SEO For Financial Services
I provide SEO consultancy for financial services organisations, helping them increase their visibility for the financial products they offer and the questions, needs and problems that lead customers to those products.
My Approach to Financial Service SEO
Financial services can be an extremely competitive area of search, often dominated by major banks and established financial brands.
My approach is to build strong foundations around your most important products while identifying opportunities to compete where larger competitors aren't necessarily doing such a good job.
For most financial services websites, I believe financial product pages should be the cornerstone of the SEO strategy.
Whether that's a mortgage, personal loan, car loan, savings account or another financial product, these are ultimately the pages you want to perform.
But product pages shouldn't exist in isolation. They should be supported by relevant informational content that answers the questions potential customers are searching for and links naturally back to the appropriate product.
This supporting content can generate traffic in its own right, but importantly it also helps build topical relevance and internal link authority around the core product page.
My Approach to Financial Service SEO
Financial services can be an extremely competitive area of search, often dominated by major banks and established financial brands.
My approach is to build strong foundations around your most important products while identifying opportunities to compete where larger competitors aren't necessarily doing such a good job.
For most financial services websites, I believe financial product pages should be the cornerstone of the SEO strategy.
Whether that's a mortgage, personal loan, car loan, savings account or another financial product, these are ultimately the pages you want to perform.
But product pages shouldn't exist in isolation. They should be supported by relevant informational content that answers the questions potential customers are searching for and links naturally back to the appropriate product.
This supporting content can generate traffic in its own right, but importantly it also helps build topical relevance and internal link authority around the core product page.
Going Beyond Financial Product Searches
Financial Services businesses should also target the problems and use cases that financial products solve, rather than focusing exclusively on searches for the product itself.
For example, alongside a Home Improvement Loan page, there may be opportunities to create dedicated pages around bathroom renovations, kitchen renovations, etc. These aren't necessarily separate financial products. They're targeted entry points for people who have a specific need that your existing product can solve.
This type of middle-of-funnel content is becoming particularly important in the age of AI Overviews and LLMs, as straightforward informational searches increasingly result in answers without a traditional website click.
Site Architecture & Technical SEO
Financial websites have a tendency to accumulate pages over time – discontinued products, limited-time offers, old campaigns, outdated blog posts and multiple pages targeting essentially the same thing.
So as one of my first tasks when working with a Financial Services website, I'll look at your site hierarchy, crawlability, indexation and internal linking, while identifying outdated or overlapping content that should be updated, consolidated, removed or redirected.
The objective is a logical structure where supporting content feeds naturally into your key financial products and search engines can clearly understand which pages are most important.
Competing With Bigger Financial Brands
Smaller financial organisations are often competing against banks and other brands with significantly more authoritative websites.
Building authority and earning relevant backlinks is important, but realistically you may not be able to match the authority of your biggest competitors.
So you need to "box clever"... rather than focusing entirely on the biggest, most competitive financial keywords, I'll identify more specific searches that larger competitors aren't targeting particularly well.
That can include customer questions, circumstances, use cases and middle-of-funnel searches where greater relevance and more focused content can give you a realistic opportunity to compete.
GEO and AI Platform Optimisation
Google AI Overviews and generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT are changing how people find financial information, but I don't believe this requires throwing out everything we know about SEO and starting again with a completely separate "GEO strategy".
The fundamentals remain Technology, Relevance and Authority. What is changing is the type of content worth investing in and the increasing importance of brand and off-site authority. I incorporate these changes into the wider SEO strategy rather than treating GEO as a separate collection of tricks and tactics.
