Banks need to rank in order to attract potential customers and remain profitable.
I cover the most essential elements in search engine optimization for banks that will help you drive growth and stand out from your competitors.
SEO for Banks: The Business Case
The most common question I encounter with banks interested in SEO is: Are SEO services going to be worth it for our bank?
It’s a completely reasonable question for a financial institution to have. If you’re going to invest in a marketing agency to manage your digital marketing strategy, you want to see positive growth and ROI.
So, how do you determine this? We can gain a clearer idea of what an SEO campaign might achieve using a business case.
A business case is SEO forecasting, using available data to evaluate potential traffic, conversion rates, and ROI.
Let’s imagine that we’re launching an SEO campaign where we target keywords for both states and cities to appear on the Google Map Pack. If we can rank for every available keyword we have, let’s say that, altogether, we have a total search volume of 29,350 per month.
If we’re forecasting results that aren’t overly aggressive but not on the lower end either, we might anticipate, based on SEO trends and SEO audits:
- 2,935 monthly visitors
- 587 calls per month, if we assume a 2% call-through rate from Google
- 294 leads per month, if we assume a 10% conversion rate, which is typical
- $38,155 each month, if we assume $130 revenue per lead
As you can see from the above, hiring a marketing agency for banks can prove quite profitable, helping you generate, in this example, nearly $458,000 in a year.
Interested in seeing what you can achieve with the right SEO strategy? GB Digital can help you with your initial SEO audit and create a business case for your bank. It all starts with a simple discovery call to learn more about our banking SEO services.
Local SEO: Your Bread and Butter
If you’re a bank looking to grow your online presence and generate more leads and profits, chances are that you’re not a national bank.
You might have anywhere from a handful of branches to a couple dozen or so. You might be a community bank looking to serve locals with a personalized touch and high-quality service.
In order to stand out and remain competitive, your financial institution will need to focus on local SEO.
You can achieve this by making sure that you rank on organic search results as well as the Google Map Pack.
The Google Map Pack is something that every Google user is familiar with, even if they don’t know the name for it. If I were to Google, “banks near me”, I would be met with this sight:
The Google Map Pack suggests nearby businesses, which are ranked according to their Google Business Profiles. Users will see bank or credit union options in their area.
A Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a free tool that helps you showcase your business and provide users with essential business information (banking services, location, etc.).
When properly optimized, your GBP will help you appear at the top of search engine results pages SERPs when locals are looking for banks near them.
Optimizing your Google Business Profile and approach to ranking on the Google Map Pack means creating a GBP for each of your branches, collecting and responding to Google Reviews, utilizing high-quality photos, and updating your GBP regularly to keep it active.
Your local SEO efforts will pay off when you rank here, and you won’t have to worry about Google ad spend to get eyes on your traditional or online banking institution.
Other Local Factors
Appearing on the Google Map Pack is a major element of local SEO for banks looking to improve their digital marketing strategy. However, it’s not the only focus when optimizing for search engines. Finance SEO for banks encompasses other strategies.
For example, being at the top of localized organic search engine results pages can help you generate leads, albeit slightly less effectively than Google Map Pack, as this is convenient and located at the top of SERPs.
If I were to Google “banks near me” and scroll down, I would find that local results appear.
Creating separate pages for every city you have a branch in allows you to rank on SERPs and improve your online presence. When users search for banks near them, you’ll pop up.
The same can be done for national banks, although on a much larger scale. As you can see from the above, national banks do pop up in organic search and on the Google Map Pack. However, the average bank or credit union won’t have to worry about being left out.
Are you a neobank? Despite being a nontraditional bank and FinTech company, you can still take advantage of local SEO to drive traffic. We can help you develop a FinTech SEO strategy centered around your unique needs and offer effective SEO services that drive results.
Keyword Research (Pursue Your Niche)
Local search engine optimization will play a big part in helping you bolster your online presence, but local SEO isn’t the be-all and end-all of a banks marketing strategy.
Making sure that you’re ranking for keywords that are relevant to the products and financial services your potential customers are searching for can direct them to your bank and, hopefully, convert them into paying customers.
The way to achieve this is through identifying long-tail keywords that are easy to rank for and are related to your banking services. This is done using resources like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs. Then, you can incorporate them into your content marketing strategy.
For example, you might create content around business loans that help readers learn all about their options, ending with a CTA that encourages them to apply for funding through your bank.
If you’re a credit card issuer, producing educational content surrounding a specific financial product that’s also properly optimized will help you achieve the same effect.
Pursue your niche, and create content around said financial SEO keywords that will generate traffic, appeal to readers, and result in the conversions you wish to see coming from your banking SEO efforts.
Technical SEO
Having a website that looks and runs like it’s from the 90s is a great way to hinder your technical SEO.
For those who are aware of SEO and the role it plays in SERPs, most think that search engine optimization is, at its core, all about keywords.
Keyword research and optimization make up a good chunk of SEO. However, it’s certainly not the only type of SEO that you need to focus on in order to see strong results in your SEO campaign.
Another area of SEO that should be at the forefront of your strategy is technical SEO.
Technical SEO may be something that you’re already familiar with. For example, taking care to optimize your URL, title tag, and H1 is technical SEO.
Technical SEO also extends to the user experience.
If your banking website is slow, poorly designed (consider mobile SEO), and full of 500 or 404 errors, you could be driving away users (each a potential customer) from your financial institution. This impacts your ranking on search engine results pages.
This is something you might see on an SEO tool like Google Analytics when you’re looking more closely at your bank’s website.
Another major focus I heavily emphasize is schema markup. Schema markup is code that you can use to effectively communicate to Google your company or services, which allows you to appear when users search with relevant keywords.
It also helps you deliver rich results on search engines.
We need only look at the data to see why schema markup matters.
- Users click on rich results 58% of the time, while non-rich results only have a 41% CTR.
- Rotten Tomatoes saw a 25% higher CTR for pages with structured data. The Food Network, which also converted 80% of its pages to incorporate structured data, saw a 35% increase in visits.
- Rakuten noticed an increase in engagement. Pages with structured data saw users spend 1.5x more time on them, and they saw a 3.6x higher interaction rate on AMP pages with search features.
Examples of schemas that can be relevant to your bank include:
EEAT and YMYL
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a designation given by Google that essentially means content in the financial niche (and similar niches like medical or legal) is held to a higher standard than other niches.
A bank or a credit union is YMYL.
When you fall into a niche with the YMYL designation, you need to make sure that the website you create and the content you produce embody EEAT: experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
You could scour the search quality evaluator guidelines to get a better grasp of what Google deems high-quality. However, there are some strategies I always recommend when you fall into a YMYL niche.
To ensure your bank meets these standards, you should follow these SEO tips:
- Feature a real company name, phone number, and address, which will be on your website, GBP, and local business directories.
- Protect your users and ensure compliance with clear-cut cookie policies, privacy policies, and similar policies.
- Collect positive reviews through Google Reviews and other third-party review sites, like TrustPilot.
- Feature real people on your websites, and place a strong emphasis on quality authorship in your content marketing.
- And so on…
Integrating EEAT into every element of your website and banking activities is more than possible with the right level of support.
Content Creation
Keyword research lays the foundation for better ranking on SERPs, but you still need to incorporate those keywords in order to bring traffic to your bank.
Content creation is all about focusing on one keyword per page or article for effective search engine ranking.
In the case of local SEO, creating one page for each keyword related to the location of your branch will increase your visibility in SERPs. So too will creating individual optimized pages that showcase your bank’s various financial products and services.
You’ll also need to focus on creating blogs or articles in your content marketing strategy that will bring in new customers.
As described in the keyword research section above, finding long-tail keywords relevant to your bank’s offerings and the financial sector can get Google users to click on your website when you appear at the top of SERPs.
They may only be looking to learn about certain financial products, but they end up on an authoritative banking website offering said products, and they may feel compelled to turn to your bank to acquire said products as a result of your content SEO efforts.
A strong content creation strategy is vital to SEO success. Otherwise, your SEO effort won’t produce the expected results on search engines.
Backlink Acquisition
Backlink acquisition can be one of the top SEO challenges for any banking institution. However, you will need to focus on it for your banking website if you want your banking website to appear in search rankings.
Google uses backlinks to determine which companies are considered authoritative, which in turn affects your ranking. You not only want to be at the top of SERPs; you want to be a respected source of information in the banking industry.
Being a banking website without backlinks is like being a professor without a Ph.D. What you’re saying could very well be true, but most aren’t going to give you the time of day without the proper qualifications and show of support.
Having other websites link to your own, be it to relevant financial content or pointing to you as a solid community option for banking, can make a world of difference in your SEO strategy.
Working with an SEO agency that specializes in SEO for banks and SEO for financial services will provide you with the link-building and outreach support needed to see real results in your SEO campaign.
Brand Signals and SEO in the World of AI
AI plays a much bigger role in bank SEO than the AI Overviews that most are familiar with.
Brand signals are especially important. Google measures branded backlinks, branded searches, and even mentions of your brand across the internet. They use this information to influence ranking and inform AI algorithms.
If people are talking about your bank and its financial services, as well as engaging with your bank, you’re going to show up more in AI overviews. This is crucial given that clickless search is growing. You want Google to point to you as a resource for Google users.
Understanding how SEO evolves is necessary to keep up with these developments and continue seeing sustainable growth. If you can tap into financial services SEO like the above, you can cultivate an effective SEO strategy.
Work with Garit Boothe Digital: Bank SEO Experts
If your bank needs SEO support from financial experts so that you can see real progress in your digital marketing strategy, start here with GB Digital.
Book a Discovery Call with us now to improve your organic traffic, profits, and banking success.
