing a taxi: you gotta get the driver’s attention.
Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm treats keywords differently than it did a decade ago. Whereas previously you might rank for a short, two-word phrase – like “fintech marketing” – now you’re far more likely to rank with a long-tail keyword – like “how to create the best fintech marketing content.” As people’s searches become more and more specific, and the quantity of content on a given topic increases, Google has adapted to these trends in behavior and prospective search results.
That said, both head terms (those shorter phrases) and long-tail keywords are necessary for a site to perform well in a Google search. The key is how you connect your keywords across your pages. In other words, “backlink” to your own content. Start with a few content buckets (umbrella topics, if you will), create content that fills each of those buckets, and link content between the buckets.
Also, rule of thumb: don’t overstuff your website or blog posts with lots of different keywords. Pick the ones that work best for your subject matter and are most likely to attract Google’s algorithm to your content. But how do you figure out which keywords will hail the taxi?
3. Use SEO Tools
SEO tools can be a big help when it comes to determining the most effective keywords to use for your content. But these tools also offer many other insights. From performing free SEO audits of your website to highlighting which keywords are trending for your subject matter, to analyzing your content’s success, the following list of SEO tools will certainly help up your SEO game for your fintech content.
Of course, there are more resources out there to help you with SEO, but we’ve found these to be some of the most comprehensive and user-friendly.
4. Know Your Audience
Speaking of user-friendly, this is precisely what you want your content to be. So to effectively engage your audience members, you have to know what types of content they want and how they search for it.
Start with a look inward. Analyze your existing content via conversion tracking in Google Analytics to view your KPIs (key performance indicators) and determine which content on your site is doing what you intended. Are people really engaging with your blog posts or do you have a high bounce rate? Once you understand the types of content your audience appreciates most, you can create more of it. The more people engage significantly with your content, the more Google will recognize you as an authority in the space, and the higher you’ll rank.
It’s also important to know how your audience is searching for the content it wants from you. For example, if they’re primarily finding you via their mobile devices, you should certainly make sure your website looks incredible and is easily navigable on mobile. Optimize for the medium, not just the subject matter, and you’ll earn a loyal audience.
5. Know Your Competition
Now that you’ve performed a solid internal assessment, look outward. What is your competition doing? Which searches appear to be the most common in your industry and are there gaps in the existing content that you can fill?
For example, gaps in SERPs are an opportunity for you to create superior content than your competition that could be featured above the fold. Say there’s a listicle in a SERP featured section that’s rather trite or contains outdated information. You could create a blog post that contains a fresh take on that listicle, which Google might recognize as the preferred piece of content to display in the featured section.
6. Promote Your Content
Of course, if you want to earn authority in your field and positioning in featured sections of SERPs you have to promote your content. There are a few ways to do this, but they all involve networking.
Your social channels are naturally a very potent amplification tool, but you should also consider cross-promotion with other companies in your general field. Not direct competition, mind you. But competition-adjacent. In other words, if you’re a payments company, you could cross-promote content with a gift card company or a digital security company. You link to their content and they link to yours, upping everyone’s SEO. These businesses overlap with the payments space, making them stakeholders in your success and you in theirs without occupying the exact same footprint. Win-win scenarios make for good partnerships. Tap fintech networking events and social channels to find businesses that would be interested in joining your cross-linking network and watch your SEO for fintech content improve.
Even though Google continues to shift the SEO sand under our feet, there are certainly ways to optimize your content so more of your target audience can engage with it. These six steps are sure to get you on the right track and, before you know it, your SEO for fintech content will be next level.
