Looking for ways to improve your SEO as a financial firm? Perhaps you’d like to nudge your marketing performance to that extra level in the months ahead. In this post, our financial marketing team offers 7 ideas to help inspire and guide you.
We hope you find this useful and invite you to book a free online conversation if you’d like to discuss your marketing with us.
#1 A/B testing
This is a key area of digital marketing that most financial firms (in our experience) are not engaged with.
That presents you with an opportunity. With A/B testing, you take a specific page or post on your financial website and run two or three “versions” of it. One each page, you change one specific variable that you think could have an impact on traffic volume, engagement and/or conversion rates. You then track the results over, say, two or three weeks.
Afterwards, you compile the results to see which version performed best. You can then ask yourself why. Did the wording connect better with the target audience on the successful page? Perhaps the layout was easier to navigate, and so resulted in more form submissions.
The benefit of these small iterations, over time, can result in big improvements to return on marketing investment (ROMI).
#2 Using “author pages”
Recently, Google announced that would help SEO if financial firms (and other businesses) included author pages on their websites.
Including this feature helps search engines evaluate the content of different authors contributing to your financial website, and its quality. So, here it can be worth building up strong “author profiles” on your financial website, if not done already.
These might include a photograph of the author and a short bio – along with links to their most recently articles, underneath. This gives you the opportunity to establish each of them as “thought leaders” in their respective fields, which is great for your branding too.
#3 Schema markup for FAQs
Do you have a FAQs page or area on your financial website? This can be a powerful way to engage users with your content, as it offers them real value by addressing their pressing concerns – directly. However, are you doing the right “on-site SEO”, here?
On-site SEO refers to the coding, bolts and whistles (i.e. the technical features) of your website content which Google looks for when evaluating a page. A key part of this whole area in 2022 is “schema markup”.
In particular, FAQs are a powerful way to integrate links – a vital ingredient in financial SEO. This helps show that your website is seen as authoritative by other quality websites, and that you are directing users to helpful content around the web.
FAQs are also now a big feature of Google search engine results. You often see a handful of them a few scrolls down the page, where you can click on the accordions to “expand” the questions and see the answers. Make sure your content is optimised to appear here.
#4 Improve internal links
Are you linking to other pages or posts on your website within your content? This is one of the best ways to drive traffic throughout your website, which can give you a big SEO boost.
Consider checking your Google Analytics to see which pages are receiving the most referral traffic (i.e. traffic from other decent websites) and make sure your internal links are optimised here. The higher traffic volume gives you more opportunity for engagement.
You might also benefit from doing a link audit. Here, you want to make sure that any existing internal links still work properly, and point to the best page/content for the user.
#5 Limit redirects
To some degree, redirecting users is unavoidable. For instance, if you bought a new domain name for your business but people are still in the habit of using the old one, it would likely be foolish to just take this website address down (with no redirect).
That’s a sure way to lose traffic.
However, be careful not to go overboard with redirects – particularly if your website is fairly large. It isn’t a good user experience if Google sees that visitors are frequently greeted with notifications on a page such as 301, 302 and 404!
#6 (Perhaps) leave AMP
Have you heard of AMP? It stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and was designed by Google to help provide a faster user experience when opening search engine links (particularly on mobile). However, Google now no longer considers it a ranking factor.
The problem for financial firms interested in investing in AMP is that, essentially, it requires you to maintain two versions of your website – just to get a small extra SEO benefit. This isn’t really viable for most financial planners and similar firms.
Perhaps you have a good experience with it and can give it the time and attention it needs. If you’re looking to invest a limited digital marketing budget very carefully into “low hanging fruit” for SEO, however, then you may want to consider avoiding AMP.
#7 Invest in your favicon
A favicon is a small icons typically associated with a particular website or web page. You tend to see it, for instance, in the top left corner of your browser when visiting a website (on the tab). This little visual image may seem insignificant, but it’s a big deal.
Today in 2022, most people are now searching for websites – including financial websites – in search engines on their mobile phone. Here, your favicon appears more prominently than on desktop, and has the potential to catch users’ eyes and draw them from rivals.
Did you know that making your favicon appealing, distinctive and decent could raise your click-through-rate by 1%, 2% or even more? That could be difference between getting a new client, or not. Small changes can have a big impact sometimes!
