How to Do SEO for Financial Services: Ultimate Guide for 2025
Financial services companies are facing a number of challenges when it comes to marketing in a crowded industry. Fierce competition for consumer attention, trust, and patronage is compelling brands to maximize their marketing strategies across every channel.
Search engine optimization (SEO), or the practice of improving a website’s ranking within organic search result pages, is a key component of a diversified marketing approach. While many traditional methods such as email campaigns involve active outreach to end users, SEO relies on consumer search interest to generate brand recognition, leads, and customers.
SEO for financial services can be especially effective due to the importance consumers place on brand credibility when choosing a financial institution (FI). Search engines like Google consider a myriad of factors when ranking search results, but brands with online credibility or trust are likely to rank higher in the results. Consequently, the higher that the rankings from financial website SEO propel a FI in the search results, the more probable it is that the listing will produce organic traffic through a combination of trust and exposure.
While paid traffic can produce revenue results for FIs, leads generated through SEO in financial services may prove to be of a higher quality. For example, email lists can contain unqualified contacts that often result in low conversion rates. However, a consumer actively searching for a particular financial-focused keyword who finds a FI’s website may be more qualified to become a customer.
This can also speak volumes for marketing budgets already spread across an omnichannel strategy. SEO tends to be more economical to implement since the work is typically conducted on an existing corporate website, requiring just the time and resources to optimize content. Conversely, paid traffic carries an overhead through methods such as cost per click models that charge the FI even if the lead does not convert to a customer. Considering Google alone, organic search traffic presents a return on investment (ROI) of 5.3x while paid search yields an ROI of just 2x.
Understanding the Basics of Financial SEO
With the advantages of financial website SEO in a comprehensive marketing plan evident, marketers can benefit from an understanding of the basics. As noted above, SEO is the intentional enhancement of a website’s assets in order to make it more appealing to search engine algorithms. Search engines like Google and Bing consider a variety of website attributes when determining the quality and relevance of a webpage in comparison to a user’s search query. Some of these factors include:
- Keyword relevance: Does the page or website include the word(s) the user is searching for?
- Meta tagging: Does the page or website include behind-the-scenes information that makes it easier for the search engine to find?
- Backlining: Do other websites link to information on the website as a demonstration of the brand’s credibility?
- User experience: Does the page or website load quickly and render correctly across different devices and screen sizes?
- Recency: Is the page or website frequently updated with new information to help users access the most helpful content?
These are just a few of the key considerations for SEO. Complicating matters even more are the nuances of SEO for financial services.
First and foremost is the need for compliance. Developing content targeting specific keywords and user search queries must be balanced with adhering to the regulations and guidelines around publishing financial advice and financial product information. While marketers may not be able to control the text a search engine displays, they can ensure the destination page includes the proper disclosures and data privacy measures.
Trustworthiness is also a major consideration for financial website SEO. From one angle, this can be viewed as the confidence that consumers have in an FI and its products or services. This is often cultivated by publishing accurate and transparent details potential and current customers can use to drive their decision making.
Adding to this is the perspective of the search engine itself when it comes to determining trust. Google, for instance, considers whether a webpage provides content designed to help consumers or just to rank in the search engine results. Finance SEO in particular is subjected to more rigorous standards in page quality assessment by Google, which considers the topic to be impactful on consumer outcomes.
The value financial institution website SEO can bring to an organization overshadows any of the obstacles that may arise. By creating a search engine friendly website on the backend with content that helps front end users relate to and understand available products and services, marketers can use SEO for financial services to fuel overall growth. In addition to improving brand credibility with search engines and customers, SEO for financial services can:
- Improve conversions by connecting with consumers already actively searching for specific financial products or services
- Support existing marketing campaigns that may initially engage prospective customers who then turn to search engine results for more information
- Help an FI brand stand out in a competitive marketplace by taking on the role of a perceived thought leader and reliable source
- Connect with local consumers looking for regional or location-based FIs that also offer the products and services most important to them.
To implement SEO for financial institutions, marketers should consider search engine optimization as one of many components in an overall strategy. Understanding search intent, or the reasoning behind what and why users are searching for content online, can help FIs better align their marketing plans with consumer demand and buyer personas. This, in its turn, should support the company’s overall financial goals and key performance indicators per product or service. This alignment can help marketers allocate their time and resources more effectively on projects likely to match consumer purchasing decisions.
Navigating the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) Landscape
Financial advice and products are a serious sell when it comes to the consumer landscape. The information and services customers may choose to abide by can have a direct impact on their financial outcomes now and in the future. As such, consumers are generally encouraged to do their research and do business with credible financial services companies, while these same FIs are regulated and instructed to be honest, transparent, and factual about the products and services on offer.
The significance of these decisions is not lost on search engines either. In particular, Google classifies pages that cover topics that could “impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people” as Your Money Your Life (YMYL) pages. As such, the search engine holds these pages to a higher quality standard in order to protect consumers from misinformation that could potentially harm them. Pages with misleading, inaccurate, or inappropriate content regarding a particular topic or keyword are much less likely to be recommended in Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Best practices for SEO for financial services should start with ensuring all information presented is accurate, verifiable, and cited where sources are available. Sourcing content can take several forms including the embedding of backlinks to exact references or the inclusion of expert credentials within the page copy. While some content may be evergreen, meaning that it remains relevant and accurate over time, a key step for most SEO finance maintenance is the upkeep and updating of content that can quickly go out of date.
One example of effective YMYL content is Bank of America’s Better Money Habits website. Its articles, such as this one describing IRAs in detail, are frequently updated with current facts and figures, include credible sources, and list clear disclaimers regarding the advice given for compliance reasons.
E-E-A-T and Its Role in Financial Services SEO
One key part of ensuring proper page optimization and YMYL consideration is to establish page content that complies with the E-E-A-T principle. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is unique to the Google search engine, which sees 91.47% of the world’s search traffic. While E-E-A-T does not directly impact SERP rankings, Google uses it to determine the quality of the content presented, which is an attribute of its YMYL assessment.
E-E-A-T standards include consideration of the following when choosing a topic for a webpage:
- Experience: Does the company or author have direct experience regarding the topic up for discussion?
- Expertise: Does the company or author have credentials that demonstrate authority for the content presented?
- Authoritativeness: Do other websites consider the content credible and reliable enough to link to or cite directly?
- Trustworthiness: Is the website content accurate, secure, and recent to protect user data and decision making?
In SEO for financial services, E-E-A-T is especially important for underscoring overall credibility. Financial services websites with a poor YMYL assessment will likely also have low E-E-A-T compliance. This will cause the website to rank poorly in the search results as Google prioritizes content deemed more reliable. Failing to meet E-E-A-T standards can impact more than brand visibility; it can have a direct impact on brand reputation.
To boost financial website SEO through E-E-A-T, marketers can consider ways to demonstrate their thought leadership online.
- Showcase authorship by industry experts or through direct customer feedback to demonstrate experience and financial understanding.
- Include easy to access citations, sources, and other references alongside contributor credentials to highlight expertise in a particular topic.
- Create a strong backlink network with other reputable industry websites and press through brand mentions and public relations to establish authority.
- Update the website’s security measures, privacy policies, and disclosures to underscore trust with end users and search engines.
Technical SEO for Financial Websites
Security measures are just one aspect of implementing effective technical SEO. Search engine optimization is a general practice that often includes developing content that includes quality information, strategically placed internal and outbound links, and keyword implementation. Technical SEO refers to the back-end development of the website itself and how its structure can impact SERP rankings.
Since technical SEO can impact website architecture, web developers are often relied upon to implement these changes. However, marketers should have a basic understanding of how these changes can impact search engine rankings. Key factors for technical SEO include:
- Removing broken links
- Adding alt descriptions to images
- Improving page speed
- Ensuring responsiveness across devices
- Creating site maps and robots.txt files
- Optimizing crawl performance
- Implementing schema.org markup for indexing
- Improving site navigation and search
- Applying SSL/TLS and HTTPS for security
- Integrating front-end interfaces with back-end systems
These elements are extra important for financial institution website SEO where security and data privacy are required. Fixing elements such as link errors and slow page loading can also improve the overall end user experience, helping to create a positive impression on consumers.
Unfortunately, financial websites may face challenges working with outdated platforms that are more difficult to optimize, let alone integrate with enterprise systems for customer data management. Technical teams need to work with marketers and data security officers to ensure that experiences are optimized not just for SEO purposes but also for more seamless and secure data management.
Developing a Financial SEO Strategy: Where to Begin
While SEO for financial services may seem like a marketing-only discipline, FIs can benefit from including various internal department leaders when crafting a strategy. Technical, compliance, and legal resources are liable to be needed as strategies become action items that require review and resources to implement. When creating a strategy for financial SEO, consider these key steps.
Audit Existing Website Performance
Developing an SEO financial services plan starts an assessment of the website’s current ranking and performance along with the technology used to power it. A technical audit can help uncover opportunities for short-term successes and long-term projects to improve search engine ranking and overall website performance.
A number of tools are available to help with an audit designed to highlight website performance metrics. Each can be used to determine a baseline and establish new goals. Website crawlers like Screaming Frog or error reports generated by Google Search Console simulate how search engines assess a website’s structure. They can then report on any issues such as broken links, keyword density, and meta tag implementation. Assessing page load times and device responsiveness with Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) and Google Lighthouse can also help identify the need for image optimization or server response times, among other key attributes.
Conduct Audience Research
The keywords a company thinks are relevant may not necessarily align with consumer search habits. Conducting audience research can help uncover the pain points, and search terms, target customers are using around financial products and services.
One approach is to review the feedback and data collected by customer-facing teams to confirm the issues and topics important to a target audience. Many CRM systems include reporting tools that can assess trends across purchasing, customer service calls, and different demographics. This can then be used to direct content development projects.
Evaluating general search volume outside of an existing prospect or customer base is also an important step. Marketers can conduct competitive research and keyword research exploring proposed topics and phrases to strategically create content. Tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Ads Keyword Planner all provide insights around search volume, related search terms, and competitor rankings for specific keywords. This can also help with prioritizing opportunities based on traffic and search interest as well as relevance to business goals.
Optimize Current Website Content
With an understanding of technical performance and clear direction for content development, marketers can evaluate existing content with an eye to the E-E-A-T principles. Each page should be considered with regard to whether it presents information that demonstrates the company’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Specific to Google, the search engine works with nearly 16,000 global search quality raters who manually determine whether pages that fall within the YMYL category are presenting high-quality information. Using a set of extensive guidelines, raters assess a page’s relevance to a particular topic along with factual accuracy, readability, clear purpose, working links, and inclusion of critical information. For SEO for financial services, this is especially important as raters and search engine crawlers look for claims that are substantiated, verified, and backed by the proper disclaimers.
Marketers can also bolster existing content SEO performance by strategically aligning messaging with the keywords selected during audience research. On page optimization should include the inclusion of the targeted keyword in the title tag, meta description, headings, copy, and image alt text. However, marketers should also resist the urge to overuse keywords, a method known as keyword stuffing. This typically looks like using the same words excessively within the text with an unnatural sound to the phrasing.
Monitor Progress
Financial website SEO is not a single instance project. Instead, marketers should continue to monitor their search rankings and create new content aligned with their strategy. Technical SEO aspects such as page speed and responsiveness should also be tracked closely since updates to servers and platforms can cause disruptions over time.
Changes in SERP rankings can also take time, up to three months or more in some cases, due to the frequency search engines recrawl websites and the competitive landscape around different targeted keywords.
Marketers can monitor website performance metrics to ensure that traffic remains consistent, if not improved, while making optimization changes. This can include changes in:
- Inbound organic traffic
- Keyword SERP ranking
- Dwell time and bounce rates
- Conversion rates
Implementation Challenges and How to Overcome Them
SEO is an evolving discipline as search engines continue to update their algorithms and requirements to provide what they believe is the best matching content for the end user search intent. In SEO for financial institution websites, additional implementation challenges could come to light.
Navigating compliance regulations are key to FIs presenting content that follows legal guidelines for sharing financial advice and presenting financial products. The standards for ensuring data privacy policies and licensing information are more stringent for FIs not only because of the requirements set forth by Google’s YMYL approach but also for the legal ramifications overseen by compliance teams. Issues such as broken links to privacy policies, compliance language, and other industry regulations can impact SEO and compromise the business as a whole.
Resources can also be a barrier to rolling out a comprehensive SEO finance services plan. Smaller FIs or those without an internal technical resource may find it more difficult to make more complicated updates to their website’s structure. By contracting an agency or external resource that specializes in technical SEO tactics, FIs may see a significant ROI on their investment. One way to monitor this is to calculate the SEO ROI. To do this:
- Subtract the cost of the investment (i.e. outsourced technical SEO contract) from the typical conversion value.
- Divide the value from step one by the cost of the investment.
- Multiple the figure in step two by 100%.
Branding inconsistencies can also arise when implementing SEO. While marketing may be targeting specific keywords based on user search intent, sales may have other ideas regarding messaging and customer interactions. This makes managing internal stakeholder buy-in an essential part of SEO efforts and marketing strategies in general. Fostering collaboration can help create more cohesion between the messaging a potential customer sees in search results and the conversations they have with sales or customer service representatives.
Examples of Successful Financial SEO Strategies
Determining the impact of SEO activities for a particular FI is largely an internal monitoring activity. However, with tools like SEMRush, any marketer can explore keyword activity and performance and conduct a competitive analysis.
Major banking brands such as Bank of America may have an advantage when it comes to available resources. This can be reflected in the amount of organic traffic they receive each month. For general, shorter search terms such as “banks,” Bank of America received 24 million organic traffic visits and ranked for over 2.2 million keywords. Much of this can be attributed to a comprehensive thought leadership approach to content development. In addition to informative product pages inclusive of the proper terms and conditions, their Better Money Habits series provides educational resources that summarize key takeaways, optimize headers and keyword inclusion, and include links to supporting resources.
JP Morgan Chase’s website assets also experience high-volume organic search traffic exceeding 26 million monthly visits. The campaigns run by Chase do more than just target financial industry keywords. They have demonstrated success with brand recognition through an omnichannel marketing approach that is reflected in the search traffic with 93.1% of traffic is branded. This indicates that consumers are searching directly for financial industry terms alongside the brand name “Chase” or other related brand names.
Both of these big bank tactics for SEO can be implemented by smaller FIs and regional banks. One approach can be to emulate Bank of America’s wider keyword targeting paired with local SEO terms that can capture consumers looking for regional offerings. For example, instead of targeting “open checking account,” consider using a longer tail keyword such as “open checking account Toledo, Ohio.” In another tactic, marketers can create comprehensive campaigns pairing their brand name with select keywords that can help with brand identity along with products and services on offer.
The Future of Financial Services SEO
SEO is also an evolving field directly impacted by trends in technology. As the software and processes that power search engines become more complex, marketers need to stay on top of the latest developments that could affect their rankings, for better or for worse.
Search engine optimization has already been altered by the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-driven SEO. These tools are designed to help marketers improve their rankings by analyzing aspects such as keywords, content, and backlining using machine learning to identify areas for improvement.
Multi-platform usability has been a critical part of SEO for financial services for years, but voice driven search optimization promises to take this to a new level. With more consumers using voice search capabilities on their smart home devices and phones, such as Alexa or Siri, websites need to be easily searchable while also considering the differences in how people speak versus type in search queries. Voice-driven SEO looks for clear answers to common questions presented in conversational tone
Financial SEO for 2025 and Beyond
Remaining current on SEO trends can help marketers tasked with FI brand identity and lead generation remain relevant online. These leaders should keep in mind that a website optimized for today’s SEO landscape may quickly become outdated given the rate of change in the field. Google’s algorithm for SERP is constantly being refined to consider everything from user engagement to content quality. Estimates place these updates at occurring nearly 13 times a day, making the task of staying current an endless one. This is in addition to consistent monitoring of ranking results and creating new content to address new business goals, all while maintaining the technical performance of a website.
At Vested, we understand that SEO is a continuous project that requires strategy from content, legal, and technical perspectives. Our experts work with clients to gain buy-in and input across the organization and implement effective SEO strategies that drive business goals. From an initial audit to ongoing refinement, Vested’s SEO strategists also know how to navigate the challenges of financial services SEO to ensure compliance and results. Learn more about how Vested can help your organization make its mark in SERP to enhance brand recognition and lead generation.