Fintech SEO: 5 Tactics To Get You Started
If you run a fintech company, you need customers. But how do you find them? I have one three-letter word for you: SEO.
SEO remains one of the most effective ways to build website traffic, find leads, and convert them into paying customers.
Fair enough, you say.
But how does a fintech company get started with SEO?
In this article, I am going to lay out five tactics you can use to get started with SEO for fintech. By implementing these five tactics, you will be able to start building a long-term strategy that will help you succeed with your SEO program.
Keyword Research
In my experience, Keyword research remains the most important first step in any SEO strategy. Keywords, or “queries”, are the language of Google search.
They are the literal words that your potential customers are typing into the Google search engine to find the information, goods, or services they are looking for.
A customer may be interested in fintech services, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will type that particular word into the search bar.
Keyword research is your portal into the mind of the Googler. So how do you get started with keyword research?
One easy way is to take a word that comes to mind that describes your business well and see what related terms pop up on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for that keyword. I will call this “The SERP Strategy”.
The SERP Strategy
As an example, let’s go ahead and type “fintech” in the Google search bar.
If you scroll down below the ads, you’ll see clues for additional keywords. On the left side are “People Also Ask” (PAA) questions and on the right side are some related keywords in the knowledge panel.
The PAA questions include:
What does fintech mean?
What does the fintech do?
How do I get started in fintech?
Is fintech the same as banking?
The keywords in the knowledge panel include:
Banking companies
Fintech banking companies
Technology
Fintech technology
Services
Fintech services
See the screenshot of the SERP with my beautiful yellow highlights here:
Below the knowledge graph keywords, take a look at the “People also search for” box. These include:
Robotics
Cloud Computing
Internet of Things
Finance
Finally, if you scroll down past the initial ten or so results, you come to the “Related Searches” section. Eight related searches appear including:
Fintech examples
Fintech courses
Fintech India
Fintech full form
Fintech login
Fintech bank
Fintech jobs
Fintech technology
Search Intent
Not all eight of these keywords are going to help you find new clients because the search intent may be off. For example, someone who is Googling “fintech jobs” is likely looking for a career, not a digital banking service.
Someone Googling “fintech login” is likely looking for the login to the company named Fintech rather than performing a generic search for companies to do business with.
Also, take note: The fact that many searchers for “fintech” may be looking for the individual company rather than the industry as a whole may limit the effectiveness of using this keyword in your content.
On the other hand, the fifth search result is Wikipedia’s entry on the concept “fintech”, not the individual company. That means that Google is recognizing a mix of two different kinds of searchers.
While many may not be looking for the services offered by a business like yours, others likely are. So this keyword still has plenty of value for a fintech firm.
Keyword Research Tools
By simply performing this one search and studying the results, you have now found several related search terms and phrases that are likely relevant to your business. You’ve also learned something about the intent of the searchers who enter this query.
You may rinse and repeat this process with as many keywords as you want. However, there may be other and equally useful ways of gaining keyword data.
Many keyword tools can help you perform research for your fintech SEO strategy. For example, there is the free Keyword Planner in Google’s Adwords software.
There are also highly effective paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush that have lots of keyword data and useful ways to organize it.
For some, it is worth paying the subscription prices for these tools. For others, relying on free sources of information like the SERP strategy above will be enough to get you started.
2. Start Blogging
Getting Started and E-E-A-T
In my experience, blogging is one of the most effective ways to achieve SEO success. And creating valuable, relevant, and useful content for your users on your niche topic is more important than ever if you want to win the SEO game.
It is not hard to set up a blog on most website builders like Wix or Squarespace, as well as on a CMS like WordPress. For anything larger than a very small business, I tend to recommend https://wordpress.org/ (NOT .com) as the go-to tool for building both your customer-facing website and your accompanying blog.
By creating content on the topic of fintech as well as any niches relevant to your business, you will begin to build topical authority in your space.
So much of SEO success these days is built around the E-E-A-T model which stands for
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
When you write blog posts for your site, you should always have these four factors in the back of your head to guide you. The other three can be subsumed under trustworthiness, which is the main goal here.
You want to be creating helpful, useful content that searchers believe they can trust. By demonstrating your experience, displaying your expertise, and showcasing how authoritative you are, the more trustworthy your content will be.
Choosing Blog Post Topics
But how do you know what to blog about?
Let your keyword research be your guide.
For example, above we learned that one of the related search terms for “fintech” was “Fintech examples”. Perhaps you could create a blog post called “7 Examples of the Latest Fintech Technology” or “3 Examples of Fintech Companies”.
Both of these topics would focus on the keyword “fintech examples” in different ways. You could create just one or both of these blog posts or generate even more ideas. You will need to experiment to see which way you have more success - creating one comprehensive piece for this keyword or creating a cluster of content around the topic of “Fintech Examples”.
However, as much as I am an advocate of SEO strategy, in the beginning, it is more important to get in the habit of consistently creating quality content on your topic.
As you do this, you will begin to develop a feel for the process and you will improve. Meanwhile, you will start to build up some topical authority in the eyes of Google.
And remember to have fun with it! You want your content to be not just useful but also interesting in the eyes of your users. You want them to enjoy reading it as much as you are enjoying reading this post right now! You know you are.
Promoting Your Blog Content
Remember, it’s not just about creating the content. You also have to promote it. Your blog isn’t the field of dreams and just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come.
How do you promote your blog content? There are so many ways! For starters, you’ll want to make sure you share it across all of your social media channels. This may include:
Facebook
Twitter / X
Instagram
LinkedIn
TikTok
Pinterest
And any other channels social media channels you use or are important to your business.
Not only does sharing your content get eyeballs on it, but social engagement can turn into positive SEO signals for Google, including acquired backlinks. While there is no definitive correlation between social media engagement and Google search results, there is anecdotal evidence to think there are benefits.
If you have an email list, I also highly recommend that you distribute your content to your audience through email marketing. You can do this periodically or even include blog posts in a regularly scheduled newsletter sent weekly, monthly, or even just quarterly.
Finally, it can sometimes be beneficial to boost your social media content with a small ad spend to juice its reach and engagement. While it’s controversial how effective organic social media is these days, it goes without saying that spending a few dollars a day or even a week to promote your content on a platform like Facebook or Linkedin can get it in front of a much larger audience.
3. Site Navigation
Search Experience and the Main Navigation Menu
While you may not spend much time thinking about your main navigation menu, site navigation is an essential part of SEO success. That’s because a site that is easy to navigate provides users with a great experience. And a great user experience helps provide a great overall Search Experience.
When users land on your website, they may be on the page they are looking for. But they may be interested in navigating to another page. Will they be able to easily find it? Will they be able to find it at all?
This is what your site navigation is all about. And it is extremely important for SEO. The most important part is your main navigation menu, but there is much more to it than that.
When you look at the main navigation menu for your website, what do you see? We can use my website as an example here.
My main navigation consists simply of five different menu items:
Home
SEO Services
About
Blog
Contact
I consider these to be the five most important pages on my website because many of my users will want to find them.
Notice how simply and cleanly I label them, too. By reading the anchor text of the link, you should know exactly what each of these pages is about.
Think about how different it would be if instead of “SEO Services” I wrote, “Explore”. I see many companies do things like this.
It generally isn’t helpful.
Nobody is going to know exactly what “explore” means, but they will know what I mean by “SEO services.” Even if they do not know exactly which SEO services I offer, or how I will execute them, they will know that this is the right place on my website to find out.
Similarly, instead of “Learn” I have “Blog”. “Learn” could mean a lot of things - a wiki, an instructional or explainer video, a podcast, a course.
But “Blog” is self-explanatory. It’s a blog.
Additional Navigation Menus
Keep in mind, that navigation goes beyond your top-level navigation menu. For example, your website footer menu is also great real estate for placing useful navigation links.
You can use it to place links that are less important than the ones in your top navigation. You can also use it to showcase links deeper into your website.
Perhaps you can add links to individual product or service pages. Or individual blog posts.
Another thing to keep in mind: different sections of your website can have navigation menus apart from the main nav bar.
For example, maybe you have a service page menu showcasing links to your most important service lines.
Or you have a blog navigation with all of your most important blog categories. On a fintech site, these could be things like:
Fintech AI
Digital Banking
Insurtech
Embedd finance
Fintech Financing
Or whichever blog topics you plan to cover and are important to your particular business.
All of these navigation menus help you create internal links that structure your website. And site structure is important for SEO.
It helps Google understand what your site is all about and what topics you cover in all of your content. That way, it will start to understand which queries to rank your content for.
4. Optimize Your Meta Tags
It’s been my observation that some people who are less familiar with the basic practices of everyday SEO think that updating metadata is all there is to SEO. This could not be further from the truth.
But, according to Google’s search guidelines, updating your meta tags is still important even in 2023. For example, your title tag is one of the most important pieces of SEO real estate on any given page. You should not neglect it.
Some pages on your website can ignore the need for keyword placement. Content serves many purposes and SEO is only one amongst a competing set of goals.
But, the pages that are most important for SEO, including
your homepage
product pages
service pages
and any blog content created (in part) to rank for Google terms
should all be keyword-optimized. Ideally, this means placing the right keywords in your meta tags.
The most important tags that you should be updating on all of your SEO-driven pages include:
Title Tags
Meta Description
Heading Tags
Image alt tags
Let’s look at each of these tags in turn.
Title Tags
Your title tag tells Google the main topic of your page. On an SEO-focused page, that topic should be a keyword or have a keyword included. Title tags look as follows in your HTML code:
<title>your title</title>
Your page title is written in between the open and closed elements. For example, on your services page, you could simply title your page “services” which would look as follows:
<title>services</title>
While this is descriptive of what the page is about - your services, it is not keyword-rich. You are probably not trying to rank for the keyword “services” by itself. But you may be trying to rank for the keyword “fintech services”.
So this would be a more descriptive and more SEO-friendly title tag for your page. It would look so:
<title>Fintech Services</title>
There’s even more you can do, however. You can also brand the page with your company name. Doing so helps you in several ways.
For one, it starts to associate the name of your brand with the concept of “fintech services” in the minds of your users.
But it also starts to create this association in the Google algorithm as well. So, branding your page titles can be a highly effective way of creating them. Which is why this is an industry-standard best practice.
If the name of your company is “Greatest Fintech Corp.” your HTML title tag would then be written:
<title>Fintech Services | Greatest Fintech Corp.</title>
The “|” separator is one standard way of separating the actual page topic from the company or organization branding. Although some prefer to use a dash like “-” instead. There is no major difference here; it is personal or organizational preference.
One thing to be careful of: if your title is too long, Google will likely cut part of it off. The maximum length of a tag is usually about 60 characters or so. Some tools can help you preview what your title tag would likely look like on the SERP if Google doesn’t alter it algorithmically. I like the free Higher Visibility SERP optimizer.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are a summary of what your page is about. Whereas title tags tend to be a few words, meta descriptions may be a couple of sentences long.
In crafting your meta description, you should accurately describe the content of your page succinctly, clearly, and in a way that will interest your readers.
Let's say we are working on a blog post titled “What is digital banking?”. We might write a meta description that looks as so:
Explore the world of digital banking in our latest blog post, where we demystify its features, benefits, and future impact on finance. Dive in now for insights!
This meta description, which I generated using ChatGPT, describes exactly what the content of the blog post is about. It also includes a short call to action at the end.
The HTML code for such a meta description would look as follows:
<meta name="description" content="Explore the world of digital banking in our latest blog post, where we demystify its features, benefits, and future impact on finance. Dive in now for insights!.">
Each page on your website should have a unique meta description that accurately captures what is on that page. Eliminating duplicate meta descriptions is considered a technical SEO best practice.
Heading Tags
Heading tags are for one purpose and one purpose only: adding structure to your page content. It is like generating an outline for a page or post.
If your page title contains the main topic of your page, your headings contain the subtopics of your page.
The exception to this is often the H1 heading tag. This is often used as an audience-facing title tag, rather than a subtopic indicator. Whereas your <title> tag displays the page title as it will be seen in search results, <H1> tags often display the on-page title for your readers.
Lower-order heading tags like H2, H3, and H4 tags are then used to add a hierarchical structure to your page. For example, on a page called “What is fintech?” we may have the following heading structure:
<h1>What is Fintech?</h1>
<h2>History of Fintech</h2>
<h2>Key Components of Fintech</h2>
<h3>Digital Banking</h3>
<h3>Blockchain and Cryptocurrency</h3>
<h3>Payment Solutions</h3>
<h3>Personal Finance Management</h3>
<h3>Insurtech</h3>
<h2>The Impact of Fintech</h2>
<h3>On the Banking Sector</h3>
<h3>On Businesses</h3>
<h3>On Consumers</h3>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
This code, which I created with ChatGPT and then slightly modified, is a great illustration of how heading tags should work. You’ll very rarely go deeper than an <h3>, although I have used <h4> and even <h5> tags in my content once in a blue moon.
It is important to point out that heading tags should be used for structure and not for styling. If you want text to look large and bold, use CSS to style the font. Do not use html structure to accomplish this task, because this will lead to a confusing structure for your page. Confusing structures are bad for SEO.
Image Alt Tags
Image alt tags are used to describe the content of an image that you are using. For example, if you place an image of a yacht sailing on an ocean, your alt tag may say “a yacht sailing on the ocean on a sunny day.”
There are multiple reasons why image alt tags are important. For one, they help image search algorithms understand the content of an image so they know which queries to display it for.
Second, they provide additional context to search engines about the contents and topics of your page or post.
Third, when an image is used as a link, the alt tag serves essentially as link anchor text. This also provides context about your page as well as the page you are linking to.
Finally, image alt tags are important for accessibility. If your user has a different visual ability, they can use screen readers to understand the content of your image as long as an alt tag is present.
While accessibility is not necessarily an SEO ranking factor, providing this tag and supporting accessibility on your website is still an SEO best practice to help differently abled users in your audience.
Keep your image alt tags relatively short. Use keywords when possible, although keep in mind that the main purpose is to describe your image, not insert a keyword.
For example, in our article “What is fintech”, perhaps we have an image of a professional woman working at her computer.
We could use the alt tag, “A fintech professional working at her computer”. Such a description provides an important SEO keyword and also accurately describes what is being depicted in the picture in the context of your article.
5. Page Speed & Site Performance
Nobody likes a slow website. And if someone does, this person is weird, don’t talk to them or feed them after midnight.
Your fintech website should be fast.
This is important both so that your users do not get angry and throw their computers at the wall and because site speed is important for SEO.
How do you know if your pages are loading fast enough? Luckily, you have access to this information right in Google Search Console.
When you enter your search console, scroll down to the “core web vitals” section” underneath the “experience” heading of the left-hand index.
In this section, you will see a matrix explaining the number of pages that are performing as “good”, “needs improvement”, or “poor” for metrics known to SEO professionals as “core web vitals”.
The core web vitals measure speed, page stability, and interactivity, three elements of site performance.
The report here is also broken out into desktop and mobile. Depending upon how your website is mobile optimized, your CWVs scores may look quite different on the two separate devices.
One way to analyze your site performance and speed is to run your page through Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool.
Enter your webpage into the search bar and run the analysis. Not only will you receive a report on whether your page passes the analysis, but you will also see a list of recommendations to help you improve the performance of your site.
Some of these recommendations may include things like:
Reducing unused javascript
Serving images more efficiently
Enabling text compression
Minifying and compressing code (JavaScript and CSS)
Running JavaScript Asynchronously
But there are several other things you can do. You may have the development and coding resources to solve these problems. In other instances, using a plugin or similar tool for your website builder or CMS may be the best solution to the problem.
Can an SEO Consultant Help with Your Fintech Site?
Yes, absolutely. While some companies may have the resources they need to handle their SEO internally, an SEO consultant can work either instead of an internal option or in coordination with your in-house team to help you improve your fintech site’s performance in Google organic search.
Generally, an SEO consultant will help you analyze your site to identify major SEO opportunities and correct SEO problems. They will do this through a combination of techniques including technical, content, and backlink analysis.
The SEO consultant will then provide you with several recommendations. You can either implement these recommendations yourself or have your SEO consultant implement them for you if they offer that service.
While SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that requires a significant amount of time and investment effort, most businesses will benefit from investing. And while patience is required, the eventual ROI is generally more than worth it.
If you are interested in learning more about my SEO consulting services or how I can help optimize your FinTech site for SEO performance and results, I’d love to speak with you. Please reach out to me at brian@reiserseo.com anytime and let’s chat.