Fintech is an industry which has enjoyed rapid growth, especially within the last decade. Owing to technical innovations and demand from both B2B and B2C, this industry is showing no signs of slowing down.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should not be overlooked as a powerful and often cost-effective tool for fintech firms. Whether you’re launching a new product or are looking to grow, having your website rank on a search engine’s page can accelerate success.
In this journal entry, we talk about SEO as a tool for growth and why fintech firms should be using it.
SEO is the process of improving a website so that it appears higher up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). The end goal of this is to drive traffic and convert it – whether it be an enquiry or purchase.
Fintechs can often face an issue of determining how SEO can work for them – what if their product is disruptive to an industry? How do these firms get organic attention?
While SEO can be a standalone activity, it’s more effective when it works in tandem with other marketing activities like paid advertising and social media. Together, these tactics are very effective for raising awareness of a brand.
Search engines are used daily for an array of queries –from every day mundane questions to finding a specific web page. It’s estimated that Google processes 5.6 billion searches per day.
With this amount of volume, there will no doubt be valuable queries that could lead to your product. While SEO is unlikely to provide all of your traffic and leads, early investment can be incredibly beneficial in the fintech industry - where awareness of a product or firm can be gained organically from the get go.
Google has an algorithm and set of ‘ranking factors’ which is used to determine which web pages should be shown for specific terms.
For fintech firms, it’s likely that they will be impacted by a further guideline named ‘Your Money or Your Life’, often referred to as ‘YMYL’.
YMYL was introduced in 2015 and it is applied to any website that provides information, services or products that could have an impact on the user’s finances or life.
While this does not apply to all businesses, it likely will for fintech firms operating in sectors like finance, law, housing and healthcare. These types of businesses should pay particular attention to:
Strike, an online estate agent, is a great example of how fintechs can use SEO as a growth tool – although it’s not the only avenue that they have used to raise awareness of their product.
While the housing industry maintains a lot of traditional estate agents, the online potential is huge and growing.
According to SEMrush, the term ‘houses for sale’ attracts 550,000 searches per month. However, aggregators such as Rightmove and Zoopla dominate these types of searches.
With tough competition in the organic search landscape, Strike has sought to gain online visibility in a different way. Through creating relevant and useful content that matches up with what their potential audience wants to know, they’re expanding their potential customer bases – from both buyers and sellers.
Strike appears in the top three positions on search engines for the following keywords:
Data: SEM Rush Domain Analytics
In creating content that directly answers queries for both customer bases (buyers and sellers), Strike is raising their brand awareness and growing their organic visibility, finding an audience that they may not have had without this content strategy.
Buying a house is a process that users will research extensively – this is behaviour that can be seen when the service or product is high value. For the likes of challenger banks Monzo and Starling, open banking is the disruptive way to handle finances and there are 1,600 searches per month for the term ‘what is open banking.’
When you’re growing quickly, prioritisation is key when it comes to marketing tactics.
It may be that you can only invest in one area of marketing or that you don’t have the internal capabilities to dedicate to multiple streams of marketing. Whatever your circumstances, there’s a strong argument to be made for SEO being an early priority in your growth strategy.
Fintechs operate in a competitive space – not only do they have innovative new entrants to the market but the incumbent, traditional firms are catching up. And inevitably have bigger budgets. Take the financial services industry for example – clicks for paid online advertising are expensive. While paid advertising is likely to be essential to long-term growth, SEO offers a cheaper alternative and the earlier you invest in it, the more likely you’ll reap the benefits in the future.
Investing in SEO is often referred to as a long-term strategy, as it can take slightly longer to see the results come to fruition. But by continually optimising your website in the right areas, it’s likely that you’ll see exponential growth.
Outsourcing to an agency or studio can help to ensure that you have experts on your side and a long-term vision for your SEO strategy.
Keyword research often underpins an SEO strategy – it helps to provide context to how users are searching in your industry.
As seen with the example of Strike, for fintechs, it can provide an option to develop content to help drive relevant traffic.
There are free tools that you can use to find queries that are frequently made. Answer The Public allows you to find all queries relating to a topic. This will give you an idea of what your target audience want to know.
Using keyword research, you can determine exactly what type of content you need to create to benefit your audience.
The key to creating unique and insightful content is to answer the question. Think about what your user could be feeling when they’re asking the question and what type of information would be useful to hear.
Being able to demonstrate your expertise and authority is key to building trust with users. If you’re new to an industry and offering an alternative – this is critical.
By creating author profiles for your team, you can build their credibility in detailing their experience, qualifications, awards won, and showcase their work.
Backlinks are like a vote of confidence – by having reputable websites link back to your content, you're also likely to gain relevant traffic.
Good content that ranks well will often pick up coverage and links, however, don’t be afraid to reach out to relevant websites that could feature your content. You can check a website’s domain ranking (DR) using a free tool like Ahrefs’ website authority checker.
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