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7 SEO Tips that Will Boost Your Financial Website’s Ranking

No matter how much time and money you put into developing and designing your website, you won’t get any meaningful traffic if you don’t work on your SEO strategy. 

A website is an amazing marketing tool that can constantly bring in new leads and clients. But before this can happen, you need to make sure that people can see your pages when they search for financial information.

You also have to regularly update your SEO strategy since search engines are always updating their search algorithms. If you’re not continuously improving, your competitors will completely dominate the first few search results pages and will have much better chances of getting those precious clicks.

If you want to quickly improve your financial website’s organic traffic, here are 7 SEO tips that you should implement immediately.

Produce Content That Gives You Credibility

In 2018, Google rolled out a huge update that affected lots of websites in the financial and health space. Commonly known as the ‘Medic’ update, it puts websites and pages dealing with topics that can directly affect a person’s overall happiness, health and financial security under much closer scrutiny. SEO professionals often refer to these types of pages as YMYL or ‘Your Money, Your Life’ pages. 

If you want to improve your search engine ranking, your content needs to provide valuable information that people will find useful. Your website also needs to be able to display a higher level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness or E-A-T before it will show up on the first few pages of search results. Using old tactics like keyword stuffing and poorly written spam content won’t even make you show up on Google’s radar anymore.

Your content needs to be developed by professional copywriters who are experts and have a lot of experience in their respective fields. Pages with higher word counts are also more effective at getting to the top of search results. 

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Roughly half of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile users. Google also recognizes this fact and has switched over to mobile-first indexing as of 2020. This means that if you want your pages to rank higher, they have to be mobile friendly. You can use Google’s own Mobile Friendly Test to check how easily mobile users can view your site, as well as how well search engines can index it.

You can improve your site’s mobile friendliness by updating your website and adopting a mobile-first design philosophy. Websites that were primarily designed with desktop users in mind will have more difficulty adapting and adjusting to smaller screens. It’s often much easier to scale up a mobile optimized website to a larger display. When you redesign your website, you can make sure your user interface, website navigation, call-to-action buttons, and content are all easily accessible and usable no matter what device your visitors are using.

Improve Page Load Times

Improving page speed has been a top priority for webmasters ever since the days of dialup. Even in today’s digital landscape where fiber Internet and fast mobile connections are ubiquitous, it’s still extremely important. You never know whether your visitors are stuck with  spotty mobile Internet or are using slower machines and mobile devices.

Page speed is one of the ranking factors that Google measures. This means that slow pages that are filled with large unoptimized photos and buggy code will rank lower in search results. 

In addition, if your pages don’t show up instantly, people will think there’s something broken and will quickly hit the back button. Search engines will see this and consider it as a bounce. In general, higher bounce rates will lower your search engine ranking.

Optimize Your Local SEO Strategy

Local SEO is extremely beneficial to businesses that deal with clients and customers face to face. Financial advisors, in particular, are better off targeting local audiences first since these are the people who are more likely to do business with you. It’s natural for people to be more trusting of people who they know they can reach out to easily, especially when it concerns their finances.

Focusing on local SEO also gives you the added benefit of not having to compete so much for keywords on a national or global level with businesses and websites that have much larger budgets. 

To get started with local SEO, you need to make sure your updated address and phone numbers are listed prominently not only on your website, but also on other business directories such as Google My Business and Yelp. This ensures that people who live and work near your place of business can see your company when they search for topics and keywords related to your services. They’ll also be able to see your exact location on digital map services like Google Maps. This also helps you target mobile users since search engines can easily pinpoint their locations and match more relevant search results from their surrounding area.

Claiming your Google My Business and Yelp page also means people will be able to post reviews about your business. If you are able to provide great service and manage bad reviews by promptly responding to them, your audience will trust you more.

Another way to better target local audiences is by producing content that’s more relevant to people in your city and state. Discussing local regulations and situations will resonate more with people in your local market and will make you a more recognized authority in the area. You’ll also be able to target keywords that fewer competitors are even considering – giving you an edge when it comes to discoverability. 

Audit and Update Your On-Page SEO

If you haven’t done much to improve your website SEO in a while, the first thing you should do is perform a thorough audit. This will help you identify all the technical on-page SEO issues that you can easily fix to get a significant boost in your search engine ranking. 

Here are just a couple of on-page SEO elements you can optimize: 

  • Meta tags 
  • Descriptions 
  • Titles and headings
  • URL structure 
  • Image ALT text
  • Internal and external links
  • Adding structured data for rich snippets

All of these seemingly small and minor improvements will make your website easier to index and will help search engines understand your pages better. When done properly, on-page SEO will push your pages further up the SERP (Search Engine Results Rages).

Use More Infographics and Explainer Videos

Aside from text-based content, you can also attract new audiences by using more images and videos on your pages. If your goal is to educate and inform your target market, you can add infographics and explainer videos to make your content more dynamic and engaging. 

When you have really attractive and intriguing multimedia content, you’ll be more visible on the ‘Images’ and ‘Videos’ search tabs. If you’re one of the very few websites that tackles a particular subject or keyword using infographics and explainer videos, you can get way ahead of your competition in the search rankings. And when it comes to videos, you have a good chance of showing up on the top of the search results page when you use video rich snippets. 

Get Higher Quality Backlinks

It’s hard to build the credibility that search engines look for to rank your website higher if you’re just starting out. But you can speed up this process by reaching out to already established sites and asking them to link to your content. 

When Google sees your links on well-known websites, it sees it as a signal that your site also offers valuable content. In a way, some of the credibility that the well-known site has gets transferred over to your site. 

It may be hard to convince other websites to link to your page especially if you’re relatively unknown even in your own industry. But if you have lots of unique content that incorporates your own personal experiences and specialized expertise on a particular subject, you’ll have a much better chance of actually getting those precious backlinks. 

You can also attract new backlinks if you’ve got really useful infographics, white papers, or additional multimedia content like explainer videos. You’re basically doing all the hard work for these pages, all in exchange for a link to your own site.

If your company has important new updates or deals, make sure to send out press releases to local news outlets and websites that feature topics in your space. 

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