Competing for organic traffic in Financial Services

SEO is challenging for every industry, but financial services brands have to fight harder than most to rank at the top of results pages. Aside from intense competition, Google places strict quality guidelines on financial services content, making you particularly vulnerable to algorithm updates.

Building search visibility can feel impossible for new and smaller financial services brands. And, while it’s not easy, it’s certainly possible with the right strategy, especially if you use the volatility of financial services SEO to your advantage.

In this guide, we discuss the current state of SEO for financial services and how to overcome its biggest challenges in 2024.

The state of financial services SEO

The SEO landscape is constantly changing, bringing new challenges and opportunities. So, let’s start by addressing the current state of SEO in 2024 and what this means for financial services brands.

Winning organic traffic is tough

Organic traffic is the currency of SEO and it’s only getting harder to rank in the top positions that consistently drive traffic. There are several reasons for this: 

• The big guns: The big, established brands dominate the top of results pages for the most valuable keywords.

• Comparison sites: If the big guns aren’t dominating the top spots for your target keyword, the comparison sites probably are

• Zero-click searches: According to Semrush, 25% of desktop searches and 57% of mobile searches in 2022 ended without clicking through to a website – largely driven by featured snippets and other SERP features.

• Declining traffic: Organic traffic is down across all industries with a 1.3% decline for financial services between Q4 2023 and Q4 2022.

• AI Overviews: As if featured snippets aren’t taking enough potential traffic away from sites, Google AI Overviews use content from pages to generate instant answers at the top of results pages.

• E-E-A-T and YMYL: Financial services content is some of the most scrutinised by Google’s quality raters.

• Algorithm updates: Google can reshuffle the SERPs and its ranking factors at any moment with an algorithm update.

• Industry developments: The financial services industry is volatile at the best of times with constant disruption from economic shocks, new technologies and sweeping industry trends – eg: the rise of fintech.

• Regulations/compliance: Strict regulations require all financial marketing content to be 100% accurate, transparent – and always up to date.

As these challenges mount up, driving organic traffic becomes increasingly difficult. However, every financial services brand outside of the top-ranking positions is facing the same challenges. So, don’t be afraid of these problems. Tackle them head-on, because this is where you’ll gain the most ground on your competitors.

Financial services traffic share: Organic vs. paid and other channels

According to Similarweb’s financial services benchmarks, direct (61%) is the main source of traffic for the top financial services websites globally, followed by organic search (19.3%) and referral traffic (11.6%). Their remaining traffic comes from email (2.9%), social media (2.1%), paid search (0.8%) and display advertising (0.6%).

Source

We get a different breakdown from Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks, but the similarities are telling:

1. Direct: 46.7%

2. Organic search: 25.5%

3. Paid search: 10.0%

4. Paid social: 2.1%

5. Email: 2.1%

6. Organic social: 0.2%

7. Other: 11.5%

The key takeaway here is that organic search is the most important channel for driving traffic to financial services websites.

The industry also has the highest levels of direct traffic in Contentsquare’s benchmark report. Direct traffic includes users who visit websites by typing in URLs, using autocomplete to revisit, bookmark websites, etc. This raises the importance of building brand awareness through organic visibility, social reach, link building and digital PR while optimising for branded searches.

Evidence is mounting that Google is placing more importance on branded searches.

However, direct traffic also counts visitors from unknown sources. This can include bot traffic, visitors accessing through in-app browsers, traffic via URLs with poorly implemented UTM parameters – and a range of other untrackable sources.

The impact of ranking higher in the top 10

To showcase the value of increasing ranking positions in the top 10 results, let’s look at one of the most competitive keywords in financial services: “car insurance”. We tracked ranking positions for five consecutive days to measure the impact of climbing the SERPs.

We’re particularly interested in brands that were ranking in positions 5-11 on July 4 and climbed one position by July 9. We can see how much extra traffic this climb generated over the five days and – at an average CPC of £3.24 – how much it would cost to drive the same traffic increase with PPC ads.

Now, if we multiply the traffic increase from these five days to estimate a monthly total, we get the following:

Those are some hefty advertising fees for the equivalent traffic increases there, but it’s not always as simple as paying your way to traffic. If we look at the average CTRs for organic ranking positions vs. the top pack of paid ads, you’ll see paid ads struggle to keep up with the top ranking positions, especially when you break into the top three.

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Yes, ranking in the top 10 positions for competitive keywords is challenging, but the potential payoffs are huge. Even climbing one position in the top 10 for the most competitive keywords is transformational for competing financial service providers.

The most competitive keywords are worth fighting for, even if it takes time and hard work. Implement long-term strategies to build visibility for the most valuable keywords. Meanwhile, build momentum elsewhere by targeting quick wins using less competitive keywords with relatively high search volumes and commercial value.

Key takeaways

After analysing the state of SEO for financial services in 2024, here’s a quick summary of the key takeaways:

• Organic search is the most important channel for driving traffic

• Build quick momentum with easy wins – eg: high-volume, low-competition keywords

• Be ambitious with your long-term SEO goals – climbing a few spots for competitive keywords can make a big difference

• Build brand awareness through every channel (organic visibility, social reach, link building, digital PR, etc.) and optimise for branded searches 

• Financial services PPC traffic is expensive – so prioritise the highest-ROI traffic with paid campaigns

• Tackle these SEO challenges head-on – this is where every company struggles and the biggest wins are gained

Now, let’s address these SEO challenges we listed at the start of this article. Gaining ground in these areas will increase visibility for the queries that matter most and generate more of the most valuable kind of traffic.

Competing with the big guns and comparison sites

The most visible SEO challenge for financial service providers is that industry leaders and comparison sites dominate results pages. So, how can you put together an SEO strategy that competes with the biggest names in the industry?

You can gain ground by combining strategies for low-competition quick wins and long-term SEO goals with the following strategies:

1. Keyword and topic coverage

2. Competitor analysis

3. Quality content

4. Link building

5. Engagement signals and UX

Now, let’s discuss how you can use each of these strategies to implement an SEO strategy that competes with the biggest financial service providers.

Keyword and topic coverage

With keyword research and topic coverage analysis, you can set out your primary target keywords and identify lower-competition opportunities. This is where you can unlock some of those quick wins by finding the right balance of search volume vs keyword difficulty (ie: competitiveness).

Monitoring search trends is a great place to start because you can identify emerging opportunities before your rivals start optimising for them. Pull data from Google Trends or use an automated trend analysis tool like Glimpse to track keywords and topics.

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You can also look for topic coverage gaps by creating topic clusters from important keywords. Financial services are complex by nature and many audiences are overwhelmed by the sheer amount and technical nature of information.

Use this to identify keyword/topic opportunities, but also to create content funnels through your website. You can use these to guide visitors through multiple pages and sub-topics as they need more information, bringing them one step closer to converting with every click.

Going back to the idea of reactive content, respond to key developments before your competitors – eg: the latest regulatory rulings, government initiatives, market shocks, etc.

Competitor analysis

Every competitor has their strengths and weaknesses – some you can take advantage of sooner than others. Again, this brings us back to the idea of identifying quick wins and optimising for more ambitious, long-term goals.

For the strategies we’re covering in this section, start with the following:

• Map out their ranking positions for your target keywords

• Audit their website health and technical SEO

• Analyse their best content

• Look for gaps in their keyword strategy and topic coverage

• Analyse their link profiles

• Identify their most valuable inbound links

• Look for backlink opportunities they’ve missed

• Assess the UX of their website

• Check their Core Web Vitals performance

• Analyse their pages for E-E-A-T signals

Identify your competitors’ weaknesses and use them to your advantage. Use their strengths and benchmarks to elevate your site and SEO strategy.

Quality content

We hear it all the time: quality content is the key to SEO, but what does this really mean? Well, as mentioned earlier, Google places some of the strictest quality requirements on financial services content.

So, here’s a summary of some of the key things you have to consider:

• Purpose: What is the purpose of the page in question and how does this benefit the end user?

• Search intent: What are visitors looking for when they click through to this page?

• Keyword and topical relevance: How closely does the content on your page match the users’ search query?

• Accuracy: How accurate is the information on your page?

• Inbound links: How many third-party websites consider your page valuable enough to link to?

• Outbound links: Which websites are you linking out to and why (eg: stats, citations, etc.)?

• Content freshness: When was the page published or most recently updated and how up-to-date is its content?

• Uniqueness: How unique is the content on this page and what does it offer that users won’t find elsewhere?

• Depth: How detailed is the content on this page and how well does it fulfil the search intent?

• E-E-A-T: How well does the page satisfy Google’s quality rater guidelines?

• Engagement: How and to what extent are users engaging with the page?

One of the biggest challenges for financial service providers is constantly providing accurate information.

Industry regulations leave very little room for error with the accuracy of information. Likewise, Google is especially strict when it comes to information accuracy for financial services content – as we’ll discuss when we talk about E-E-A-T in more detail later on.

This is all exacerbated by the fact that legislation, court rulings, market shifts, new technologies and various other factors can send ripples through the industry.

As soon as anything changes, any relevant content needs updating for accuracy and freshness almost instantly. This is, of course, a serious challenge for financial service providers, but it’s also an opportunity to beat rivals to the punch.

Take a look at our article on creating financial services content for further guidance.

Link building

Google likes to tell us that links aren’t as important as they used to be and all you need to worry about is creating quality content. However, we know this isn’t the case.

There’s plenty of public data making a strong case for the importance of quality, inbound links. For example, the latest analysis finds that 96% of sites ranking in Google’s top 10 positions have over 1,000 links from unique domains.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, only 0.3% of websites ranking in the top 10 have fewer than 100 backlinks and no websites with 50 links or fewer rank in the top 10 positions.

More importantly, we know from our own campaign data that quality link profiles are as important as ever – especially when you’re optimising for competitive keywords.

In fact, backlinks were the key strategy in getting one of the country’s biggest insurance providers back on page one after it was hit by a manual search penalty.

So, how do you develop an effective link building strategy for financial services pages?

• Statistics: Publishers are always looking for the latest insights to support their agenda, so run surveys, studies and other statistical content they’ll love to reference and link to.

• Thought leadership: Establish your brand as an authority with content that offers insights, innovative ideas and advice.

• Partnerships: Team up with authoritative sites to create insightful content, studies, articles, etc.

• Network: Build reputations with journalists, writers and industry publications who can reach out to you when they need expert contributions.

• News coverage: Give journalists and publications good reason to write about your business.

• Editorial content: Write for leading publications as an expert contributor.

• Guest posts: Publish guest content on relevant, high-authority websites.

• Updates: Update your best content to keep earning links and retain existing ones.

• Citations: Ask valuable websites that cite your brand or content (without a link) to add one.

• Outreach: Reach out to target publishers linking to rival pages offering superior content, the latest insights, etc.

• Reactive content: Respond to the latest industry developments, audience concerns, etc. with content publishers will want to share, reference and link to.

Implement these link building strategies alongside a broader digital PR campaign to build brand awareness. This will help you optimise for other metrics than enhance link building, such as brand mentions and citations.

We’ll explain why this is important in more detail a little later on.

Link building example #1: Hiscox

Hiscox ranks in position #1 for “small business insurance” in the UK. Unsurprisingly, the company excels at link building with 28K backlinks pointing to its domain from 4.7K unique websites – 78% of which are do-follow links.

Hiscox consistently publishes data-driven reports on the topics its target audience and publishers around the web care about. Its Cyber Readiness Report series performs particularly well, generating a fresh supply of new, high-quality links as the latest version is released every year.

Hiscox’s latest report currently has 211 backlinks from 143 unique sources – 89% of which are do-follow links. Crucially, the 2019 version of its report is still earning new backlinks, currently standing at 385 inbound links from 311 unique sources with a 91% do-follow rate.

Link building example #2: Standard Life

Moving a little down the SERPs, Standard Life ranks in position #5 for “personal pension” in the UK. At the domain level, Standard Life has 22K backlinks from 2.7K sources. Now, if you look at Standard Life’s product and sub-product pages, each level has a smaller share of high-quality backlinks.

For example, its pensions page has 151 backlinks from 51 sources and its personal pensions page has 25 links from 20 sources. Crucially, the relevance and quality of the backlinks pointing to category pages is relatively high, most notably from comparison sites like MoneySavingExpert.

Quality beats quantity in link building and you want two key things here: topical relevance between your page and the linking page and, ideally, relatively high domain ratings.

Link building example #3: Yorkshire Building Society

As we get more niche topically, Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) ranks in position #4 for “best cash ISA” in the UK. Now, YBS’ backlink strategy is doing its best work in securing links for its product pages from high-authority sources like This Is Money and MoneySavingExpert, particularly in their product recommendation lists.

The top-ranking page for “best cash ISA” in the UK is MoneySaving Experts’ guide to cash ISAs and guess which bank is among the recommendations – yes, Yorkshire Building Society with a link pointing to its cash ISA product page.

Aside from featuring in product recommendation articles, YBS has also positioned itself as a citation source for publications like Investopedia on topics including “the benefits of offset mortgages”.

Now, if we look at YBS’ product page for cash ISAs, we can start to see why it might attract such links from websites like Investopedia. Aside from product information, the page is filled with general info and advice on ISAs with plenty of links to guides and further information on its website.

The page offers specific examples and figures to help visitors make sense of what the product offers in everyday terms. Above all, this is helpful content that provides accurate information that helps potential customers make informed decisions – crucial for trust, E-E-A-T and YMYL.

Clearly, it’s also the kind of information a site like Investopedia wants to source and a perfect candidate for SERP features like feature snippets and AI Overviews.

Yorkshire Building Society’s product pages are a lesson in not only optimising for backlinks, but also every SEO challenge financial service providers face today.

Engagement and UX signals

Users are the priority in every search experience. Any time we talk about something subjective like search intent, content quality or user experience, the answer lies in user activity.

Quite simply, if your content gives visitors what they’re looking for, they’re going to hang around and engage with the page. Otherwise, they’re going to head back to the results page and look elsewhere.

Let’s apply this concept to search intent. If someone types in an informational query like “what does a good home insurance policy cover,” it’s clear they’re looking for in-depth information.

In this instance, you want to send strong on-page engagement and UX performance signals.

This means a good amount of time spent on the page and engaging with your content. Better yet, you want them to click through to other pages for more information (not back to search) and, if possible, some kind of conversion: using your comparison tool, requesting a quote, downloading a guide, etc.

Compare this to a branded search for a payment company’s mobile app. For this search, you want users clicking through to your download page, hitting the download button and quitting the session to log into that app of yours.

Forget about time on page and pages visited. Concentrate on fast loading times, responsive pages and getting that conversion.

Dealing with AI Overviews and zero-click searches

Zero-click searches – where users complete a search without clicking through to a website – are a major SEO concern these days.

Back in 2021, SparkToro published findings that 64.82% of Google searches in 2020 were zero-click, mostly due to featured snippets providing the information users needed on the results page.

More recently, Semrush published insights for 2022 showing 25.6% zero-click searches on desktop and 17.3% zero-click searches on mobile.

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Roughly 11% of all searches show featured snippets although they show twice as often on desktop vs mobile and they can significantly increase CTRs – at the expense of other results, though.

Featured snippets aren’t the only contributor to zero-click searches, either.

While Google AI Overviews only started rolling out in the UK in August, they launched in the US back in May and are having an impact. They appear for roughly 9% of all queries, automatically generating answers to user questions at the top of results pages.

The real kicker is that Google uses content from websites to generate these answers – and it doesn’t always clearly cite its references. So, Google rewards the best, most relevant content for a query by using it to automatically generate its own answers and, potentially, prevent traffic from clicking through.

No wonder SEOs are raising concerns about the potential impact of AI Overviews and zero-click searches.

The good news is, AI Overviews show far less often now – a major drop to 8.71% from 64% when they first rolled out as Search Generative Experience. Another study cites a drop to 7.6% from 17.4% over a similar period.

Another small silver lining presents itself in Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks report. As mentioned earlier, organic traffic is down across all industries with a -3.6% drop between Q4 2022-Q4 2023.

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Luckily, financial services websites are faring better than most with a 1.3% drop in organic traffic over the same period. Of course, this data won’t include the impact of AI Overviews (not in the UK, anyway). 

Crucially, though, financial services is not among the top content categories for showing AI Overviews, although the numbers vary across studies.

Either way, it’s too early to draw any concrete conclusions, but how can financial service providers deal with the risk of zero-click searches?

How to deal with zero-click searches

The impact of zero-click searches will continue to evolve, but financial service providers can take action now to limit the impact on SEO performance. This starts with analysis and, potentially, adapting a few key optimisations:

1. Analyse zero-click sessions: Identify the queries triggering featured snippets and AI Overviews and analyse the search intent (informational, commercial, etc.).

2. Prioritise commercial queries: Zero-click searches mostly impact informational queries and, as shown above, even the smallest ranking increase for competitive keywords can generate massive traffic increases – so don’t be afraid to target those most competitive, commercial keywords.

3. Target click searches: Prioritise informational queries that don’t trigger featured snippets or AI Overviews.

4. E-E-A-T and YMYL: As with all generative AI technology, Google’s AI Overviews have an accuracy problem that could limit their presence for YMYL topics in finance – so use this to your advantage by prioritising YMYL pages and optimising for the highest E-E-A-T standards.

5. Optimise for featured snippets: Turn featured snippets into an opportunity (like the Yorkshire Building Society examples from earlier) instead of a threat – some reports put snippet CTRs as high as 42.9%.

6. Optimise for AI Overviews: If AI Overviews are showing for valuable keywords, optimise for them in the same way as featured snippets.

7. Link building: Aside from increasing your rankings for target keywords, backlinks build your reputation as a citable source and this increases your chances of showing in featured snippets and/or AI Overviews.

Early data suggests financial services pages may be less vulnerable to AI Overviews and this would make sense in terms of E-E-A-T and YMYL. If Google cares about YMYL as much as it says, it can’t afford to let inaccurate information creep into AI Overviews, particularly for the more informational queries they typically show for.

If your analysis reveals you’re losing out to zero-click searches, put more resources into optimising for the most valuable commercial queries. It might take time to climb the rankings but you can offset this by identifying quick-win opportunities from keywords with relatively high search volumes vs low competition.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to optimise for featured snippets or AI Overviews that are showing for important queries.

Start by building a stronger link building strategy with pages authoritative sites want to link to. The more links, references and citations your pages gain, the more likely they are to show in featured snippets and AI Overviews.

Finally, if Google is going to show AI Overviews for your target keywords, then use AI’s weaknesses to your advantage by doubling down on E-E-A-T and YMYL.

Optimising for E-E-A-T, YMYL and the helpful content update

Google employs a human team of quality raters who are tasked with manually analysing the quality of search results and pages for specific queries.

This team follows the guidance in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF). This is where the concepts of experience, expertise, trust and authority (E-E-A-T) and Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) come from.

E-E-A-T and YMYL are not direct ranking factors but they do give us vital insights on what Google wants from financial services content.

What do E-E-A-T and YMYL mean for financial services providers?

E-E-A-T is a framework for quality raters to assess the trustworthiness of pages ranking in Google.

The guidelines state that Trust is the most important element of E-E-A-T and that “Experience, Expertise and Authoritativeness can help with your assessment of Trust.

Google tells quality raters to assess E-E-A-T as follows:

• Experience: The extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic.

• Expertise: The extent to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic.

• Authority: The extent to which the content creator or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic.

• Trust: The extent to which the page is accurate, honest, safe and reliable.

Before we explain how you can optimise pages for E-E-A-T, we need to talk about YMYL. You might notice the link in Google’s quality rater guidelines that says: “Some types of pages require a high level of Trust”.

This is where YMYL comes into play.

As the guidelines put it:

“Some topics have a high risk of harm because content about these topics could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society”

“We call these topics ‘Your Money or Your Life’ or YMYL”

Google specifically refers to financial security as a primary consideration for YMYL – “Topics that could damage a person's ability to support themselves and their families.”

So, any financial services page and all financial services content quality as YMYL. And, as YMYL pages, financial services content faces the strictest criteria for E-E-A-T:

“For pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards because low-quality pages on such topics could potentially negatively impact a person's health, financial stability, or safety, or the welfare or  well-being of society.”

This means financial service providers need to optimise for the strictest E-E-A-T standards. 

How to optimise for E-E-A-T

Before we run through the steps of optimising for each element of E-E-A-T, let’s quickly discuss the effectiveness of this strategy for financial services content.

Foundation has an excellent case study looking into Bankrate’s rise up the SERPs in recent years – all from optimising for E-E-A-T. Bankrate is now among the top 10 finance websites and “one of the most-trusted sources of financial advice for millions of people in the US, Canada, UK, and other parts of the world”.

The website now generates over £60 million in revenue from traffic with just 1.3% of visitors coming from paid ads.

Optimising for experience

• Author profiles: Create profiles for all content creators, including bios stating their relevant experience with links to relevant credentials, publications, etc.

• Off-site content: Get your content writers published in off-site content on high-authority, topically relevant websites.

• Personal/professional experience: Although professional experience is more important for financial services content, including relevant examples of professional experiences can enhance trustworthiness – eg: previous claims, cases, projects, etc.

• Case studies: Refer to relevant case studies demonstrating the experience and profile of the company.

Optimising for expertise

• Topic clusters: Use topic clusters to demonstrate expertise and provide complete, in-depth knowledge on the topics your target audience cares about.

• Depth of coverage: Create pillar pages with in-depth overviews of broad topics, linking to sub-topic pages to provide greater depth and value.

• Expert writers: Have topic experts create your content, using specialists as much as possible – eg: mortgage advisors,  market analysts, investors, etc.

• Assigned topics: Assign expert writers to cover their topic of expertise and make this clear in their author bio that they’re qualified for the role.

• Expert contributions: Call in external experts to write on topics outside your areas of expertise or add value to the content you publish on these topics – eg: interviews, quotes, etc.

Source: Nerdwallet’s author bios state their role as writers at the company while demonstrating their experience and expertise

Optimising for authority

• Inbound links: Earning links from relevant, authoritative websites shows that you’re a tested source of information.

• Data content: As mentioned earlier, publishing data-driven content with your own insights (surveys, studies, analysis, etc.) is a great way to earn links and demonstrate authority.

• Thought leadership: Authoritative brands excel at thought leadership and their audiences pay attention to what they have to say.

• Off-site content: Regularly featuring in relevant, authoritative publications shows you’re an authority among industry peers.

• Expert contribution: Just as you can call in experts for your own content, get your experts to contribute to articles, interviews and other this-party content.

Optimising for trust

• Accuracy: Above all, make sure everything you publish is 100% accurate and up to date with the latest info.

• Topical depth: Readers are more likely to trust a source of information they feel provides enough depth for them to gain valuable understanding from.

• Clarity: It’s difficult to trust something you don’t understand, so excel at simplifying complex topics into clear, conversational content.

• Editorial standards: Implement an editorial system with accuracy processes and systems for quality, fact-checking, etc.

• Updates: Update any relevant content as soon as anything changes that could impact the reliability of your information – regulatory changes, new laws, security breaches, etc.

• Citations: Back up points with the latest supporting stats and other citations.

Optimising for helpful content

The helpful content update encourages publishers to create “helpful, reliable, people-first content”. The update first rolled out in August 2022 but, as of March 2024, it is now part of Google’s core algorithm.

Google wants publishers to self-assess their content on the following criteria:

• Content and quality questions: For example, does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis; or does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

• Expertise questions: For example, does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, and background about the author?

• Page experience: Does the page provide a great user experience and perform well with Core Web Vitals?

• People-first content: For example, after reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal; or will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience?

• Avoiding search engine-first content: Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines, or are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?

As you can see, there’s a lot of overlap with E-E-A-T here, so implement a strict optimisation strategy to achieve the highest standards for E-E-A-T and helpful content.

Refer to Google Search Central documentation for more information on the helpful content criteria.

Optimising for cumulative ranking signals

We can talk about the hundreds of different ranking factors and debate which ones are most important, but this kind of misses the point. Ranking factors don’t work in isolation; they’re cumulative signals that reinforce each other – and some combinations reinforce each other more than others.

Example #1: Backlinks

Backlinks are a perfect example of this. Earlier, we explained why backlinks are so important for financial services pages, especially when you’re optimising for competitive keywords.

In fact, a supposed Google leak hints at just how important links still are in Google's algorithm.

Yet, regardless of how important links are, they’re not enough to build a search ranking by themselves. Websites don’t just earn a bunch of high-quality links all of a sudden – not naturally anyway.

As Rand Fishkin explains in his commentary of the alleged Google leak: “If you get a whole bunch of links in one day and nothing else, guess what? You manipulated the link graph. If you’re really a big brand, people should be talking about you.”

Google’s algorithm is smart enough to know that an increase in links should be accompanied with increased brand mentions, citations and a bunch of other supplementary signals.

This means your link building strategy also needs to target these cumulative rankings signals.

The same thing applies to every aspect of your SEO strategy.

Example #2: E-E-A-AT

Let’s go back to E-E-A-T for a moment, given how important this is for financial services pages. You can nail every aspect of E-E-A-T, YMYL and the helpful content update and still struggle to climb the SERPs without optimising for the right cumulative signals.

How is this possible? Well, let’s say you put all of your resources into content strategy and optimising for E-E-A-T, but you don’t pay enough attention to user experience and signals like Core Web Vitals (loading times, interactive responsiveness and visual stability).

Even with the best content in your niche, a poor page experience is going to send a bad bunch of signals back to Google’s algorithm. Users are more likely to bounce, spend less time on the page and engage less with your content.

They’re also less likely to visit multiple pages, get the full value out of your content, and revisit your website in the future. The knock-on effects of this can impact every stage of the customer journey and the cumulative signals Google is paying attention to: engagement, session durations, conversions, etc.

Know what you’re optimising for

It doesn’t matter how great your content is on paper if users aren’t sending the right signals back to Google (time on page, pages visited, events, conversions, etc.)

You need to know which ranking signals to optimise for in every campaign – the primary ranking factor and the supporting signals.

If you’re improving the quality of your content, make sure this translates into engagement, interactions and conversions. If you’re building links, make sure brand mentions and citations are also increasing.

Use the same approach in competitor analysis. Look for gaps in their optimisation strategy that you can use to send a stronger batch of cumulative ranking signals.

Know the purpose of each page and optimise for the search intent

Expanding upon the same idea of cumulative signals, different page types need to send different combinations of signals. For example, on a blog page, the combination of low avg. time on page and high bounce rates is a negative combination.

Yet, a landing page with high conversion rates and bounce rates could suggest you’re giving users exactly what they want.

This is actually the first task for Google’s quality raters. They’re asked to consider the purpose of the page they’re analysing and this determines the criteria of their assessment, including E-E-A-T and YMYL.

“The purpose of a page is the reason or reasons why the page was created. Every page on the Internet is created for a purpose, or for multiple purposes. Most pages are created to be helpful for people, thus having a beneficial purpose. Some pages are created merely to make money, with little or no effort to help people. Some pages are even created to harm users. The first step in understanding a page is figuring out its purpose.”

As you optimise your website and content, consider the purpose of each page and identify the most important signals.

• Homepage: Loading times, time on page, on-page engagement, conversions, pages per visit, etc.

• Insurance policy landing page: YMYL, loading times, conversion rates, CTA impressions, form completion rates, etc.

• Category page: You might focus on the previous page, next page, exit rate, etc. to determine whether category pages are directing users to the right places.

• Loan application page: Conversion rates, form starter rate, form completion rate, time spent, field returns, etc.

• Blog posts: E-E-A-T, helpful content, time on page, scroll depth, referral traffic, pages per visit, etc.

Apply this to funnels and page sequences, too – are you trying to convert users on the landing page or guide them through a series of pages?

Visitors click through to every page with a purpose, whether they realise it or not.

Technical SEO for financial services

Technical SEO is crucial for maximising search rankings. Most importantly, it ensures your search engines like Google can crawl and index your website without any issues. However, it also optimises the technical health of your website, so it can send all of the right positive ranking signals: page speed, Core Web Vitals, internal links, descriptive URLs, etc.

The opposite is also true: poor technical SEO and website health limit your ability to send these positive signals. This means you don’t get the full reward for all of your SEO efforts. You could have the best page on the web for your target keyword, but poor technical SEO prevents it from ranking as high as it could and maximising its traffic potential.

SEO is competitive enough for financial service providers and driving organic traffic is already difficult. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be by neglecting website health and technical SEO.

We recently published an article on technical SEO for financial services, highlighting some of the key areas where brands in this industry run into problems:

• Duplicate content: Marketing products to multiple target audiences often creates duplicate content issues, keyword cannibalisation and crawling/indexing issues.

• Speed and performance: Loading times are one of the most important UX factors for users and an increasingly important ranking factor for search engines – one of several technical areas financial services lags behind other industries.

• JavaScript and frameworks: Many financial services websites, product pages and web apps rely heavily on JavaScript or JS frameworks. Carefully optimised JavaScript code is fine, but poorly written or copy-and-pasted code can create all kinds of problems with crawling, indexing, loading times and overall performance.

• Navigation and internal linking: Many financial services websites have complex architectures, which raises challenges with structure, navigation and internal linking – all of which are crucial for UX, but also in helping search engines understand the relationship between pages.

• Structured data: Structured data gives search engines contextual information about your pages, helping to rank them for the most relevant queries and rich results that achieve higher average CTRs.

The relative complexity of financial services websites makes technical SEO particularly challenging. You’ll often find the biggest and oldest names struggle the most with technical SEO, too. This opens a key area of opportunity for smaller and newer brands trying to compete with traditional financial institutions.

Use technical SEO to your advantage, analyse your competitors' weaknesses and exploit their technical shortcomings.

Technical SEO can make all the difference when Google is weighing up similar pages for the same ranking position. As we saw earlier, moving even one or two positions up the top 10 results can drive significant traffic increases. So, don’t let technical SEO prevent you from maximising your ranking potential, especially for the most competitive keywords.

Key takeaways and recommendations

The key takeaway from this piece is to tackle SEO challenges head-on. Everyone in the industry is facing the same obstacles and you don’t have to work miracles to climb the SERPS. You just need to outperform your closest rivals.

Here’s a quick summary of high-impact next steps you can take to compete with financial service providers currently ranking above you.

• Be ambitious with your long-term SEO goals: Don’t be afraid of taking on the larger financial service providers or targeting the most competitive keywords. Yes, it takes some time to build traction but small gains generate big results from the most competitive queries.

• Build momentum with quick wins: While you chip away at your long-term SEO goals, build early momentum with quick wins. For example, identify keyword opportunities with relatively low competition vs high search volumes and CTRs. At the same time, look for keyword/topic coverage gaps in competitor SEO strategies.

• Pick your battles with competitor analysis: Climbing the SERPs is all about beating the pages ranking above you for any given keyword, one at a time. Know your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. If you’re ready to fight a competitor’s strengths, then exploit their weaknesses while you build a stronger search presence elsewhere.

• Outpace your slower rivals: Large financial institutions are often slow to respond to new opportunities, particularly the old traditional players. Use this to your advantage by beating larger competitors to emerging opportunities while they’re still getting briefs signed off at multiple levels.

• Take the lead with link building: Create pages and content that quality sites want to link to. Prioritise high-value link opportunities, such as product recommendation lists from the top comparison sites. Aim for quality over quantity with inbound links and give third-party sites good reason to link to your most important pages, not only your blog posts.

• Prioritise E-E-A-T, YMYL and helpful content: Prioritise YMYL pages as your key SEO asset for rankings, link building and lead generation. Earn trust with helpful content, 100% accuracy and reliable information – the kind quality sites link to and Google includes in featured snippets, AI Overviews and other SERP features. 

• Update and improve existing content: Keep all of your content 100% fresh, accurate and up to date, including any regulatory compliance revisions, such as T&Cs updates. Maximise the performance of your best content with regular updates and maintain the highest standards of E-E-A-T and YMYL. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for competitor content that’s starting to age – potential opportunities to outrank or steal inbound links from them.

• Excel at technical SEO: This is another area where traditional financial services providers often struggle, especially those managing older or complex websites. Above all, excel at technical SEO and maintain website health to avoid indexing issues or limiting your ranking potential. At the same time, audit your competitors’ technical SEO performance to look for weaknesses you can exploit and avoid making the same mistakes.

• Optimise for cumulative ranking signals: Know which ranking signal combinations you need to optimise for your marketing goals. For example, build citations and online chatter around your link building strategy to get the full ranking boost from inbound links. Alternatively, target improved on-page engagement as you optimise UX factors like loading times.

About the author

Michael Carden-Edwards is SEO Strategy Lead at Reddico. A seasoned SEO and digital marketing expert with 13+ years of experience, Michael has directed SEO strategies for major brands like British Airways and O2 as well as conducting countless public and internal SEO training sessions. Based in Sevilla, he joined Reddico in 2021, enjoying the flexible working and unique culture from a sunnier climate.

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, Totally Money and Wellington Management. If you'd like to discuss how we can help your business create content that ranks contact us >

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