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Content Marketing for Financial Services SEO

Content Marketing for Financial Services SEO

2 Jul 2024 | SEO

Reading Time: 5 minutes

When looking for a new accountant, did you know that 72% of potential clients start with an online search? For tax services, that figure increases ever so slightly to 76%, and for loans, it skyrockets to an undeniably huge 90% of financial services clients.

The point? Your online presence and visibility matters, especially if you are in the financial services sector.

By making use of a financial services content marketing strategy (the technique of publishing content to engage and inform your audience) you can cultivate a more visible presence in search engines, tapping into that huge market of financial clients. From blogs to videos, content creates an ecosystem of value designed to push your business into the spotlight.

To learn about content marketing and how it fits into the wider world of SEO for financial services, we’ve put together this handy article.

What Is Content Marketing?

Simply put, content marketing is the creation and publication of content for your business. It involves planning and strategy, content creation, and relevant, consistent distribution, with the aim of engaging and converting your target audience organically.

Financial content can be created in a whole range of forms, including:

    • Blogs
    • Articles
    • White papers
    • Videos
    • Infographics
    • Podcasts

Rather than a standalone plan, content marketing is one piece of a much wider, more complex SEO strategy. It sits within search engine optimisation (SEO) in the digital marketing space and is used by 90% of professional marketers to connect businesses with their target audience.

Why We Conduct Content Marketing

Content marketing is an important part of the marketing strategy for any financial business.

Just a few of these reasons include:

    • Building Trust and Credibility: Content marketing shows you know your apples from your pears (or your HMRC from your Companies House). High-quality, regular content will establish you as a thought leader in the finance industry, showing potential clients that you’re knowledgeable, confident, and trustworthy.
    • Educating the Audience: Content is crucial for educating your audience. This can include informing them of why certain financial services exist and are so important, the implications of not seeking professional financial support and guidance, and how they can make staying on top of their finances easier.
    • Engaging Potential Clients: There are a lot of financial services businesses out there, so why choose yours? Content will inform and engage new potential clients, taking them from the top of the sales funnel and nurturing them right through to a conversion.
    • SEO Benefits: When creating a financial SEO strategy, content marketing is key. By using optimisation techniques, your site can be boosted higher up the ranks for relevant results, helping you get noticed by the audience looking for your services.

Benefits of Content Marketing for Financial Services Companies

As a finance professional, photography and video editing might seem a world away from your industry. What has a YouTube video got to do with helping your clients get their accounts sorted? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Increased Online Visibility

Content marketing is a critical part of ensuring your website ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Considering that everyone who’s anyone in finance has a website these days, this is incredibly important.

By consistently publishing valuable content, you can tap into the Google algorithm and make yourself more favourable in the eyes of search engines. The more valuable they perceive your content, the higher you’ll appear for relevant search results.

This drastically enhances your online visibility. We know that users don’t tend to scroll very far down the SERPs, with a huge majority of clicks going to the first few results, so ranking in those pole positions is going to bring a lot more attention to your financial business.

Higher Quality Traffic

Using content marketing in your financial SEO strategy will drive more relevant, higher-quality leads to your site.

These are users who are actively looking for the services you’re offering with the intent to convert (or a far higher likelihood of conversion).

Enhanced User Engagement 

Including videos on your website can boost the average time a user spends on it by 88%.

Quality content engages your users. It entertains, informs, and makes learning more about your industry appealing to your target market. It explains what they want to know and dives deeper into interesting topics, bringing value to your users that entices them to stick around.

Improved Conversion Rates

Content marketing enables winning financial SEO strategies to enhance your visibility and engage your audience. Once you’ve got your audience interested, it also drives conversions.

From calls to action (CTAs) to empathising with pain points, there are a multitude of techniques that encourage your audience to convert.

This allows you to take your high-quality leads right from the top of the marketing funnel – at that first point of engagement – through to a conversion using only the power of valuable, informative content.

Strong Client Relationships

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that strengthens your relationships with your audience, as well as building your SEO.

The right content answers audience questions, empathises with their problems, and provides useful solutions. It helps potential clients get to know your business too. From your tone of voice to greater visibility of your friendly team, it humanises your brand for stronger connections.

This is true both for leads and existing customers. Once a user converts, your content will still work to earn their long-term loyalty.

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How Content Marketing Supports A Financial SEO Strategy

We use content marketing for both on-page SEO and off-page financial services SEO. It offers a wealth of opportunities to gain some lovely SEO points, including through:

    • Keyword Targeting: We carry out keyword research to find the terms your target audience is searching for and work them into your content, helping search engines match your blogs, white papers, and videos to the audience they’re intended for.
    • Content Planning: Research fuels our content planning sessions, helping us pinpoint the financial topics that your audience is interested in. For example, if we see that your audience is searching ‘How do I register for tax as a sole trader’, we know that content answering this question is going to resonate with your target market.
    • Optimising for SEO: There are a multitude of ways we optimise content to rank higher in the search results, from adding multimedia components to using keywords in alt tags. This has an impact across your website, showing Google just how relevant, credible, and trustworthy you are.
    • Distributing and Promoting: From Digital PR to social media marketing, content distribution drives more clicks to your site, building trust with search engines, and encouraging them to increase it’s rankings.

Kickstart Your Financial Content Marketing

In the financial industry, content marketing builds credibility around your business. Informative content that’s easy for non-financial experts to understand can help bridge the gap between you and your audience, showing them exactly how you can help them and cultivating trust.

Quality content will drive high-quality traffic to your website, engage the audience, and encourage them to stick around for longer.

At Woya Digital, we offer complete content marketing services for finance sector businesses. With a team of experienced SEO experts, we’ll work with you to build a winning strategy that drives long-term success. Book a free consultation with our team today.

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Keyword Research for Financial Services SEO

Keyword Research for Financial Services SEO

21 Jun 2024 | SEO

Reading Time: 6 minutes

One of the most important components of SEO is keyword research.

Keywords guide the direction of your SEO efforts, determine the types of search queries you should look to rank for and differentiate your site from your competitors. 

But, before you dive into the deep end of keyword optimisation, it’s important to take a moment to pause and consider strategy.

This is where keyword research comes in. To ensure your marketing efforts see the payoff you’re expecting and your business is found by the right audience, you first need to identify the right keywords for your SEO.

From what exactly keyword research is to why it’s so essential for your financial services SEO strategy, uncover everything you need to know in our handy guide. 

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research involves finding those all-important words and phrases that are going to earn you some pretty significant SEO points, and support to get your website ranking in search engine results pages. 

Keyword research helps you make conscious decisions to improve the relevancy of your site, ensuring you’re targeting terms that are specific to your business and optimal audience.

If you don’t conduct research, any optimisation done using keywords is going to be guesswork. 

Let’s take a quick look at an example to learn more:

  • Business One wants to optimise using keywords but they skip research phases. Instead, they think optimising for financial services will bring some decent results to their online doorstep. What they don’t know is that this keyword has a super high volume of competition that makes it incredibly difficult to rank for and a low search volume among their target audience.
  • Business Two adds keyword research to their SEO strategy. They see that financial services isn’t a smart choice, but that accountants in Sussex has a drastically lower volume of competition and a decent search volume among their niche, ticking the boxes for local SEO.

Both finance industry businesses move ahead with their optimisation. Business One struggles to rank in any of the top spots and, with around half of all leads clicking on the first 3 spots in Google, they don’t see any significant changes to their traffic.

Business Two moves up the ranks for accountants in Sussex quickly to claim a top spot and, thanks to the targeted demographic, sees an uptick in leads looking for exactly what they’re offering.

Types of Keywords

A quick note here that, during research for financial services SEO, you will uncover different types of keywords. These include:

  • Head terms: Keywords that can be vague or general but carry a super high search volume, like ‘accountants’, for example.
  • Long-tail keywords: A more specific key phrase that usually contains 3-5 words and has a lower search volume but is great for targeting more niche demographics, like ‘financial help for small businesses’.
  • Semantic keywords: Keywords or phrases that are related to your target keyword. The keyword ‘accounting’ for example, might have semantic keywords like ‘accountancy help’ and ‘tax accountant’.

Why Do We Conduct Keyword Research for Financial Services Companies?

At Woya Digital, keyword research is a key part of our financial sector SEO strategies. Why is it so important in our strategy?

Market Demands

Keyword research helps our finance SEO experts understand your audience. We look at what exact terms they’re typing into Google and the services they’re looking for. 

This helps us optimise for their queries and create a customer-centric SEO strategy.

Target Audience Insights

Keyword research also reveals the pain points of real customers based on their searches. 

Let’s say that there are a few high-volume terms that relate to tax, as an example. This gives us an indication that your audience is in need of tax guidance and help, and this should be a key focus of our financial services SEO strategy, by also advising our content strategy.

Competitive Analysis

Competitor keyword analysis looks into the keywords or phrases that competing companies are ranking for, investing in, and gaining traffic through. 

By identifying the terms they’re going after, we can then create content that attempts to rank better than them, and boost your business higher, giving you a competitive edge.

Content Strategy Development

Content strategy makes up a big chunk of SEO services and feeds into lots of other rank-boosting techniques, including keyword optimisation. 

As soon as we’ve identified target keywords and terms, we’ll focus on creating content that incorporates them. 

Not only is this excellent for ensuring your website gains the understanding of search engines, but it also helps you create relevant content that engages your audience.

Benefits of Keyword Research for Financial Services Providers

Keyword research provides solid foundations for strong financial services companies SEO strategies and guides the direction of campaigns. 

When using well-researched keywords in your content, you will see a whole range of business-boosting perks, including:

  • Increased visibility: Targeting the right keywords in your content will help your website rank higher in the SERPs. You’re telling Google that your business is relevant to audience queries, increasing your online visibility and organically driving traffic.
  • Higher-quality leads: Well-researched keywords target specific demographics. These are the audiences who are actively looking for a business just like yours, earning them the title of high-quality leads.
  • Enhanced user engagement: Once you know what your audience is searching for, you’re better able to help with their queries. Creating relevant, high-value content shows you understand your target market, and this will increase user engagement and highlight your business as a source of relevant expert information and knowledge.
  • Improved conversion rates: When you’re proving to your audience that you have the solutions they need, they’ll be far likelier to trust you with their finances. Aligning user intent, keywords, and your content can culminate in higher conversion rates.
  • Increased ROI: By pinpointing the right keywords for your business, you can focus your marketing resources on areas you know will see more impactful results.

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How Keyword Research Drives Our SEO Strategy

Identifying the right keywords feeds the next steps in your SEO strategy, and enhances results, making it a key priority. When working on financial services sector SEO strategies, our team begins with in-depth research to guide our decision-making.

Identifying the Highest Value Keywords

We always want to target the highest-value keywords for your business. These include keywords with high search volumes, lower competition, and that we think will drive higher-quality leads to your site. 

We’ll also take into account the current ranking websites to work out how likely you are to outrank their pages (government websites, for example, are notoriously tricky to beat).

Tailoring Content to Audience Queries

Our high-value keywords directly influence the financial services SEO content we create. Using insights into what your audience is searching for, we can create content that:

  • Answers their questions
  • Meets their needs and interests
  • Directs them towards relevant services

If we know, for example, that a lot of people are looking for terms related to small business tax expenses, we know that there’s an audience for this type of content. 

We will then focus on content that answers key questions about expenses, boosting audience engagement and satisfaction, and earning your business some key brand awareness points.

Optimising On-Page SEO

We carry out both on-page and off-page SEO.

Keyword research helps guide our on-page optimisation, filling your site with relevant terms that we know will help you rank. 

We’ll specifically target those high-quality keywords for the on-page elements that gain the most attention from search engines, including meta tags, image tags, and headers.

Enhancing Off-Page SEO

When building domain authority, we’ll use keyword research to boost your off-page SEO too. 

Your high-value keywords inform our link-building and outreach strategies, boosting your credibility in the eyes of search engines and helping you reach more of your relevant audience.

Start Building A Financial Services Industry SEO Strategy

If you’re a business owner in financial services, SEO keyword research could be the starting point of skyrocketing your business growth.

From identifying your target audience needs to outshining your competitors, understanding the terms your potential clients are searching for can drastically improve your market understanding. 

Optimise your SEO efforts to drive conversions, enhance user engagement, and establish yourself as an industry leader with high-value keywords.

At Woya Digital, we take keyword research seriously as a part of any digital marketing strategy. With a team of experts and years of industry experience on our side, we can help you develop keyword-driven financial SEO strategies to drive leads to your website.

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Introduction to SEO For Financial Services Companies

Introduction to SEO For Financial Services Companies

11 Jun 2024 | SEO

Reading Time: 6 minutes

There are over 80,000 financial businesses in the UK and – looking at the averages – around 80% of them have a website. That puts the number of companies in financial services vying for online visibility at a whopping 64,000 – which provides a good indication of the level of competitiveness to rank.

With so many businesses out there, it can feel impossible to secure the attention of your target audience. That’s where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes into play.

SEO helps to push your website up the search engine results pages (SERPs). By implementing factors that we know search engines like Google love, your website is much more likely to reach those coveted top spots for relevant search terms, driving more traffic to your site and boosting brand awareness. 

Find out more about SEO for financial services companies, and why it’s such a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy.

Importance of SEO for Financial Service Providers

In financial services, SEO plays a critical role in driving on site conversions. But what exactly can you expect to see from your SEO strategy? 

Increased Online Visibility

When using a search engine like Google, the vast majority of users don’t look beyond the first page of search results. The top three organic search results claim almost 70% of all Google clicks, with the last users spread out over the next few websites and a couple of brave browsers dipping their toe into page two.

The point here is that if you’re not ranking in those top spots, the majority of your target audience simply won’t see you. Even with a dazzling website and competitively-priced services, you won’t get the visibility you need to drive sales.

The overarching goal of SEO efforts is to stop this from happening. Our SEO campaigns aim to skyrocket your site up the ranks so that all (relevant) eyes are on you, enhancing your online visibility for more powerful marketing.

Building Trust and Credibility 

Users trust search engines – it’s one of the reasons they stick so heavily to those top results. 

They trust that search engines are going to find them reputable, relevant web pages that meet their needs. So, when your website turns up at the top, they also trust that you’re the business they’re looking for.

This drastically improves your credibility in the eyes of your audience. When you’re in the top spots, you have a bigger sway over your leads purely because of your pole position, driving eager consumers who are ready to trust you. 

You’re also likely to see engagement increase, which will further bolster loyalty as your credibility increases, creating a trickle-down effect of advantages. 

Targeted Traffic

Your financial services SEO strategy is focussed on driving high-quality leads to your website. It places you directly in the eye-line of the users who are already on the hunt for what you’re offering, giving you access to an audience who are almost ready to convert. 

Rather than throwing an advert out there and hoping to secure a few interested leads, it’s a targeted method of digital marketing that brings relevant traffic straight to your digital doorstep. 

When it comes to your long-term marketing success, this is important. High-quality leads are more likely to convert.

Cost-Effective Marketing

With an experienced financial services sector SEO agency by your side and solid strategies in place, SEO becomes a strong contender for one of the most cost-effective marketing methods.

One of the reasons for this is that it is a long-term strategy rather than a quick scheme to push short-term sales. SEO builds solid foundations that will generate results into the future, attracting leads over a much longer period. 

A snowball effect can often be seen with SEO, in which it becomes more effective over time, boosting your return on investment (ROI) as it does.

The alternative method to SEO is pay-per-click (PPC), which works a little differently. Paid ads aid in generating a quick uptick in website traffic and driving some snappy sales, but as soon as you stop paying for PPC, it stops working. SEO, on the other hand, provides ongoing ROI that pushes your investment further.

Pair the two together – SEO and PPC – and you can secure short-term boosts and consistent long-term growth.

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Core Components of SEO for Financial Services

To gain more insight into the world of finance industry SEO services, here are some of the core components of a winning SEO strategy.

Keyword Research

Optimising your website with relevant keywords is one of the most important elements of SEO. These are the key words and terms that your audience is searching for – like accountant near me or financial services.

By identifying key search terms, and optimising your website with them, you are telling Google that your website is relevant to these words. Google can therefore identify and rank your website according to searches including these terms, boosting your visibility for the right audience.

Content Optimisation

Regularly updating your website with fresh, keyword-optimised content is a smart way to gain SEO points.

As part of Woya Digital’s finance sector SEO services, we optimise content to ensure it ticks all the boxes for search engines and audiences. Balancing keyword-rich, informative content with the perks of regular upgrades provides a big push for your on-page SEO.

Link Building

When a reputable website links to you, you gain a bit of their credibility in the eyes of search engines. The big stars of SEO are giving you a shout-out and Google’s always listening. 

This strategy is known as link building, and it involves boosting the number of inbound valuable external links pointing towards your website to increase your domain authority. Your domain authority is an indicator of your website’s reputation and reliability within a niche, and the higher it is, the better.

Technical SEO

SEO can get pretty technical at times, with a lot of heavy coding work and website development needed to ensure you rank. Some of the technical SEO factors that require focus include:

All of this comes together to build a strong, high-quality site with a well-put-together back end, which search engines love. This drives the performance of your website too, creating a better user experience that boosts your credibility and cultivates a clear, consistent brand identity. 

Local SEO

Many financial services sector businesses have a local focus. Even those aiming for national – or even global – reach, can and should optimise for local search, too, in order to win over potential nearby clients.

Local SEO ensures you’re visible to more localised leads through a number of techniques, including the creation of local pages, the use of local keywords and location-based search term optimisation and setting your business up on key local search platforms, like Google My Business. 

The Benefits of SEO for Financial Services Companies

We’ve highlighted the importance of SEO for businesses in the financial industry, but before we wrap up, here’s a quick run-through of some of the additional benefits you can expect with an effective SEO campaign:

  • Enhanced customer experience: Techniques including improving page speeds and creating responsive websites cultivate a smoother online user experience for your leads, boosting your brand image.
  • A competitive edge over industry competitors: By climbing up the rankings, you’re literally placing your business above (and in front of) your competitors for a larger share of the market.
  • Increased brand awareness: Increased, prominent visibility in the relevant SERPs will result in increased brand awareness and familiarity.
  • Build authority: Generating relevant and engaging SEO content presents your financial business as a knowledgeable leader in the larger financial niche, shining the spotlight on your credibility and expertise.
  • Improved conversion rates: By targeting higher-quality leads and focusing on strategic marketing (such as including internal links and calls to action) your conversion rages will naturally increase.
  • Access to performance metrics: A crucial aspect of SEO involves analysing data that can drive many other business decisions, creating a more streamlined marketing approach.

Investing in SEO for your Financial Services Company

SEO ensures that your business is positioned directly in front of your key audience. It brings visibility to your website, drives conversions in a natural, non-invasive way, and increases your credibility in the eyes of high-quality leads. If you want to secure those top spots for your business, SEO is an important aspect of any effective marketing strategy.

As a financial services industry business, investing in SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic.

Our financial services SEO team at Woya Digital are here to support you in driving your business up those search engine rankings. We know the importance of online visibility for your business and, with years of industry experience and technical SEO expertise, we can create a tailored SEO strategy designed to direct leads to your site, over your competitors.

Ready to boost your online visibility and drive sales? Get in touch with our financial services SEO team to learn more and book a free consultation with our experts.

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