If you\u2019re a fintech or financial services business, you\u2019re probably accustomed to paying thousands of dollars a month buying traffic from Google AdWords. A single click on a one of the top keywords for financial advisors and related businesses can cost anywhere from a few dollars to well over $100.<\/p>\n
Now imagine you could get that exact same traffic \u2014 prospects actively searching Google for your products and services \u2014 at a 97% discount. For every dollar your competitors spend on advertising, you will be spending only 3 cents. A qualified lead that used to cost you $250 to acquire will now cost you only $7.50.<\/p>\n
That’s exactly what CanIRank Full Service’s financial SEO strategy accomplished for a consumer lending client who approached us looking for help reducing their reliance on expensive paid acquisition channels like Google AdWords.<\/p>\n
Over the course of a 6-month collaboration, we dramatically overhauled their content strategy<\/a> and link building to generate over 700 new page 1 rankings for competitive financial industry keywords, resulting in a 452% increase in Organic traffic. Those exact same search clicks would have cost nearly $1 million \/ year if purchased through Google AdWords.<\/p>\n<\/div> As this client prefers to remain anonymous, we\u2019ll refer to them as Client X in this case study, but would be happy to provide proof of all the claims in this article upon request.<\/p>\n \u201cWe reached out to CanIRank because we needed an affordable solution that would help our business grow its online presence and generate leads. We knew if we wanted to be competitive, we had to reduce our cost of customer acquisition.\u201d<\/p>\n – CEO<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThink 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.\u201d<\/p>\n – Stefan Debois<\/strong> Further complicating matters, Client X was skeptical about hiring an SEO agency<\/a>. A previous agency they\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n How can an ambitious new entrant reach rocketship growth velocity in the consumer financial services industry without mountains of funding<\/a>?<\/p>\n<\/div> 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.<\/p>\n Client X\u2019s site structure consisted primarily of service pages and a sea of mediocre blog content. To tighten this up, CanIRank\u2019s Optimizations specialist Emma mapped out the <\/span>customer research journey<\/span><\/a> using CanIRank\u2019s Grow my Content tool<\/a> to learn what prospective clients were searching in Google at each phase of the purchasing process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s expertise.<\/span><\/p>\n To keep campaign costs as low as possible, Content Strategist Andrew focused on refurbishing existing site content rather than starting from scratch. Google\u2019s standards for financial industry content are particularly high because most queries are within a category they call \u201c<\/span>Your Money or Your Life<\/span><\/a>\u201d (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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s 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 \u2014 the ones that give the best return on investment.\u201d<\/p>\n – CEO<\/strong> CanIRank PR & Outreach Specialist Mike knew <\/span>link building<\/span><\/a> was going to be a critical part of improving the website\u2019s trust and brand authority. In the highly saturated financial content space, many bloggers and media only offered links on a \u201cpay for play\u201d 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<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By focusing on developing <\/span>authentic win-win relationships<\/span><\/a> with bloggers and journalists in the personal finance community, the CanIRank team was able to help them see Client X as one of the \u201cgood guys\u201d 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\u2019s Founder as a leading expert in their niche.<\/span><\/p>\n Mike also leaned heavily on Content Amplification techniques, using <\/span>CanIRank\u2019s Promote My Content tool<\/span><\/a> 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 \u201ctrickle-down links\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div> Over the course of the campaign, Client X\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Most importantly, the campaign achieved its objective of reducing Client X\u2019s reliance on paid ads as a means of growth, freeing up significant cash flow to enable them to reinvest in their business\u2019 future growth. The client was able to re-invest those dollars into other growth channels, including a financial email marketing plan<\/a> to nurture new leads.\u00a0 The additional traffic can get even higher ROI<\/span><\/p>\n CanIRank\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n Although it may seem counterproductive to admit this is in an SEO agency case study, even a 3,000% ROI doesn\u2019t guarantee a client will stick around. Unfortunately, Client X ended up canceling their service soon after this case study was completed.<\/p>\n Although we\u2019re always sad to lose a client, in this case, a silver lining is that it allowed us to compare the site\u2019s performance under their new SEO agency against the growth rate achieved by CanIRank Full Service.<\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n First, some context: as you can tell from the quotes, Client X was happy with our SEO strategy and the results we\u2019d achieved. But human psychology is such that sometimes, even when we have a good thing going, we can\u2019t help but wonder if maybe something even better is out there.<\/p>\n \u201cI would like to thank CanIRank\u2019s team for their hard work. Our website is in a much better position now. Their team has gone above and beyond my expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n -CEO<\/strong> 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 \u201cissues\u201d with the client so that I could explain why they weren\u2019t really a problem. Client X’s response: \u201cDo you really want to go through this?\u201d<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, an agency that exploits the layman\u2019s 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\u2019s see how they did: Almost immediately, Client X\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Besides the spammy links, some new content went up on the site, but it was of the \u201cmarginally legible but not meaningful\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s response was swift and tragic: SEMRush and Ahrefs data show that the site\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n According to BrightEdge<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising<\/a>. Instead, younger consumers are over 3 times more likely to be influenced<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s strict content quality guidelines.<\/p>\nFinancial Services SEO Strategy<\/h4>\n
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\nFinancial Services Client<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>The Challenge: SEO for Financial Services<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>
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\nFounder and CEO<\/strong>
\nSurvey Anyplace<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nCanIRank’s Solution<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>
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<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>![\"atomic](\"http:\/\/blog.canirank.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/atomicseo-e1575493494560.png\")
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\nFinancial Services Client<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nFinancial Services SEO Campaign Results<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>
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<\/p>\nPost CanIRank SEO Services<\/h3>\n
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\nFinancial Services Client<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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<\/p>\nHow can CanIRank SEO help your financial services firm?<\/h3>\n