Working within the FinTech industry can be tricky at times. You’ve worked hard to develop top-tier software solutions for financial problems – but that’s only half the battle.
You won’t find much success if enough people don’t know about or use your FinTech software.
FinTech companies face fierce competition and increasing government regulation. That adds to the challenge of marketing your products, as you don’t want to attract a government audit.
If you want to increase your sales and conversions for the long term, you need to use SEO (search engine optimization.)
It’s a form of inbound marketing where you master Google’s hidden ranking system. You see, Google has a way of ranking and indexing their organic search results. By tweaking your content to align with their algorithm, you can rank higher.
In today’s age, most customers are online, including those interested in FinTech solutions. When looking for new products, many will turn to Google to find what they need.
That’s why a robust SEO strategy is necessary for any FinTech company. While the fundamentals of SEO stay the same for any company, the financial technology sector has some unique requirements.
Considering this, I’ve prepared 10 essential steps to consider when constructing a game plan for FinTech SEO. Plus, I’ve highlighted 6 excellent benefits of using SEO for your FinTech company.
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How is FinTech SEO Different & What are Those 6 Benefits?
FinTech SEO refers to the unique challenges FinTech companies face when using SEO. Interestingly, the fundamentals of SEO never change, regardless of industry.
Yet, putting those fundamentals into practice varies heavily among industries. The SEO needs for a manufacturing company will look a lot different than FinTech.
That’s why you need to tailor your tactics to the financial sector.
So what’s so different about FinTech SEO?
For one, you’ll be under extra scrutiny from Google’s algorithm. Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines view FinTech companies as part of the YMYL industry.
YMYL stands for ‘your money or your life,’ and it refers to websites related to your well-being. That means sites in the legal, health, and finance niches are all YMYL.
These websites deal with matters affecting your health, finances, and happiness. For this reason, Google will hold them to a higher ‘page quality’ standard.
Google’s #1 goal is to display the most reliable, relevant, and engaging results for organic search queries. The last thing they want is to link to a page that presents false or harmful information.
So if you have a FinTech website promoting your software, it needs to display 100% verifiable & trustworthy info.
Otherwise, Google won’t bother to rank you as you’ll be viewed as a risk to the algorithm.
In particular, Google will heavily consider your expertise, authority, and trust, or EAT. If you pass the test, you’ll be in Google’s good graces and will rise in organic search results.
Luckily, there are some quick and easy ways to improve the EAT of your web pages, but more on that later. For now, let’s take a look at 6 essential benefits you’ll enjoy by using SEO.
1. Able to Target Your Various Audiences & Their Pain Points
A huge advantage of SEO is its ability to target buyer personas and address their pain points. The idea is to base your content strategy around specific organic search queries or keywords.
Let’s say that your FinTech company makes software that simplifies the payroll process.
In this situation, your target audience is accounting professionals. By doing a little keyword research (with a tool like Ahrefs), you can get into the headspace of this buyer persona.
After a while, you discover ‘ways to simplify payroll,’ a trending long-tail keyword. You decide to target it and base a few blog posts around it and related keywords.
When creating content, you need to focus on solving your audience’s problem.
They’re spending too much time during the day on payroll, and your FinTech app solves that. That’s how you can use SEO to target different buyer personas and problems. It’s a highly effective way of finding customers that are already searching how to resolve their pain point (and your solution could solve that).
2. Builds Trust Through Giving Valuable Content Away for Free
It’s no secret that FinTech SEO requires more trust than other industries. That’s because financial technology services often involve accessing sensitive customer information.
Since your software may require inputting sensitive financial information, trust is critical.
Beyond earning the trust of customers, you’ll need to become trustworthy in the eyes of Google too. Otherwise, you risk Google not even indexing your page.
Luckily, developing stellar content is a great way to build trust.
Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand.
You use SEO tactics to enhance your content to stand out to search engines. Whenever you create content that solves your target audience’s problems – you’re providing value for free.
That will stick in your customers’ minds and lead them to trust you more. After all, your blog just solved a huge problem they’ve had for a while and reading it didn’t cost a dime. That builds trust and loyalty and can inspire customers to try out your product.
3. Greatly Increase Brand Awareness
An effective SEO strategy will work wonders for brand awareness. By creating relevant content that answers questions or solves problems, you’ll build trust. If you do that consistently over time, you’ll start to gain a reputation as a thought leader in your field.
That’s a highly desirable position to be in as readers will flock to your blog articles to educate themselves.
Once you reach this level, your brand awareness will go through the roof. Before you know it, more and more people will know about you. That’s why this form of digital marketing is so powerful, wide-reaching, and effective.
4. Creates a Flywheel of Ongoing Organic Traffic
Another significant benefit is that you can set your SEO to autopilot after a while. It’s true that SEO takes a while to get going (often 12 months is the ‘break-even’ point), but once it does, watch out!
SEO is so great because it has a compounding effect. That means everything you do now will build upon what you’ve done in the past.
A winning SEO strategy will also bolster your other digital marketing channels. More traffic means more leads (email addresses) and sales.
Once you’ve got pages ranking high on Google, a flywheel of ongoing traffic starts to spin up. Your highest ranking pieces of content will continue to generate traffic for you well into the future.
5. If You Get YMYL Right, You Will Zoom Past Competitors
This benefit is entirely unique to FinTech SEO. As stated before, YMYL refers to ‘your money or your life.’ It’s what Google categorizes specific industries as, such as health, legal, and financial technology sectors.
Your FinTech website will fall under more scrutiny than others. It’s imperative that you perfect the EAT for your site, or its expertise, authority, and trust. Here are a few tips for how to do that:
- Ensure you have sitewide SSL
- Ensure your user experience is stellar (use data to inform updates to UX)
- Have accurate ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ email and address on your site with real people (not info@yourdomain.com)
- Have well-known authors contribute to your blog, and include a picture + short bio of the author to boost credibility
- Keep your blog posts current; check them every 6-12 months and update with if needed
So why is perfecting YMYL a benefit for FinTech SEO?
It’s because not every company in the sector will do it right.
That means if you have impeccable EAT for your site, you’ll blaze past others that don’t. That can give you a noticeable edge over the competition.
6. Even Though It Takes Time, It’s Worth Sticking with It
Just like training to run a marathon takes time to build up endurance so is FinTech SEO. It will likely take around 12 months to break even on your time + $. From there, your return on investment starts to build and reaches lofty highs in each successive year thereafter.
Since it takes so long, some companies wonder if it’s even worth it.
The answer is a resounding yes. It’s a long-term game for sure, but it pays off exponentially. It’s also a game that if you don’t play, you might get swept under the rug.
You’ll most likely have to rely on paid ads to gain traction if you ignore SEO.
By fully committing to SEO, you can start to rely less and less on paid ads. After a while, you may do away with them entirely if you want.
Your SEO efforts will compound, gaining more traffic, leads, and sales. There are also ways to implement ‘quick wins’ to see a more immediate boost in traffic. That’s why it’s worth sticking with SEO because you stand to gain so much from it.
10 FinTech SEO Tactics to an Organic Traffic Avalanche
Now that you’ve seen why SEO is worth your time and effort, it’s time to put it into practice. I’ve compiled 10 steps that comprise a well-rounded FinTech SEO strategy.
Over the years, I’ve run various tests to confirm the effectiveness of each step.
It took a lot of time and meticulous trial and error, but I think you will agree with me that it was well worth it.
My SEO strategies tend to center around robust email outreach + guest posting. That’s how I prefer to build links and obtain traffic. To me, it’s all about quality over quantity. That’s why it’s best to focus on content that’s most likely to convert into a sale or a lead.
1. Check Your Budget for Goals Fit/Alignment: Set Some If You Haven’t Already
If you don’t have realistic SEO goals yet, now is the time to come up with at least one. Try to get specific with your goal, too, as that will help you come up with smaller objectives along the way.
For example, a goal could be to ‘increase our conversion rates.’
That doesn’t provide a timeline or specify how significant an increase you’d like to see. Since you’re going to put time, effort, and money into SEO, you need a clearly defined goal.
Here’s a better version of that same goal: ‘Our goal is to increase our conversion rate from 2% to 5% over a period of 18 months.’
Now you have a crystal clear vision of the results you want to see out of your campaign. In addition to your primary goal, you should pepper in objectives that will help you get there. An example would be setting a specific number of outreach emails a day to send out and how many links you want to build per month.
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2. Consider Government Regulation & Where You Are Going to Draw the Line
The government is regulating the FinTech industry more and more. That’s due to the sensitive information involved in the world of finance. The goal of the regulations is to weed out ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes that scam people and are illegal.
For this reason, you need to be very careful with the claims that you make with your content.
It’s best not to make extravagant claims about your product that are untrue. While doing so may attract attention at first, it leads to unsatisfied or angry customers. That’s the last thing you want, as they could file lawsuits or trigger a government audit.
Yet if your content is not convincing enough, you won’t generate much traffic or conversions.
You’ll need to decide where you’ll draw the line with promoting your products. Go for a happy medium between hard-sell tactics and not selling at all.
3. Content Marketing Audit to Identify Quick(er) SEO Wins (Existing Pages)
Next, you’ll want to conduct an audit on your existing content. Why’s that? It’s so you can identify opportunities for ‘quick wins.’
A quick win in SEO is a simple change you can make to your existing content to boost traffic.
Instead of waiting 12 months for results, you’ll see a boost in traffic in a few months after publishing your optimizations.
The great thing about a content audit is that it is relatively easy to do. All you’re doing is optimizing and refining your existing pages to rank on Google.
I look for other keywords that are within ‘striking distance.’ Look at your existing content pages where you are in striking distance of much more organic traffic and optimize them for that 1 primary keyword.
Google is trying to tell us that we should better optimize each page for that 1 keyword. Using these keywords in your content can bring about quick boosts in traffic.
4. Technical SEO Audit (Existing Pages)
Your content isn’t all that you should look at during an audit. Google will look at more than your content when crawling and indexing your site.
There are some critical technical factors that you need to optimize for Google. Otherwise, you risk confusing the algorithm and not ranking for anything.
Here’s what to look at during a technical audit:
- Ensure your page loads fast (and passes the Google Core Web Vitals Test)
- Compress your images and videos
- Minimize JavaScript and CSS files
- Redirect (301) pages that are broken (404)
- Ensure every image has an ‘alt tag’ describing its content
- Among others
Fixing broken technical issues is another great way to achieve a quick win for your SEO campaign.
5. Keyword Research for Home/Product/Service Pages (Existing & New Pages)
It’s not always apparent which target keywords are best for your website. That’s why you need to conduct keyword research to find ideal ones.
You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to see which keywords are trending for your niche; just make sure the words you choose to optimize to are ones that have a “product/service” search intent instead of a “content article” focus.
For these pages, you want to find the former keywords and optimize your home, product/service pages with those. Keep the article search intent keywords separate and for your articles only.
It’s hard to rank an article on a “product/service” search intent keyword and vice versa.
6. Keyword Research + Content Editorial Calendar (New Article Pages)
For all your new content, you’ll need a consistent release schedule. I recommend creating a content editorial calendar to keep yourself on track.
You’ll want to release blogs regularly (but focus on quality over quantity) to help you develop an audience.
Remember, the goal with each piece of content is to inform and solve customer problems. Keep in mind that the time and money you spend to generate content will continue working for you if you infuse SEO into each one.
Creating new pages is something you’ll want to do for your FinTech blog because it will help you get in front of new prospects regularly. Google likes to see updated content (if it is outdated or incorrect), so don’t forget about updating what you’ve already released.
7. Implement Above Search Engine Optimizations
For this step, you should stop and take stock of everything you’ve done so far. If you’ve only outlined some of the optimizations, don’t proceed until you implement them (keyword optimization, editing existing pages, creating new pages, technical audit items, etc.).
You’ll want all the proceeding steps to be complete for the next few steps.
That will help you find the most success in growing your SEO traffic and when link-building. I hate to admit it, but I’ve seen the “execution” ball get dropped far too often.
You won’t find much luck with requesting backlinks if you don’t have any new (or recently optimized) content. That’s why you need to implement all the above optimizations before moving forward.
8. High Quality + Authoritative + Relevant Link Building (External + Internal)
Now it’s time to start the link-building process. You can think of a link as a ‘power boost’ for your ranking. If you’re able to link to other high-ranking pages that Google views as trustworthy – it will boost you, too.
That’s why link-building is an essential part of any SEO strategy.
You’ll need a combination of both internal and external links to do it right. Internal links help your SEO and encourage readers to click on other articles. That creates a ‘spider-web’ of related articles on your website.
There are many ways to go about acquiring external links. I like to use the ‘skyscraper’ technique. That’s where you find a piece of content in your industry (FinTech) that has excellent backlinks.
You outdo their content by providing more insights, pictures, videos, and more. Then you reach out to the sites linking to the top 10 ranking articles via email and request that they link to your page instead.
If it is indeed superior, the chances are good that they’ll go for it.
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9. Create Email Opt-in Enticements & Build Email Nurturing Workflow Automations
You’ll want to include email marketing as a part of your strategy. You should think of email addresses as a form of currency. After all, once you acquire one, it’s a lead for your business.
The idea is to get prospects to give you their email address willingly. That means that they’re open to receiving emails from you. More importantly, they know to expect emails from your company.
Having them give you their email is far more effective than cold emailing.
To get them to give up their address, you need to entice them with a freebie. Provide them with a video, eBook, or other free pieces of content if they give you their email.
It would help if you also practiced email nurturing. That’s where you send each prospect a series of targeted emails guiding them through the buying process. Each email should correspond to the prospect’s noted behavior on your site.
10. Monitoring, Reporting, & Tweaking
The last step is to keep the SEO train moving. Now that everything is set in place, you need to monitor, run reports, and make subtle changes (if needed).
Tools you can use for analytics include Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Google Search Console.
Keep an eye on your traffic levels and conversions to make sure you stay on track. If you notice a dip or a boost, tweak your strategy accordingly.
Proven-Effective SEO Strategies for FinTech Companies
FinTech companies face some tricky challenges when developing SEO strategies. It’s an industry that is increasingly coming under more scrutiny from Google and the government.
It takes real diligence to strike a balance between over-promising promotion and informative content.
You want to promote your brand without making claims that are too bold. You also need robust email outreach to obtain backlinks. Luckily, I’m well versed in FinTech SEO and have devised winning strategies for countless companies. If you’re ready to generate more sales and leads, reach out to me so we can chat.
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