Fintech SEO: Strategies to Grow Your Business

Our SEO analysts here at Workshop Digital are often asked for tried-and-true formulas that will make a fintech website “win” in organic search results. We’ll be the first to say it: As with all verticals when it comes to SEO, there isn’t any “special sauce” or even a one-size-fits-all approach for fintech SEO. However, the good news is there are widely used strategies and tactics fintech companies can adopt online to prove their expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and provide a positive experience for users. In turn, companies that take these steps tend to have better organic visibility where it counts (making the juice worth the squeeze!).

In this guide, we’ll cover top SEO strategies fintech companies can begin using today to meet prospects at every stage of the funnel and ultimately improve their bottom line.

Fintech SEO Strategy

SEO is just one of multiple digital marketing channels that fintech companies like financial services providers and insurtech can leverage when generating leads and engaging prospects, but it’s an important one. The added regulations for financial services make a well-informed fintech SEO strategy essential for establishing credibility and setting your business apart from others vying for the same audiences.

Here’s what our analysts recommend for fintech websites when it comes to SEO.

1. Know the Rules

Imagine Googling when to go to the emergency room. You’d want the answers you see in search results to be accurate, right? Of course!

Same with other topics that can greatly change our lives like financial advice, parenting guidance, or reviews on prescription drugs. That’s why when determining page quality ratings, Google puts heavier scrutiny on web pages that can directly and significantly impact people’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society. Collectively, these topics are known as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics.

As you may have guessed, financial security fits squarely within the YMYL spectrum because content that is not accurate or trustworthy could cause significant harm. Imagine if someone gave bogus guidance on how to invest money. The essence of YMYL topics is that your finance website must:

• Contain information that your target audience finds beneficial

• Deliver on promised value propositions in your marketing

The emphasis on content means it’s important to ensure the information you’re sharing on your website has value for your visitors. Here are some ways to get started:

• Source content from experts: Writing a page that requires formal expertise? Lean on content creators with industry expertise to ensure your website becomes a resource for anyone looking for the most accurate or up-to-date information.

• Put qualifications front and center: Leverage author bios to show users and search engines that they are qualified. Ensure you make it clear on your site that you’re credible (Google values a positive reputation). Has your company earned awards? Gotten certified? Make it known!

• Think like a reader: Before hitting publish on a page, review it to make sure it’s accurate, comprehensive, and clearly communicating to your intended audience. When raters are evaluating the quality of a web page, Google recommends that they think about what expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness mean for the topic of the page: Who are the experts? What makes a source trustworthy for the topic? What makes a website highly authoritative for the topic? Standards for very high E-A-T will differ depending on the topic of the page. YMYL topics will require higher standards.

Ask these questions before writing a new piece of content for your site:

• Who are you writing for?

• What’s the purpose of this page?

• What kind of information would they like to see?

• What kind of information would help them or make their lives easier?

• What would entertain them?

• What industry or news updates would they find interesting, informative, or entertaining?

• Top tip: A good resource to understand where your audience goes on the web and what they are sharing on social is SparkToro. This is a market research tool with a great freemium option.

This will all serve to improve your E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), which is again extremely important due to the prevalence of YMYL topics in fintech.

2. Put an Emphasis on Action

Another element for you to consider to optimize your SEO strategy for your fintech site would be audience engagement. Look for ways to create high-engagement, low-effort opportunities for users to quickly get valuable information, like a mortgage or payment calculator.

Here is an example we created to help marketers calculate their Cost Per Lead (CPL) and adjust their paid media campaigns to achieve their customer acquisition goals.

When done properly, the addition of this type of content can be extremely beneficial to both SEO in finance and to data collection. If the payoff is compelling enough, users may share information that can help you more quickly qualify them for next steps.

3. Keep an Eye on the Competition

When it’s time for our fintech partners to plan their off-page SEO strategy (aka earned media), we start with a peek at their respective competitors’ backlinks. An assessment of linked content on competitor and peer websites often reveals the right types of content that your fintech company should produce for your own successful SEO program (e.g., landing pages vs blog content), what kind of outreach you should consider (e.g., listicle mentions, competitive link stealing), as well as what sources are linking to competitor content (e.g., specific news sites or publications).

For example, we used Ahrefs to grab the backlink profile for Lemonade insurance company. Using filters, we can see a list of backlinks that is chock full of aggregators, news sites, and listicles. Lemonade has created useful pages on topics like jewelry insurance that are getting picked up by third-party sites and shared.

You likely won’t know exactly what formula of outreach, in-house content creation, or third-party relationships your competitors have in place to achieve their results. You will, however, be able to see the content at the center of it all, and that’s what you’ll need to start developing your link-building strategy.

Notice the types of content that gets shared the most often, and what keywords or phrases they’re using to connect interested fintech audiences to those articles or information. Start creating your own, even better content for the words and terms that are key to your business, and develop some good outreach strategies to improve the probability of success.

4. When and How to Invest in SEO

When you are ready to see even great returns on your SEO strategy for your fintech website, we recommend looking at the supporting pieces for your SEO program. This includes the infrastructure used to implement your strategy, like personnel devoted to SEO and the programs they have at their disposal, as well as complementary digital marketing programs like paid ads.

A comprehensive tech stack (e.g., Ahrefs or Semrush for keyword research), and specialty programs (e.g., PR and outreach in your niche) will help improve your SEO team’s capabilities and efficiency, giving them access to the data they need to better track success.

When you need to give your messaging more of an immediate boost or you’re finding it hard to break into search results for key terms organically, paid ads are the best tactic. Plan for paid support when you have big company announcements or planned marketing pushes, as well as during key investment times or moments when there are more people than usual searching for the financial terms you’re targeting.

Look for any other opportunities to cross promote your message to help supplement your SEO finance strategy. Any time you can validate the content that you have on your website, you’ll be improving your overall website health and helping your content get in front of the right eyeballs.

5. The Details Matter

One additional tactic that will benefit your fintech website’s SEO is schema markup.

Schema markup (aka structured data) is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. This added layer of data will increase the likelihood that your page triggers a rich snippet for the content you’re publishing, giving searchers (and search engines) added context about the value of your website.

Check out this list of Schema.org markup for banks and financial institutions. Applying this added layer of information to your web pages is fairly straightforward and may pay big dividends to help set your content apart from other similar finance-related information. If search engines have a better understanding of what exactly it is you are sharing, they’ll be able to let searchers know, as well.

Don’t forget about FAQ markup, which is perfect for pages that contain both questions and answers. Below is an example of an FAQ rich result for Lemonade’s page, “What Renters Insurance Does (and Doesn't) Cover.” Lemonade takes up more real estate in results with this schema markup:

Google provides several resources to help you implement schema markup.

Why Fintech Businesses Choose Workshop

Our analysts are always looking for ways to find an edge for fintech websites, from developing robust digital marketing strategies for banks to staying on top of the latest rollouts and announcements in the digital marketing space. Our passion for the ideas and strategies we create is evident in the great results we see in our partnerships.