Most marketing for financial services is about education. The buying cycle may be long and the customer will spend a lot of time evaluating your competitors as well as you. Also, they may be passively researching for months before they start actively talking to financial service providers. Therefore, there are three key goals that you should be aiming for;
- Be there at every stage of the cycle. Through the research stage up to the evaluation stage. You and your brand need to be available.
- Promote your brand as one that customers can trust. Trust, as far as SEO goes, comes from two areas. First, show what you know and make sure your website covers industry trends, changes in the market etc. Second, get other media outlets to show that you know your stuff.
- Make it easy for the customer to take action.
Whether you offer business banking and payment solutions, or financial planning or guarantees and bonds, we know that you customers are using the web to find you and your competitors. They will be researching as much as they possibly can.
There are a few key things you can do to promote your financial services firm with SEO;
- Ensure you know what you want customers to do when they get to your site. If it is to download a prospectus, then make sure you have that set up as a goal in analytics.
- Make sure you blog/write news as often as possible
- Make sure your blog is connected to Google+ and you have rich snippets enabled so that your profile will show up next to your posts.
- Use a service like NewsMaker to promote press releases as frequently as possible.
- Select keywords for your packages that the client are likely to use. Your business may be involved in securitised term notes or tradeable debt, but your client is more likely to be searching for “corporate financing services”.
- Offer to write for industry papers or news outlets. The more frequently you are seen in the media, the better change there is that someone will look you up.
- Use Adwords strategies to continuously promote your business to your customers, through remarketing and youtube etc.
- Syndicate your product offerings to other websites as much as possible.
A financial services SEO, as with most other markets, should be measured with conversions. The key to any good SEO campaign is the analytics that you use to track what people are doing when they come to your site. Looking at analytics, you should be able to tell what keywords customers are using before they download a portfolio. You can use event tracking in Analytics to achieve this.