Got a cool-looking website? Awesome. One snag — as a finance marketer, you’re as good as leaving cash on the table if you don’t tweak your SEO.
SEO is a continuous process. The end goal is to make our website more visible on Google and boost traffic and conversions, but also improve the user experience. And because Google is always changing the rules of the game, you need to stay ahead of the curve if you’re to stay ahead of your rivals.
If your SEO efforts are a bit dusty and so 2017, in this article we’ll show you what finance marketers need to do to freshen up their SEO game.
Freshen your URL structure
If your page content is all fine and dandy and doesn’t need improving, that’s great. But ranking high on the SERPs isn’t just a simple case of slotting the right keywords into your content; it also requires you to get your URL structure absolutely right. If you don’t nail it, you could get lost in the search results.
The small things often make the biggest of differences, and this is very true where SEO is concerned. When it comes to your URL structure, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Keep things short — 60 characters is a good ballpark. Anything over 100 characters and you’re losing value. Now, Google doesn’t mind longer URLs, but it’s harder for users to copy and paste them
- Don’t shy away from making your URL structure similar to your page title. There’s nothing wrong with that
- Employ your main keyword
- Don’t use capital letters — URL structure is case-sensitive
- Separate words with underscores and hyphens
Here’s an example of a good URL from Hubspot:
blog.hubspot.com/marketing/inbound-marketing-finance-industry
Make those tags nice
How important are tags to your efforts? Very important. Tags need to be relevant to the services and products that your particular financial institution offers. Page tags aren’t usually longer than 60 characters, and they succinctly explain to people what your page is about.
Page tags are also an excellent way to optimize your website so that you rank better. This means that you’ll need to do your due diligence when it comes to keyword research so that you’re using the keywords that are searched the most by your customers.
Pay close attention to character limitations, too, because you need to squeeze your main keyword into a rather limited space.
As well as this, you need to include your location. For example, “home loans” is just not enough to make you visible to the right people. Instead, you should add something like this:
home loans in (town/city, country)
It’s also a good idea to add your company’s name to the end of a page tag, and then separate with a dash from the rest of your text.
As well as optimizing tags for Google, you will also need to optimize them for your social media channels, too.
Add fresh content
How old is the content on your website? If it’s old and dated, it probably needs freshening up.
“But it adds a lot of value to my readers,” you might argue.
That it might do, but Google uses “freshness” as a ranking signal. Moreover, things might have changed since you last wrote a particular piece and — as we all know — things are always changing in the financial world.
This is important to note because Google is on the lookout for content that adds value to your readers. When it detects that your content is giving lots of value to your readership, it will be a good enough sport to rank you higher.
The rub is that it can only do this if you freshen up your content. Doing so means Google will index your content more — and might rank it higher if it can see that you’re providing lots of value.
Now, you don’t need to go back to all of your old content and freshen everything up. Some of your content will be evergreen and can stay as it is. But take a look at your analytics. If there is content that’s performing amazingly well, see how you can double down on it with a bit of recycling. Can you create an offshoot piece of content that elaborates on what it’s saying?
Then, take a look at content that contains facts and figures and financial advice that’s now dated. There’s no need to overhaul the whole article, but tweaking the numbers that are out of date will alert Google to index it again.
And as we said, the more often your content is indexed, the better chance you have of ranking higher.
Build links
Backlinks are important because they give your site link juice and establish more credibility with Google. The more backlinks you have, the more traffic you’ll have because links are passed from one site onto yours.
As finance marketers, the best way to secure backlinks is to reach out to authoritative blogs in your niche and ask if you can guest blog for them.
Building backlinks will take time, effort and patience, and you need to find the right influencers in the finance sphere. But once you start blogging on finance for other people, not only will your SEO game improve, you will also be able to position yourself as an expert worth listening to. See, SEO isn’t just about visibility; it’s also about your place in the grander scheme of things.
Implement a PPC campaign
PPC — Pay Per Click — has its pros and cons, but it’s especially useful to financial marketers because this is a very competitive industry that you’re in.
If you’ve never done PPC before, in a nutshell, it’s an online marketing model whereby you pay a fee each time your advert is clicked on Google. An ad (yours) is placed in the SERPs, and when someone clicks on it, you pay a fee to Google. The fee isn’t big, but the ROI can potentially be massive.
Essentially, you are “buying” site visitors instead of growing a customer base organically.
PPC can work very well for financial marketers because it can secure you top ranking on some of the most competitive keywords in your niche.
These are 5 fresh ways financial marketers can improve their SEO. None of this is a one-shot deal, though. If you don’t see SEO as a continuous process, these fresh ideas will soon become stale. Keep analyzing your results and keep tweaking.
