SEO for Financial Services: How to get Google clicks at a 97% discount

Like many financial services businesses and FinTech startups, Client X had a profitable business but struggled to squeeze more growth from highly saturated marketing channels in the financial products space. Paid ads, social media, content marketing, PR, and affiliate channels are dominated by billion-dollar corporations offering competitive debt products, including credit card companies like Chase, Capital One, and Citibank, as well as consumer banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and PNC Financial.

“Think about creating content that returns specific value to the visitor, such as a financial assessment or calculator. An example is the ‘Early Retirement Calculator’ on retirement.net. This type of content is also great for link building, since it is perceived as a helpful, non-commercial resource.”

– Stefan Debois
Founder and CEO
Survey Anyplace

Further complicating matters, Client X was skeptical about hiring an SEO agency. A previous agency they’d worked with utilized outdated black hat techniques and failed to achieve the desired results. They didn’t see the benefits of SEO services during that engagement and were wary of going through the same experience again.

How can an ambitious new entrant reach rocketship growth velocity in the consumer financial services industry without mountains of funding?

The CanIRank Full Service team deployed a strategy we call Atomic SEO. Phase 1 focused on establishing a high performing, usable, and crawlable website well optimized for brand signals to build trust and credibility with users and search engines alike.

Client X’s site structure consisted primarily of service pages and a sea of mediocre blog content. To tighten this up, CanIRank’s Optimizations specialist Emma mapped out the customer research journey using CanIRank’s Grow my Content tool to learn what prospective clients were searching in Google at each phase of the purchasing process. 

This funnel became the basis of a new site structure focused on educating prospects and turning them into qualified leads. Our graphic designer Megan created new landing page templates for bottom-of-funnel keywords to incorporate both conversion and SEO goals. In the new site structure, each of these new bottom-of-funnel keywords became the tip of a thematic Supporting Content pyramid that served to establish Client X’s expertise.

To keep campaign costs as low as possible, Content Strategist Andrew focused on refurbishing existing site content rather than starting from scratch. Google’s standards for financial industry content are particularly high because most queries are within a category they call “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL). In order to avoid accidentally giving a searcher bad information that could adversely impact their health or financial situation, Google algorithms pay particular attention to rewarding trustworthy, high-quality content demonstrating a high level of subject matter expertise. When looking for financial services marketing firms, it’s highly important to look for agencies that already have a proven track record in working within the YMYL category. 

To meet YMYL content standards, Andrew turned blog posts with thin content into in-depth resource guides covering topics such as credit history, budgeting advice, and types of loans. He also wrote new Supporting Content articles from scratch to attract more visitors to the website at the early stages of the sales funnel, where competition is often lower.

“It’s not enough to just rank for keywords, the key is to rank for the keywords that your customers actually search for. CanIRank has the right processes in place to identify the most valuable keywords for your business — the ones that give the best return on investment.”

– CEO
Financial Services Client

CanIRank PR & Outreach Specialist Mike knew link building was going to be a critical part of improving the website’s trust and brand authority. In the highly saturated financial content space, many bloggers and media only offered links on a “pay for play” basis, knowing the value that Fintech SEO represents for many new companies. And given Client X’s prior experience with Black Hat SEOs, they were understandably eager to avoid running foul of Google’s guidelines on paid links. 

By focusing on developing authentic win-win relationships with bloggers and journalists in the personal finance community, the CanIRank team was able to help them see Client X as one of the “good guys” despite being a relatively new brand. Those collaborations helped earn links on a number of highly-ranked topical pages, as well as landing brand-boosting thought leadership pieces that helped to establish Client X’s Founder as a leading expert in their niche.

Mike also leaned heavily on Content Amplification techniques, using CanIRank’s Promote My Content tool to promote each newly-created blog post on relevant social media groups, aggregators, and communities. This not only drove traffic and awareness for the great content Andrew was creating but also generated second-order “trickle-down links”.

Over the course of the campaign, Client X’s organic traffic more than quadrupled. The ranking improvements translated to $76,000 worth of monthly organic search traffic, saving the client approximately $1 million per year in Google AdWords spend.

Since the total cost of the SEO campaign was in the low five figures, the ROI generated exceeded 3,000%. For every $1 that Client X invested in CanIRank’s SEO services, their competitors with weaker SEO had to spend $33 to buy the same exact traffic via Google AdWords.

Most importantly, the campaign achieved its objective of reducing Client X’s reliance on paid ads as a means of growth, freeing up significant cash flow to enable them to reinvest in their business’ future growth. The client was able to re-invest those dollars into other growth channels, including a financial email marketing plan to nurture new leads.  The additional traffic can get even higher ROI

CanIRank’s content and outreach efforts resulted in many quality links. Our team has worked with a variety of financial services companies and earned press on sites such as:

Post CanIRank SEO Services

Although it may seem counterproductive to admit this is in an SEO agency case study, even a 3,000% ROI doesn’t guarantee a client will stick around. Unfortunately, Client X ended up canceling their service soon after this case study was completed.

Although we’re always sad to lose a client, in this case, a silver lining is that it allowed us to compare the site’s performance under their new SEO agency against the growth rate achieved by CanIRank Full Service.

If you’ve ever been tempted to cut costs by going with a budget SEO agency rather than an experienced financial services marketing agency or wondered whether the work your agency is doing really makes a valuable difference in search engine optimization – this part is for you!

First, some context: as you can tell from the quotes, Client X was happy with our SEO strategy and the results we’d achieved. But human psychology is such that sometimes, even when we have a good thing going, we can’t help but wonder if maybe something even better is out there.

“I would like to thank CanIRank’s team for their hard work. Our website is in a much better position now. Their team has gone above and beyond my expectations.”

-CEO
Financial Services Client

One day the client wrote to us that another SEO agency had mailed them claiming (incorrectly) that their site had serious technical problems that needed to be resolved ASAP in order to preserve their Google rankings. Sadly, this is actually a pretty common sales tactic used by some low-quality agencies. I immediately offered to jump on a call and review the “issues” with the client so that I could explain why they weren’t really a problem. Client X’s response: “Do you really want to go through this?”

Unsurprisingly, an agency that exploits the layman’s lack of SEO knowledge to try to lure away clients by falsely claiming there are urgent problems is unlikely to be amongst the top-performing SEO agencies. Let’s see how they did:

Almost immediately, Client X’s site started getting hammered by super low-quality auto-generated links. Profile links, web2.0 links, and directory listings like those favored by Black Hat SEOs over a decade ago. Low-quality SEO agencies use these techniques because these garbage links are much cheaper and easier to create than authentic, white-hat links. It allows them to show “progress” in vanity metrics such as the number of linking root domains but rarely leads to sustainable rankings improvement.

Besides the spammy links, some new content went up on the site, but it was of the “marginally legible but not meaningful” variety produced by content mills earning pennies per word. Without a strong financial services content strategy to guide their efforts, much of this new work will never deliver an ROI.

Google’s response was swift and tragic: SEMRush and Ahrefs data show that the site’s rankings have slipped for nearly all of their most valuable keywords, and overall organic traffic has dropped by 83%. If SEMRush data is accurate, it took less than 6 months for a black hat SEO agency to completely reverse the gains our team had fought for nearly a year through our SEO for financial services or fintech SEO strategy.

How can CanIRank SEO help your financial services firm?

According to BrightEdge, 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search. Every day millions of queries are conducted online for financial information – yet many financial institutions are missing out on opportunities to grow their business through smart search engine optimization strategies.

84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising. Instead, younger consumers are over 3 times more likely to be influenced by blogs and other content marketing. As more buying power migrates to younger generations, it’s increasingly important for financial companies to adapt to these shifts in consumer behavior. Rather than letting the media control the narrative, financial brands should leverage SEO and content marketing to play a direct role in educating and engaging with potential customers.

When it comes to choosing an SEO agency, it can be challenging to separate the wheat from the chaff. Not every agency is able to achieve consistent growth in competitive verticals. SEO for financial websites is particularly challenging due to link building hurdles and Google’s strict content quality guidelines.

The CanIRank Full Service team has helped numerous businesses in the finance sector including investment firms, financial news companies, and fintech startups. Book a consultation call to learn how CanIRank can help your organization improve its online presence and stay on top of the latest trends in digital marketing.