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Developing a fintech SEO strategy not only creates value and relevance for people searching for the tools and solutions you offer, but it can play a major role in maintaining a positive public image of your brand.
Implementing a solid fintech SEO strategy ensures that your brand can be found by prospects at every stage in the customer journey. The more searchers can find you, the more they will look to you as a trusted resource as they navigate that journey.
But fintechs face unique challenges when it comes to developing an SEO strategy. Many fintechs are category creators – meaning many of their searchers may not even know what they are searching for. Many organizations are still in the nascent stages of developing the vocabulary they use to talk about their products, services, and brand. So how do you walk and chew gum when it comes to SEO?
Basics of Creating a Fintech SEO Strategy
Setting Goals
Without goals, your SEO strategy will not go far – and it certainly won’t yield a positive (or measurable) ROI. In fact, reverse engineering your SEO strategy from your target results is the most effective way to see those results. Common SEO goals include:
- Boost ecommerce sales (define which products, services, and solutions)
- Increase website traffic (define how much traffic and assign value to the traffic of specific pages)
- Increase conversions (define lead/demand generation programs and what counts as a conversion)
Your goals can be whatever you want them to be, so long as they can be defined and measured. Remember that goals are best composed using the SMART strategy – so make sure goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Not-so-great goal: get more website visits
- Better goal: Boost organic traffic by 10%
- Great goal: Increase traffic to Product X landing page by 10% in the next six months
Keyword and Topic Research
Once you have your goals nailed down, you can start to do keyword and topic research. Researching and using the right keywords will make or break your fintech SEO strategy. Use tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs to gain a deep understanding of how your audiences searches – and what they’re searching for.
Build a list of relevant core and long-tail keywords related to both your brand and your products, services, and solutions. Also look for general topics related to your keywords that are intriguing and relevant to your audience. Tools like AnswerThePublic can be helpful here.
When building out core and long-tail keywords, consider the following questions to help you hone in on the most specific and relevant keywords for your brand:
- What do we do?
- What do we offer?
- What problems do we solve?
- How do we solve those problems?
- What market do we serve?
- What is unique about our product/service/solution?
- Where do we solve this problem?
- What benefits does our product/service/solution offer?
Remember – you want to get inside the minds of people looking for solutions to their problems or a way to do things better. Get inside the minds of your prospects by stepping into their shoes. How would you find what you’re looking for?
Competitive Analysis
One of the best ways to get ideas for your own SEO strategy is to look at what your competitors are doing. This is especially helpful for cutting-edge fintechs that are creating new categories in market. While you may or may not have direct competitors, analyzing how similar companies talk about their products and services – and make them findable to their audience – will be critical in helping you define your SEO strategy.
Looking at the success or lack of success by organizations similar to yours can help you find the right keywords and strategies to reach and impact your target audience. Start by analyzing your competitors’ organic search rankings, backlink strategies, blogging habits, and even online reviews. Looking at social channels, UX, and tone & voice can add helpful context to your research.
There are plenty of tools available to streamline these efforts, and it’s probably worthwhile to run technical SEO audits on some competitors as well using ScreamingFrog or a similar tool. Evaluating your competition’s technical SEO, mobile site, and page speed can offer valuable insights about what you need to do to come out on top.
Technical vs. Content SEO Strategy
Technical SEO Strategy
While a strong keyword base will help you rank better, you have to be sure your technical SEO is on point. Screaming Frog can help you uncover any issues with your website technical SEO. Addressing these issues can help you optimize your site for search engines. Some things to keep in mind as you’re evaluating technical SEO:
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL): this creates an encrypted connection between a browser and a web server. Sites using SSL have URLs that begin with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’ Google gives preferences to these sites over non-secure ones.
- Mobile-Friendly Site: Ensure your site is responsive and can automatically adjust based on the device a viewer is using. Google views site responsiveness as a top-ranking factor within its algorithms.
- XML Site Map: This is a file that “explains” your website to search engines that are crawling. Like a roadmap, this serves as a way for search engines to efficiently navigate your site and the contents of each page.
- Page Speed: The speed of your site is a critical ranking factor. Visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see where your site falls. You may need to make changes to your hosting, DNS, CSS stylesheets and other factors to improve this, but it’s well worth the effort.
While perhaps not as “sexy” as your content SEO strategy, technical SEO strategy is incredibly important and foundational to your entire strategy. Make sure to prioritize this to see the best results.
Content SEO Strategy
Many of our clients look to us for help with their Content SEO strategy. According to a former Google Search Quality Senior Strategist, high-quality content falls in the top three SEO ranking factors.
Let’s start by talking about what is not high-quality content. Content generated by a content mill that stuffs keywords into copy and doesn’t address your audience’s questions or provide value is not high-quality content.
Instead, ask yourself what information your audience will value most and build topics and content around that to achieve your business objectives. Then, see how those topics fit around your fintech SEO framework.
You can view our quick-hit guide to creating SEO content and learn more about why content and SEO go hand-in-hand to start. It comes down to solid research, strategic content development, and a strong distribution strategy that is optimized across the entire customer journey.
If you have a strong keyword strategy and your technical SEO is on-point, creating high-quality content that leverages both can significantly improve rankings, organic traffic, and relevance among your audience (and SERPs).
The Possibilities are Endless
We’ve covered some of the basics and some of the more in-depth considerations to creating a fintech SEO strategy, but the possibilities are truly endless. Other areas to look at include:
- On-page SEO
- Local SEO
- International SEO
- Off-page link building
- Mobile search
- Video SEO
- Voice search
- Branded vs. non-branded SEO
- Brand reputation
- UX and SEO
You can’t do it all at once but you can easily make incremental improvements to your overall SEO by following this guidance. The most important tip we can give is to think like your audience and use those insights to inform how you build your fintech SEO strategy. Value + relevance + quality is always a winning formula.
For more information about how you can improve your fintech SEO strategy, download our free Fintech Customer Acquisition Playbook.
