Are Financial Services SEO Worth Investing In?

Before we answer whether financial services SEO is right for you, you probably want to know what SEO actually is. SEO is the undertaking of activities that allow you to generate organic traffic to your website. In other words, if your SEO is done correctly and with consistency, you will appear at the top of the Google rankings. 

In this article we will be covering a number of topics, and a brief intro into what SEO is and how to go about doing it. SEO is often viewed with mysticism by business owners. People will tell you that all you need is backlinks in order to rank highly. Others will tell you that a well structured site with one huge piece of all encompassing content will do the trick. The reality is that, like many things in business, there are many aspects and moving parts that need to be taken care of in order to properly achieve your goals with SEO.

What Is SEO?

Financial services SEO is no different from any other form of SEO. The wonderful thing about this type of work is that it is exactly the same for any industry. If you do these things then you will, eventually, get the result you are after. The challenge is that some industries are fiercely competitive, which means there are a lot of people investing a lot of time, money and effort into appearing at the top of the search rankings.

So, what exactly is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s the process of creating content and ordering it in such a manner that makes it nice and easy for Google to search and understand its subject matter. Good financial services SEO, as with all other SEO, should act like a super well orgnaised filing cabinet. Imagine you are trying to find information on a particular subject, say DB pensions transfers. When you search for DB pension transfers, Google will show you what it believes to be the best and most informative page on this subject. Now, there may well be other things that need to be covered in this article, and so creating links from that page to another one will mean that Google is quickly able to crawl them. This will allow Google to quickly understand the entire content of your site and where all the other information can be found. 

There are other parts to good financial services SEO; site speed, on-page, off-page and social signals to name a few. Whilst these elements are important, the key thing to realise is that you are writing for people. If you create content that is both useful and easy to navigate through then Google is likely to reward you with high ranking positions. Be consistent and useful with your content and eventually you’ll get rewarded.

Why Is SEO Important?

It could be argued that financial services SEO isn’t important at all. The same could be said for many other marketing channels. It really comes down to your marketing strategy and how you go about generating leads for your business. 

A great deal of financial services companies are stuck in the past and will rely on cold calling. The effectiveness of this varies depending on the size of your sales team, the volume of calls you can make in a day and the quality of the data you have available to you. Individual advisers may leverage their network and create clients solely through referrals. Paid adverts are being used more and more now too, but this means that you will need to be constantly spending to maintain the leads. 

We’ll look at the importance of financial services SEO from a numbers point of view. In all honesty, the best traffic you will ever receive is organic. That is, from traffic that comes from people doing searches from Google. They’re asking a question, and if you can answer that question, they’ll spend time on your site. The people who come to your site through SEO have spent time thinking about their search, which means they are further along the buyer’s journey than those that come from other avenues. 

Winning at SEO comes with a whole host of benefits. Once you start to get traffic coming from your content, it starts to work as a snowball effect. Generally it keeps growing and further tweaks and improvements you make compound that effect. Once you start to get organic traffic coming to your site, it is likely it will continue to come for the foreseeable future. It’s pretty difficult to lose it once you have it. 

The best part of winning at financial services SEO? All that traffic that comes to your site is free! Imagine you have even 1000 visits to your site per month from organic traffic and you convert 1% of that as leads. That’s 10 qualified leads a month that have cost you nothing to acquire. Assuming you close at least one of those, you’re earning 1 new client per month for free. What would that do for your bottom line?

Your Money Or Your Life

Remember when we said that if your website content is providing helpful information it’s more likely to rank? Well, YMYL or Your Money Or Your Life pages are scanned by Google to determine if your content is credible, reliable and trustworthy in order to deliver it to as many people as they can in relevant searches. 

Google takes a very keen interest in the authenticity, correctness and trustworthiness of content on these kinds of websites and pages. Therefore, it is super important that not only all of the content going on the website is factually correct and helpful, but super well optimised. This is where the crux of the matter comes into play. Creating this content is not easy. If you’re an adviser doing this by yourself, it’s probably going to take up more of your time that you would like and if you get someone else to create it for you, you’re going to need to make sure they know what they are doing. Otherwise, you may face some pretty hefty penalties from Google, meaning your content won’t rank. 

The good news is Google has the same view of all content online, not just YMYL websites. It’s just that Google will look for certain things as to bracket your website as such. Basically, you just need to create super high quality content that is well optimised and factually correct and you’ll be fine.

How Long Does Financial Services SEO take?

Financial services SEO, much like any SEO work, takes time. How much depends upon an investment of two things; time and money. The long and short is that financial services SEO will take anywhere between 6-12 months to start ranking (depending on what you are trying to rank for) and 12+ months to actually start generating any meaningful traffic that will convert into leads. Now, we know what you’re thinking here, ‘I need leads now! I don’t have the time to be creating content and hoping that in 12 months I’ll get some leads.’

This is where we look at the investment in financial services SEO. Whilst SEO isn’t going to make you hit the top of the Google rankings today, tomorrow or even next month, what it is going to provide for you is a long term platform that costs you nothing to generate leads. Much like clients, you need to think long term here. The investment you make today will reap dividends later, especially if you are working with high-ticket products. Realistically within 2-3 years of a well run and consistent financial services SEO campaign, your investment into the work will be paid back and then some.

Is Financial Services SEO Right For You?

In theory, financial services SEO is right for everyone. Who wouldn’t want to be seen as a highly authoritative influencer within the industry who provides amazing content and gets new, highly qualified leads booking themselves into their calendar on a daily basis?

The reality is this. You have to be in a position where you are prepared to invest either your time or your money in considerable amounts to receive the benefit of SEO. You also need to have a website, whilst not being a huge investment, is still an additional cost as well as the upkeep of the site.

Financial services SEO is not for those who have no patience and are in desperate need of qualified leads. If you also aren’t interested in providing value and thinking about how you can help your potential clients with their financial goals then you aren’t ever going to be invested in what they want to see. 

Things To Watch Out For.

There are lots of people and services out there who will claim that they can get you onto the first page of Google. And it is likely that many of them can, however, their services may not be as they seem. If the service they are offering sounds too cheap (anywhere between $100-500 per month) then it is likely that they will be performing SEO work that is potentially more harmful than good. 

Be wary of people who offer link building only services. Whilst links are an important signal for ranking, they are not the be all and end all as some would have you believe. Website speed, page optimisation, social signals, they all play a role in determining ranking factors.

In general the rule of thumb is this; provide amazing content, make it easy to find and share and you will soon enough see the benefit of financial services SEO.

If you want to learn more about how Adviser leads can help you generate more traffic to your website through SEO, book a consultation with us by clicking the link below.