The Best SEO Tips for Financial Services
Search Engine Optimization with the popular acronym SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of your website on search engines, such as Google. For any brand or business, the SEO goal is to come up first..or at least on the first page for any search that is related to the products or services that you offer.
Most people looking for financial advisory services may begin their search on Google, or do a comparison of your firm and others even after a direct referral may have been made.
Studies have shown that over 90% of all website traffic for financial services comes from a search engine.
SEO for any specialized service in Nigeria including financial services can dramatically increase your brand visibility, awareness, reduce your average client acquisition costs and propel business growth. The bottom-line is that you are losing money every day your website is not fully optimized.
So what exactly can you as a scaling financial service firms do to position yourself at the top, especially in the light of the blood bath between retail banks in Nigeria struggling to consistently rank high and pretty much optimize for every financial related keyword under the sun!
1. Set Your Goals
You need to align your SEO goals with your wider business goals. Are you in a phase where you are more interested in short term wins than long-term wins to increase revenue for long term projects? Are you a start-up looking to aggressively enter the market and gain market share?
Some SEO goals could be:
- Triple the number of visitors to your website in the next quarter.
- Generate 20 new qualified leads each month
- Increase downloads, subscriptions or sales for a specific period
2. Keyword Reseach & Analysis of Content
Keyword research can help you discover new content opportunities, whilst improving your existing content.
A quick way to start is by making a wishlist of the keywords that you want to target. For financial services, this list would likely consist of many popular keywords, which means that it will probably be harder to reach the top of the search results.
There are many tools to perform the actual keyword research and to test the first pages of the keywords you want to target, you can perform manual searches.
Wait a minute, this is just the beginning of your content planning. The focus on the right target audience and the right content brings an understanding of the content that they’re more likely to consume. Only then would keyword research become more useful to provide you with content ideas and new opportunities to rise in the top of searches.
3. Do some PR & Influencer Marketing
You can increase your site’s SEO not only through on-site optimization, but also through external sources also called off-site SEO.
A creative combination of PR (online & offline), influencers and backlinks could be extremely successful to an improved SEO strategy.
It is arguable that the financial services industry in Nigeria do the most networking within their industry and as they interact with other industries and their clients.
My advice is that a combination of knowing your target audience and seeking professional help to expand your reach can increase your brand awareness and the interest in your business, so go for it! Boost your SEO significantly by becoming an authority in your field, without spending time on networking all by yourself. Did somebody say win-win?
4. Have a Tailored SEO Strategy
Design your strategy around trust! With financial services, it is extremely important to understand the importance of trust for your target audience.
A one-size-fits-all strategy just will not cut it for you, because to fully engage you must utilize and leverage emotionally engaging content opportunities.
For financial services nobody trusts just a brand or a logo, but they trust the humans that work at these companies. Try to humanize your brand as much as you can and shrink the distance between the brand and the consumer.
5. Measure & Monitor Your Progress
Rankings — Traffic — Conversions — Revenue
Measure for each element or metric, every step of the way.
- Your website content’s ranking on search results will show your progress while improving search engine visibility. Keyword performance is also a telling indication of how useful your content is to users compared to the competition.
- Organic traffic shows the number of users who visited your page through search results.
- Conversions aren’t just about making sales — a conversion is also any action you want users to perform after visiting your site, such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a whitepaper.
- Engagement can be measured by the time visitors spend on your site, the bounce rate, the revenue generated or even the shares and the number of comments on your content.
There’s one more thing, It’s critical nowadays to fully optimize your site for mobile devices as Google places a lot of importance on mobile compatibility as a ranking signal. A few basic things, like paying attention to image size and optimizing your site speed, will greatly improve your site’s performance on mobile devices and make it easier to execute full-on mobile optimization further down the line.
The benefits of SEO are endless.
In my opinion SEO is one of the smartest marketing investments any financial service firm can make. It is a long-term asset to your business as it generates traffic, leads, and sales.
Your customers are searching on it right now! But will they find you?
