Technical SEO for Financial Services: How does it differ and what should you prioritise?

Technical SEO is the broad umbrella of work that ensures websites are optimised for crawling, rendering and indexing of content, and should be a core component of any business’s organic growth strategy. 

Like other areas of SEO, technical SEO requirements and practices differ vastly depending on the situation and business. This can range from differing technologies such as CMSs and web frameworks, and can also extend to industries themselves. This is particularly true for financial services, where technical SEO can feed into several considerations around areas like product types, audiences and compliance.

The importance of technical SEO for financial services  

Outside of regulation and compliance, financial services is one of the most competitive arenas when it comes to SEO. Depending on the area of finance in question, there are many large established players occupying space alongside some smaller players vying for attention with a cutting-edge product or USP. Banking giants such as Barclays may enjoy institutional trust and reputation, but constantly have to evolve and update their service and product offerings as the market shifts and consumers expect more. Conversely, challengers such as Monzo may have an exciting brand prospect with an appealing range of products but need to identify gaps and USPs to stand out from their larger counterparts.

Alongside this, the opportunity for lead generation and increased revenue from SEO in the financial services sector is huge. Whether it’s savings accounts, loans, pensions, investments or mortgages, the keyword opportunity around these product types is equally massive if brands are able to produce authoritative content on the complex subject matters within their niche.

Technical SEO plays a big role here. Alongside providing an authoritative and rich content experience to help and inform potential consumers along their purchase journey, your content needs to be easily discoverable, navigable and user friendly. That means:

• Ensuring clean and clear site architecture of products and services (with strong internal linking)

• Fast load times on money pages

• Fixing potential duplicate content and indexation issues

• Relevant structured data implementation   

In addition, given the levels of competition and compliance around all things financial services, consistent technical SEO monitoring competitor benchmarking is vital to success.

Key things to look out for when it comes to technical SEO for financial services

We previously wrote a guide on prioritising technical audits, which we’d encourage you to read as a primer for getting things moving with technical SEO. There will be a lot of crossover of processes and areas of concern when it comes to technical SEO auditing for sites in the financial services sector, though there are some nuances which make it a slightly different affair. We’ve detailed some of these below. 

Duplicate content and differing audience types

Identifying potential crawling and indexation issues of cornerstone content is a must for any financial services business, though one common conundrum is tackling issues around duplicate content, particularly when it comes to certain product types. 

Financial institutions will often offer products that are targeted at specific audiences. For example, a business may have products that offer investment schemes for individuals as well as private investors and institutions. While the intended audience will be vastly different, the product, or at least how it comes across in terms of product landing page content, may not. This presents challenges in proving to Google that individual product pages, while similar, serve a unique purpose and audience. 

Providing signals in your audience segmentation (such as pop-up window questions) is hugely significant here, as you will want to ensure your key product pages for all audiences are being crawled properly.   

Speed and performance

With an abundance of options in terms of financial products available on the market, technical SEO teams have to ensure the quality of the financial product in terms of content offering is matched by its site speed and performance. There are a multitude of statistics out there that paint a clear picture of revenue loss attributed to poor site performance and UX signals, and this is incredibly important in the finance sector. 

If a user has reached the point of deciding to make a purchase and has gone through the purchasing funnel by consuming all the relevant, informative content on your website, then they expect the relevant product page to load quickly. A slow product page that isn’t wholly mobile-friendly will likely see conversion drop-offs. 

Make sure your team are constantly monitoring and benchmarking your core money pages and looking for areas where users are dropping off. Are there any issues related to your website’s UX where users bounce off your content? Are there slow load times of certain product pages that could be looked into? 

A note on JavaScript 

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of product pages in financial services are built using JavaScript. This can impact a number of things, such as crawling, rendering and indexing of content, but can also impact loading speeds. If parts of or large areas of your site rely on JavaScript to pull in content, take a look at our articles on JavaScript SEO best practices and page speed and JavaScript to see if there are any areas you could improve around page speed, crawling and indexing.  

Navigation and internal linking 

Many financial services companies will have large inventories of products across a number of different categories, so site structure and inventory arrangement can get complex quickly. This can be complicated further when there are similar types of products being targeted at different user types.

Ensuring your core product pages are easily accessible within your main navigation is vital, as is the implementation of clear content taxonomies and breadcrumb linking, among other things. Users will want to feel like they can easily shop around your site, not only exploring your different financial product offerings but also having access to various informational and educational content relevant to their interest. This will keep them on the site. 

Internal linking can be a great way to enhance key landing page discovery from the perspective of Google and the user, and is something often underutilised by brands in the finance sector and beyond. For one of our clients, BlackRock, we found that in many cases, there was very little diversity of anchor text when it came to internal links to certain product pages. Financial services brands have an opportunity to deploy keyword-rich anchor texts to important product pages within the content across their site to improve relevancy signals on target search terms.

Further crawling and indexing nuances

Aside from potential duplicate content challenges and some difficulties that large websites may face in proper crawling and indexing, there are other examples of crawling and indexing nuances to keep in mind across financial sites. 

One such nuance relates directly to compliance. To adhere to data protection regulations (such as GDPR), brands will need to implement pop-ups to inform users about data collection practices. While these pop-ups often come in the form of website overlays, financial services brands are advised to take steps to ensure that such pop-up windows aren’t doing anything to deter or hinder search engine crawlers from accessing key areas of your site or content.

Structured data

Incorporating relevant product schema into your key money pages can give finance brands an edge when it comes to informing search engines of additional information about your content. Rich results are also known to generate more clicks from users in the search results. For example, the AggregateRating schema deployed on key product pages (such as a loan page) can be a great way of demonstrating trust and reputability to your potential customers if you have a satisfied existing consumer base.

Technical SEO ventures in the financial services sector should look to make use of structured data opportunities where possible. Ensuring that there isn’t any inaccurate or misrepresentative structured data present is equally key, as not meeting Google’s structured data guidelines may mean a contravening of Google’s spam policies. Getting this right, particularly in the highly compliant arena of financial services, is hugely important.  

KPIs and objectives for technical SEO in financial services

Any SEO work, be it a project-based audit or long-term retained work, needs to have a robust KPI framework attached to it in order to properly measure success. This will vary from business to business and will depend on the scope of work involved. General SEO metrics that should be tracked (such as rankings of target keywords, organic traffic and engagement metrics) remain relevant. They can be vital components in improving your sales funnel from organic traffic.

Given the competitive nature of financial services SEO, a lot of what your team are improving and measuring performance on should lead to the bottom line in the form of conversions and revenue. Solving a duplicate content indexation issue on a particular product page may have seen a spike in traffic to that page, but what has this done in getting consumers closer to buying from you?

Building up SEO authority as a finance brand is an ongoing and iterative process, and there are many relevant metrics to track to help define success. Looking at a product page in particular, if we were to focus on a handful of important metrics to help judge commercial success, we could look at: 

• New users: Have your technical SEO efforts brought new users to your key money pages as well as retained your existing user base? This can be a strong indicator that things are moving in the right direction.

• Improved dwell time and bounce rate: SEO is becoming more about providing a satisfying user experience with your website and its content. If your technical SEO efforts result in an improved experience that entices users to stay on for longer, this is a positive sign.

• Conversions and revenue from organic: Ultimately, everything should tie back to the bottom line. All of your efforts in the areas of performance, crawling and indexing need to have revenue in mind and this will be the ultimate arbiter of success.

Monitoring progress moving forward

Unlike other industries, the financial services sector is more liable to disruption when it comes to legal and economic changes as well as areas of compliance. This means that along with the business as a whole, SEO teams need to keep up to speed with the latest news and developments relevant to their product inventories. 

Interest rate changes, tax policies, pension locks, changes in currency valuation… These can all directly affect financial services product offerings, and technical SEO, alongside content, plays a big part in keeping users reliably informed.

Couple these industry and economic changes with the ongoing changes to the SEO landscape and what your competitors are doing, and it all adds up to a highly competitive yet fascinating industry to vie for space in. 

Whether you’re a large established player or a new disruptor in the financial field with a fresh look at things, you need to constantly be at the forefront of identifying new trends and gaps in performance while keeping pace with your competitors.

About the author

Senior Technical SEO Consultant Eva Mermingi has worked on campaigns and communications for a variety of clients and industries, including finance, eCommerce, retail and other services. She has experience in site migrations, technical audits and checks, page speed optimisation, gap analysis, featured snippet optimisation, plus CMS platforms, such as WordPress, Shopify and Magento 2. Eva’s passion lies in technical SEO, ensuring that client websites are technically healthy and visible to Google.

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.

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