Prioritising SEO for Financial Services

Financial services companies have to work harder than most to build an organic search presence. However, the data that matters shows that organic search is the most important channel for financial services – not only generating traffic but also driving revenue, ROI and business growth.

Despite this, many financial services marketers struggle to make a compelling business case to senior executives for prioritising SEO and securing the budget it deserves. So, how can marketers prove SEO's real value and gain the buy-in needed to unlock its full potential?

Why organic search is the most important channel for financial services

If you need to make the case that organic search is the most valuable channel to invest in, focus on the following three points:

• Organic search is the second largest channel for financial services traffic

• Organic search is the top marketing channel for ROI

• SEO returns compound and multiply over time

Although it takes time to get results, organic search drives the most traffic, the highest ROI and the strongest business growth opportunity for financial services companies.

Now, let's look at the numbers that prove these points.

Organic search is the second largest channel for financial services traffic

In our recent guide Competing for Organic Traffic in Financial Services, we saw that organic search is the second largest channel for generating traffic.

According to Similarweb data, organic search drives 19.29% of financial services traffic. Then, you have a further 11.6% from referral traffic, most of which should come from the inbound links secured from your off-page SEO.

This tells us the average financial services company generates over 30% of its traffic from organic rankings and off-page SEO.

Interestingly, the same report finds 62.62% of financial service traffic is direct – far higher than other industry benchmarks. Similarweb defines direct traffic as: “Traffic from users directly entering the URL, using a bookmark, or clicking a saved link”.

By this definition, direct traffic represents sessions where users actively choose to visit your website. So, brand awareness and recall are the key drivers of direct traffic, which requires multichannel visibility:

• Search rankings for important keywords

• Content placements on third-party sites (off-page SEO)

• Visibility on comparison websites

• Online press coverage

• Affiliate marketing content

• Paid search impressions

• Social visibility

• Offline ads – TV, print, etc.

Elsewhere, marketers also say that SEO is the top channel for driving brand awareness.

The key point here is that SEO is the main driver behind the top three sources of traffic: direct, organic search and referrals.

That’s 93.52% of all financial services traffic.

SEO is the top channel for ROI

The latest HubSpot research finds SEO is the top-performing marketing channel for ROI – and you’ll see the same conclusion in many other reports.

In a separate study, Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks report compares the conversion rates of each marketing channel.

The top three channels for conversion rates are:

1. Direct – 3.2%

2. Paid search – 2.6%

3. Organic search – 2.3%

We see a similar pattern with conversion rates as we do with traffic share. Direct traffic is the clear winner while organic search closely follows PPC.

Now, if SEO is the key driver of direct traffic, its contribution to conversions grows – and this is before you consider conversions from referral traffic and other channels.

Taking this further, if we’re saying that SEO generates roughly 90% of financial services traffic and converts 2-3% of visits, the business case for prioritising SEO is pretty clear.

How long will it take to generate the same volume of traffic from PPC if paid search averages just 0.83% of traffic for financial services, according to our first graph?

If your website generates 100,000 visits next month, that’s a traffic share of roughly 90,000 organic visits vs around 8,000 paid. Even at the same conversion rate of 3%, that’s 2,700 leads from SEO vs. 240 from paid search.

Most companies would struggle to match those monthly traffic volumes from paid search, even if they had the required budget.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that SEO needs time to start generating ROI. It requires an upfront investment, whereas PPC can get quick results from a lower initial spend.

The problem is, that you have to keep spending with PPC to maintain traffic volumes that will never match your organic potential.

If you map out customer acquisition vs expenses for SEO and PPC, you should see something like this:

Everything you do with SEO now will continue to drive traffic and revenue in the future, as long as you maintain visibility and content quality.

If you pause PPC ad spend, the traffic stops dead. If you miss uploading a piece of content while prioritising other things, you’ll still get comparable traffic volumes from organic search.

SEO is the channel that keeps driving business and multiplies ROI over time, due to the compound impact of search marketing.

The compound impact of SEO

The compound impact of SEO describes how the return on investment from a mature SEO strategy multiplies.

Old pages continue to drive traffic and, as long as you maintain relative ranking positions, you can generate consistent traffic volumes.

Then, as you create new pages, you increase keyword coverage and, with ongoing optimisation, these pages will generate more traffic over time.

So, every page that ranks well multiplies your traffic potential.

Once your SEO strategy starts getting results, you’ll build a baseline of incoming traffic from your top-performing pages. Meanwhile, ongoing optimisation maintains the visibility of your top pages while improving the rankings of more recent ones.

This adds a second layer of growth to the ROI of your SEO strategy.

As the baseline gradually increases traffic volumes over time, SEO maintenance keeps every page performing to its best ability. This builds a reputation with search engines for consistently delivering accurate, relevant and valuable information.

This is particularly important for financial services companies that face the highest level of quality scrutiny under E-E-A-T and YMYL.

As you optimise for new opportunities, the baseline and maintenance levels of your SEO strategy continue to generate the bulk of your traffic while also building brand awareness and domain authority.

As search engines and your target audience gain trust in your domain, you get faster results from new campaigns. Once all three levels of your SEO strategy gain momentum, each level starts fuelling further growth.

This is the compound impact of a mature SEO strategy and precisely why this is the top channel for ROI.

Key takeaways

• Organic traffic is the most important commodity for financial services

• Direct and search are the top two channels for driving organic traffic

• SEO is the key driver of direct traffic (through brand awareness)

• Organic search is one of the top channels for conversion rates (direct, paid search and organic search)

• SEO is the top marketing channel for ROI

• The compound impact of a mature SEO strategy multiplies ROI over time

• To maximise ROI, you need an SEO strategy that builds baseline visibility and maintains it while you optimise for new opportunities

Making the business case for SEO investment

To make the business case for SEO investment, you need to demonstrate the value it already adds to the business.

Then, you want to show what more you can achieve with greater investment and set clear, achievable goals that align with those of the business.

Prove the current value of SEO

To prove the value of SEO to senior executives, you need to attribute revenue to the traffic you generate.

This starts with attributing traffic sources to key channels. Earlier, we looked at the average traffic share benchmarks for financial services companies:

• Direct – 62.62%

• Organic search – 19.3%

• Referrals – 11.6%

Compare your own traffic share against these benchmarks to get a sense of how your channels perform.

Keep in mind that these are averages. So, if your organic traffic share isn’t around 20% or higher, this suggests you have a real opportunity to drive more business from organic search.

Any increase in traffic also increases total conversions and revenue, even at the same conversion rate.

Likewise, if your direct traffic share isn’t up there, you’ve got a strong case for reinforcing your SEO strategy with multichannel brand awareness campaigns.

Remember, financial services companies generate more direct traffic than other industry averages. This is because brand awareness and recall play such a large part in the customer journey.

Make sure you communicate the role SEO plays in brand awareness and direct traffic.

Now, traffic share and volumes are important, but leadership will want to know your SEO strategy is generating revenue. To show this, you need to attribute conversions and other valuable actions to visits from each channel.

Again, we looked at some averages earlier:

1. Direct – 3.2%

2. Paid search – 2.6%

3. Organic search – 2.3%

Not all conversions are equally valuable, though. Ideally, you want to implement event tracking in Google Analytics so you can attribute different conversion actions to organic sessions: purchases, quotes, inquiries, form submissions, etc.

This helps you report a more accurate relationship between SEO traffic and business revenue.

Show what you can achieve with greater SEO investment

Once you prove the value your SEO strategy currently adds to the business, you can put forward proposals for additional investment. Senior executives will want to see three key things from a convincing pitch:

• Opportunities. Pitch the most valuable opportunities, demonstrating how they’ll add more value to the business.

• Forecasts. Calculate the outcome of campaigns to demonstrate an expected return on investment.

• Expenses. Set out the required budget, resources and timeline for achieving your goals.

Start by pinpointing what already works. Go back to your traffic share from each channel (organic search, referrals, direct, etc.) and look for opportunities to increase returns.

For example, if you notice referral traffic from certain third-party websites has particularly strong conversion rates, you can target similar content placements on other sites.

Next, you want to run a full SEO audit to identify any important fixes and potential quick wins:

• Website audit. Run a complete website diagnostic for overall performance, technical SEO and on-page SEO.

• Keyword research. Identify gaps in your keyword strategy and prioritise opportunities based on traffic volumes, keyword difficulty, etc.

• Topic coverage. Review topic coverage and the depth of coverage – not only in terms of target keywords, but how users navigate from one page on your website towards conversion goals.

• Content analysis. Review all of your content, paying close attention to quality, accuracy and the requirements of E-E-A-T and YMYL.

• Keyword cannibalisation. Check for multiple pages targeting the same keyword and competing against each other.

• Link building opportunities. Assess your link profile, the most valuable inbound links and look for new opportunities that could add similar value.

• Content placements. Review your content placements on third-party websites and look for new opportunities – not only in terms of building links, but also brand awareness and recall.

Once you’re done with your own website, competitor analysis helps you determine which opportunities to prioritise. You might discover some quick wins in keywords your competitors have overlooked or realise you need to play the long game on the more competitive opportunities.

First of all, make sure you know who your competitors are for priority keywords. Then, it’s a case of running the same kind of audit you did for your own website and SEO strategy:

• Target keywords

• Ranking positions

• Traffic volumes

• Traffic sources

• Content analysis

• Link profiles

• Content placements

• Technical SEO

• Website performance

Above all, you need to show senior executives what it’s going to take to beat rivals in the SERPs and what kind of returns they’re going to get.

The more detail you get out of your competitor analysis, the better placed you are to calculate the total budget, time and resources required for each campaign.

Once you’ve identified the biggest opportunities, you can present a more compelling pitch by forecasting SEO outcomes.

For example, you can use historical search data (search volumes, traffic volumes, etc.) to predict traffic potentials from climbing ranking positions for specific target keywords.

Then, you can apply predicted traffic increases to your existing conversion rates, average conversion value, etc. to predict revenue increases.

Now, you can pitch to executives with a specific goal of climbing from one ranking position to another for target keywords – and show the revenue this will generate in specific numbers.

You can also apply these forecasts to conversion optimisation campaigns to show how much more revenue you can generate with higher rankings and conversion rates, average conversion values, etc.

Show that SEO is the best place to invest

If you need to make the case for SEO as the priority channel, you can also forecast outcomes for other strategies such as paid advertising. You can show how much investment it would take to match the same traffic volumes, plus a timeline for ROI and revenue.

Go back to the traffic and conversion data we looked at earlier. Show the compound impact of SEO to illustrate how ROI will multiply over time, compared to the linear growth of other channels like PPC.

Then, show what it would cost to achieve similar things with other channels.

According to WordStream’s Google Ads Benchmarks 2023 report, the average CPC for finance keywords is $4.01 (£3.16). Elsewhere, it finds that the average cost per action for finance keywords is $81.93 (£64.74).

We recently compared some ranking position changes for one of the most competitive keywords in financial services: “car insurance”.

We monitored the top-ranking domains between July 4 and July 9 to analyse ranking position changes, the traffic they generated and what it would cost to generate the same traffic increase from PPC at an average CPC of £3.24.

When we multiply the equivalent PPC costs for those five days to get a monthly total, these brands would need to spend tens of thousands every month to sustain traffic levels from this single keyword:

On the other hand, ranking organically in position four, you’re generating consistent traffic levels every month without the high ongoing expense.

Now, if we look at a CTR comparison for the top four ad positions vs the top four organic positions, this is what we get:

Now, let’s combine this with the traffic share insights we discussed earlier. This tells us a mature SEO strategy can drive around 90% of traffic for financial services companies at a CTR of 7.2% or more from ranking in the top four positions.

Compare this to PPC campaigns with average CPCs maxing out at 2.1% and CPCs of £3.24.

Show what it takes to maintain results

One of the hardest things for executives to accept with SEO is the importance of ongoing optimisation. Reaching the top-ranking positions is one thing, but staying there is another challenge entirely.

Thankfully, it’s generally a lot easier to maintain ranking positions than reach them in the first place. 

Earlier, we discussed the compound impact of SEO and how you can scale performance by building baseline visibility, maintaining ranking positions and optimising for new opportunities.

That maintenance level is crucial because it protects your baseline visibility, builds on it and enhances everything else you do.

With ongoing optimisation, pages you published years ago can continue to climb the SERPs.

The opposite is also true, though. Without SEO maintenance, the information on your pages will naturally lose accuracy and relevance over time. The technical performance of your site will also decline and, suddenly, you’re sending all the wrong signals to search engines.

You drop down the SERPs, traffic volumes decline and your revenue from organic traffic suffers.

To protect your search rankings and maintain your baseline visibility, your SEO budget also needs to cover the following:

• Regular technical audits

• Content reviews

• Content updates

• Managing keyword cannibalisation

• Backlink analysis

• Regular competitor analysis

• Managing algorithm updates

SEO maintenance is crucial for any brand managing a search presence, but it’s particularly important for financial services.

Things change quickly in this industry and any inaccurate or out-of-date information can have real financial implications. This is why Google is so strict with its content quality guidelines for financial services (E-E-A-T and YMYL) and why domains in this sector are often hit so hard by algorithm updates.

Make sure your proposals show the value of ongoing optimisation and set clear budgets for SEO maintenance.

Reporting SEO success to senior executives

To secure the next round of investment for SEO, you need a reporting system that presents results in a way that resonates with senior executives.

Showcase the success of SEO campaigns

SEO reports for executives need to communicate value quickly and concisely. They’re not always interested in details; they want to know what SEO is doing for the business and why they should dedicate more budget to it.

Highlight the KPIs and metrics they care about as the central theme throughout your reports: revenue, profit, return on investment, etc.

Align everything in your reports with the wider goals of the business. If the company’s business strategy for next year focuses on growth, then so should your reports. If the emphasis is on managing costs during a difficult financial period, then your SEO strategy and reports need to reflect this.

This is why it’s so important (as we mentioned earlier) that you set clear SEO goals that align with the wider goals of the business during the early planning stages.

Tackle the challenges of reporting ROI for SEO

Accurately reporting the full ROI of SEO is challenging for several reasons:

• Attribution. Marketing technology is yet to produce a reliable system for crediting organic traffic at the top of the funnel to actions further down the consumer journey.

• Data collection. Collecting data from organic visitors is increasingly difficult, especially since the introduction of privacy regulations like GDPR.

• Multichannel interactions. Other channels with greater access to data (PPC, social media, email marketing, etc.) can claim more than their fair share of credit for leads.

• Delayed ROI. It takes time to get results from SEO, which only adds to the complexities of attributing conversions, revenue and ROI.

• Algorithm updates. Although it’s usually easy to attribute ranking drops to major algorithm updates, identifying the cause of declines and resolving them is often difficult.

• External variables. Seasonality, changing demands, economic factors and a range of other variables can impact SEO performance – and they’re not always easy to attribute.

Acknowledge the challenges and limitations of SEO attribution in your proposals.

Don’t let senior executives see this as a weakness of search optimisation. Position it as one of the reasons SEO is adding more value to the business than they probably realise.

Your next challenge is to implement a reporting system that closes these data gaps, so you can fairly attribute more credit to your SEO strategy.

Forecast the next round of SEO investment

Unless the business has legitimate reasons to cut marketing expenses, you either want to secure the same SEO budget for the next period – or, better yet, increase investment.

To make this case, you want to forecast two things for the next financial period:

• What you can do with the current level of investment

• What you can achieve with increased investment

Follow the same presentation formula as your reports for senior executives:

• Align business goals with SEO opportunities

• Set clear, achievable targets

• Show the campaign performance requirements to achieve your goals (traffic levels, conversion rates, revenue, etc.)

• Forecast outcomes in the KPIs and metrics senior execs care about

• Specify the resources you’ll need to run each campaign

• Set realistic timelines for campaign outcomes

• Define the budget you’ll need to make it happen

If you know what the business goals are for the next financial period, forecast projections for SEO goals that align with them.

If you don’t have this information, then use the outcomes from your latest SEO campaigns and calculate what you could have achieved with the budget you’re requesting for the following year.

Bringing it all together

To summarise everything we’ve covered in this article, here’s a quick reminder of what it takes to convince senior executives to prioritise SEO for financial services:

• Show why organic traffic is the most profitable channel for financial services companies

• Align your SEO goals with those of the business

• Attribute the metrics they care about to your SEO efforts: conversions, revenue, profit, ROI, etc.

• Prove the value your SEO strategy currently adds to the business

• Forecast what you can achieve with a higher budget – in the metrics they care about

• Pitch proposals with clear goals and projected outcomes

• Show the importance of ongoing optimisation and protecting search rankings

• Demonstrate the compound impact of SEO and how it multiplies ROI over time

• Compile SEO reports that senior executives will buy into

About the author

Shaun primarily looks after new business and growth strategy for Reddico. He has been in digital marketing for over 16 years, starting his journey at one of the UK's oldest SEO agencies. His background has allowed him to gain skills and experience in a myriad of marketing disciplines including SEO, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and Digital PR. Having multichannel experience gives Shaun the edge when helping clients to build a strong SEO strategy.

Reddico financial services clients

Reddico has worked with numerous leading financial services brands including BlackRock (case study), Compare the Market, Direct Line (case study), eFront, Finimize (case study), Totally Money and Wellington Management.

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