Like almost every other business today, banks and credit unions have to put their digital strategies in cohesion with the rules of the increasingly competitive marketplace to stand a chance. It goes unsaid that search engine optimization popularly known as SEO is a key component of any successful marketing strategy. However, to get your banking SEO strategy right, there are a number of tactics to be implemented, along with keeping yourself up to date with the latest Google algorithms. In this article, we are going to discuss bank search engines and credit union search engines. That said, the question still remains;

What does SEO stand for in finance?

For banking, financial services, investment, insurance, saving and lending firms, the acquisition of customers in the highly competitive markets of the 21st century is on a knife’s edge. The cost of acquisition per customer is incredibly high, and the customer loyalty is much younger. Marketing teams are constantly under immense pressure to deliver so much in little time.

The most amusing part is that bank SEO can be implemented in phases, through which you can continually monitor and improve on with time. In hindsight, the SEO job is never complete; it must entail constant monitoring and improvement. SEO in finance entails:

On-Page SEO

On-page search engine optimization for banks is particularly critical to your competitiveness in the marketplace as it is responsible for your individual site rankings on Google and other search engines. Assuming we are all aware that a high ranking on Google gets your site more traffic and, therefore, higher chances of converting visitors to members and customers.

Optimizing your individual pages will need you to formulate a keyword strategy first, and then optimize the page content as well as the HTML source code. There are also a few factors that must be taken into consideration for a successful on-page SEO strategy. They are:

• Optimizing Page Content: You should make sure that your website pages only have unique yet informative content (providing value to readers). You will have to have your keyword included in the title and a few times in the text. Take caution not to overdo it since Google will not rank you high.
• Optimizing the Title Tag: Your title tag normally represents the clickable headline that shows up on the search results on the search engine for your page. The title tag should be able to give your reader a description of your page that is accurate and also contains your keyword.
• Optimize your URL: On top of containing your keyword, your page URL must showcase the ranking of the page on your website.
• Optimizing Image alt text: Your image descriptors should also contain your target keywords. Without optimized image descriptors, your images will not be crawled by any credit union search engine and, therefore, will be of no help in the ranking of your pages.

Quality content

Google is bent on delivering quality to its users. That means that you will have to provide high quality content for Google to direct users to your page. High quality content is that which is most helpful to users. As Google bot crawls for relevant keywords as it looks for quality.

While quantity is also an essential aspect of some pages’ ranking on Google, quality is much more important to Google as well as other search engines. And unfortunately, in most instances, the quest for quantity often deteriorates quality. It is therefore essential to ask yourself two questions when creating content in your page: Does the content provide the customer with what they are looking for? Do visitors stay long enough to read through the information on your page?

When engaging in content creation for your bank’s website, it is wiser to post a single quality piece each week than 10 pedestrian pieces.

Local SEO

Local search engine optimization is particularly essential for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. It helps connect the visitor to their local branches and is a critical step to turning visitors to members. In local SEO, there are a few factors you should put to perspective:

• Add location pages on the site
• Claim your local business listings
• Updating all your listings on Google My Business (Image Below)
• Consistently updating your name, address, and phone number
• Creating local content
• Seeking reviews

External Linking

This is a great way to improve your page rankings. Linking your bank’s website to other authoritative sites is counted by Google as third party votes, which are a clear sign that your website is also an authoritative site. For instance, if your bank had a link from a major financial institution, the website would share a pretty huge chunk of equity from it.

While it is among the best ways to improve your site’s ranking on credit union search engines, you do not have total control over external linking. There are plenty of tactics that you could employ to receive external links. However, you will ultimately be at the mercy of the authoritative party. A great way to obtain an external link to an authoritative website is by guest blogging. Guest blogging involves pitching and writing a blog that includes a link that takes the client back to your Credit union or bank’s website.

Internal Linking

Internal liking involves linking your site’s pages to help customers easily navigate your site to find what they need. You could use an internal link from the landing page to link a customer to the mortgages page where they could ask a question about your insurance coverage. This helps first-time visitors easily navigate your bank’s website and find what they need. For example:

What’s more, internal links in your website content assist the search engine to crawl your website with ease since they form the ranking of information on the website. This makes your site rank higher on Google search result pages.

Outbound Linking

Outbound linking involves placing links to another website on your website. Outbound linking helps search engine algorithms determine the authority of the content on your web pages. According to the results many studies, outbound links weigh in when your site is being ranked by Google’s algorithm.

Research

Research is always a key factor in the success of any strategy. It is not a one-time process and should be able to inform all your marketing efforts on all channels, especially digital channels. Research should not only include keyword research and competitive research, but also consistent follow up of performance reviews and measuring the performance of the various channels involved.

Keep your users at the center of your research always. While most marketers view SEO as a way to focus on what search engines algorithms need, you should focus more on the potential customers you are targeting. After all, the users are the customers and members to your bank at the end of the day, not robots and algorithms.

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Tracking Relevant Metrics Correctly

Any realistic search engine optimization for banks should include consistent and correct performance measurement techniques. Before installing a performance measurement tool, you should answer a question first: What is the value of your website?

Today’s financial market is littered with data and tech-savvy start-ups that are a great challenge to the larger but sluggish incumbents in most sectors. Every minute spent on a marketing campaign has a measurable value. There are basic digital marketing metrics of marketing that every marketer is aware of, including average order value, click-through rates, cost per click, time on site, cost per acquisition, conversion rate and site depth. While all of them play critical roles, it is essential to identify which among them are going to be the driving force of your firm. The tool of measurement should, therefore, be able to report these values in terms that the management understands.

However, some in-house marketing teams still spend days constructing excel dashboards with traditional data tracking and reporting techniques. It is not only a time-consuming and tedious activity, but also a pointless one.

By easily implementing Google Tag Manager, you could save days in reporting time every week and buy you more free time to do the actual marketing work. Google tag Manager offers you the ability to modify Google Analytics’ configurations, which will help you acquire more insights into specific stages of the user awareness funnel. You could supplement a well configured Google Analytics tracking with top-notch interaction data. This less apparent data contains essential data on customer engagement to content marketing assets such as guides, blogs, campaign emails, customer reviews, videos, and so on.

Analytics tools to be aware of:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most famous tool that is used in website analytics. It not only costs nothing to utilize, but also amazingly effortless to install and run. The platform also boasts a huge number of users, which provides armatures and novice users with unlimited resources to guide them in the setup and management of their website’s analysis. For instance:

(Image Credit: Neil Patel)

Google Tag Manager (GTM)

The Google Tag Manager allows its users to manage all tags from a centralized location. It not only improves site load time, but also reduces the chances of tag duplication and simplifies tag management.

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)

Also known as Google Search Console, the GWT platform provides webmasters with much more insight into how the Google search engine views a website. When performing bank search engine optimization, the insights are invaluable and should consistently be reviewed. The GWT dashboard offers webmasters high level analytics (estimated click-through rate, estimated impressions, etc.), shows site errors and links to your site. For example:

(Image Credit: Bounteous)

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)

There are demographic groups that prefer Bing to Google. There is, therefore, value in using an analytics tool that analyzes your site’s performance on the search engine too. The DWT platform is similar to GWT, although it is not used as frequently as GWT for obvious reasons. It offers essential insight into how your website is viewed by Bing.

OpenSite Explorer

The OpenSite Explorer, which is part of the Moz suite of analytics tools, is particularly useful when performing backlink analysis. OpenSite Explorer is not recommended for small websites as it is aimed at providing in-depth analysis for websites that are generating a huge number of links. It is an essential tool for larger websites that want to keep an eye on their backlink profile. Here is an example:

(Image Credit: Talk About Creative)

SEMRush

This analytics tool allows you to view the queries as a specific website is ranking for on the top 20 results (first two pages of results). It can be a valuable tool, not only for keyword research, but also for competitive research.

Mobile friendly and fast

Google search algorithm has undergone tremendous changes in the last couple of years. This is to change the way results are presented to users and its user interface. Feeding this movement from the core is Google’s shift to mobile fast internet. Learning to mirror Google’s behavior is the smart move for a brilliant marketer, which also results in a better user experience for your visitors.

Mobile friendly does not only entail having a responsive web design, but it is among the most essential steps towards creating a mobile optimized website. It will also need you to understand the most appropriate type of images to share on social media, how your emails are going to look, and the content that you are going to share on blogs and social media among many more. Moreover, a sound mobile-friendly strategy should drive the bank or credit union SEO to focus more on mobile app development. Test your website to make sure it is mobile friendly with Google’s Mobile Friendly Tool, for example:

(Image Credit: Search Engine Roundtable)

We hope that you found this article useful.

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SEO Site Architecture

On-page search engine optimization is paramount for your site’s ranking search engine results pages. However, without keeping SEO site architecture in mind, you cannot ensure that your pages rank well in organic search. Ensure that all your pages are placed ideally, and their contents too. Site architecture SEO is quite extensive, but if properly mastered, drastic improvements can be made in the user interface of a website and ultimately in the traffic performance of the site. Once you have successfully assembled your keyword mapping, plot the information architecture on your site and consistently improve on and update it.

Strategic Banking SEO tips to expand your site’s overall performance

Look for Better Keywords between your Paid and Organic Search efforts

Keywords play an essential role in bank and credit union SEO because they determine where you will be placed on the search results and who your competitors are. While your initial keyword research should be driven by the customer journey, it is necessary to take your keyword strategy to the next level and look for synergies in both your paid and organic search efforts for better keywords.

If for instance, conversion is your primary SEO goal and you should take your highest converting keywords into consideration first. You can easily determine the results from paid campaigns in a few days, allowing the marketer to test new marketing metrics and compare strategies. Establish a high understanding of how paid searches are influencing conversions and then create an SEO program that limits risk. Moreover, it will avoid a scenario in which a SEO program runs for months with misaligned KPIs and keywords.

You could enjoy more traffic to your website with paid-organic synergies too. Dwelling on your website’s on-page SEO with high-volume paid keywords will gradually improve the relevance of your content and increase the chances of being ranked higher each time. It could even drive down your cost per click over time.

Include long-tail keywords in your SEO strategy to help further drive organic traffic to your site. Long-tail keywords are the very specific three and four-letter phrases that can be very helpful in ranking you higher on the SeRPs. While most of your competitors may be ignoring such keywords, you can use them to get an edge over their marketing strategies.

FACT: Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate 3% to 5% higher than generic searches.

Be comprehensive and consistent

To answer the question; “what does SEO stand for in Finance?,” it is all about being more trustworthy than your competitor, Moreover, the best way to show users your website is trustworthy is by providing as much information about yourself on social media channels and online directories. While most of them will allow you to create profiles without images, they award those that provide more information with higher rankings in internal searches and improved presence. You should, therefore, always aim to provide more relevant information like images and video, if available, and not just adding your business name and brief summary. It is also essential to note that most channels penalize irrelevant information so be sure to only select the relevant categories.

It is also essential that you remain consistent across all media channels with your Business name, address, and phone number. The three are often used to determine the authenticity of businesses across major social media platforms, bank search engines, and major directories. Setting up your social media business profiles and listing your business name on directories is, however, not enough. Utilize the potential of social media to interact with consumers and ask for reviews. Remember that negative reviews are as important, or even more important, than positive reviews. They offer your brand the chance to fix errors and broken relationships, resulting in stronger advocacy for the brand.

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