“The only thing that’s constant in fintech is change”
Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Group.
Rapid evolution is perhaps the main thing the SEO and Fintech industries have in common. Innovation in financial technology is happening at an astounding rate thanks to heavy focus from investors in the last ten years. SEO is a constantly evolving discipline thanks to consistent algorithm updates and the creeping influence of generative AI.
SEO Strategies that worked 6 months ago – let alone 6 years ago – may now well be redundant. And it is our primary focus here at Precision Growth not only to understand how to adapt our clients’ SEO strategies accordingly, but how they can also take advantage of these updates to take search market share from more established competitors.
A glimpse into Google Search’s generative AI future from their blog post in May 2023
In this guide, we will teach you how to approach SEO to drive more customers to your fintech in 2024, before giving away some of the most impactful actionable tips you can implement today to improve your rankings. We will provide plenty of examples along the way, from companies like Wise, Stripe, Kraken, and more.
Our advice is based on years of actual experience in the fintech SEO space, rather than just regurgitating what’s already out there.
So whether you’re a seasoned growth marketer or curious founder taking a peak into the SEO wormhole, we hope this guide will add a ton of value.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
What Is ‘FinTech SEO’ Exactly?
SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engine’s organic results to attract more customers. This is done through technical optimisations, targeted content creation, and off site trust signals.
SEO focuses on the organic results only, rather than the sponsored results at the top
FinTech is a broad term encompassing a range of companies which use technology to improve financial services. SEO is a popular strategy for many FinTech’s to acquire new customers.
Why You Simply Can’t Ignore SEO
SEO has been around for a while so it perhaps doesn’t get the hype of newer channels like TikTok. But in our opinion it’s still the most powerful channel in marketing for many fintechs for the following reasons:
- Sheer magnitude. 53.5% of total web traffic is driven by organic search, making it order of magnitudes greater than any other channel for getting customers onto your website.
- Highly qualified audience. What better way to qualify your audience than target people who have explicitly searched for one of your features, or a problem your product solves?
- Audience is in ‘research mode’. This audience is more likely to take action as they are actively seeking information and solutions, rather than being dragged from a social feed.
- It’s highly scalable. Organic traffic is free, which means there’s no cost restriction on how much traffic you can generate. This is particularly important in the exorbitant CPC prices in the FinTech space.
- No arbitrary regulations. Social ad platforms are highly restrictive about what kind of ads you can run whenever there is a financial element at play. No such restrictions exist in SEO.
- Increased resilience to bear markets. The FinTech ecosystem is particularly vulnerable to market forces. A strong SEO presence means you can cut your marketing spend while still retaining your visibility to potential customers.
Fintech SEO vs Traditional SEO
Much of SEO holds true across different industries, with the biggest differentiator usually being the business model. For example, the SEO strategy would be very different for a B2B SaaS vs and online marketplace. However there are three key things to be aware of when planning a fintech SEO strategy.
- Increased emphasis on trust
Google explicitly states that trustworthiness is more important for websites in the financial space. The logic being that bad financial advice could be very harmful. This means you need to go out of your way to harvest trust metrics, such as mentions trusted news sites, transparent author profiles, and high volume of brand searches.
2. Higher prevalence of programmatic strategies
Programmatic strategies – i.e. when websites publish thousands of pages using a database and a template – are much more prevalent in the fintech space due to the abundance of financial data APIs which companies are often already using within their product. This is how Wise, CoinMarketCap, and many others scale traffic into the millions.
3. Increased cost to build links
Link building is expensive in the finance space as industry news sites have cottoned on to how much value links from their site are worth. This means you have be more creative in your link building strategy and run traditional PR campaigns.
Common Mistakes In Fintech SEO
SEO is a hugely misunderstood channel in our experience. This is particularly the case in the FinTech space, where the vast majority of companies fail to take advantage of the opportunity.
Here are the most common mistakes we see out in the wild:
Lack of investment. Many businesses will spend millions on ads but next to nothing on SEO. This is generally due to a lack of understanding about the opportunity SEO offers and the investment required to get there.
Lack of focus on customers. Many SEO strategists focus too much on traffic over customer acquisition. This leads to strategies that look good on traffic graphs, but don’t have a serious business impact.
Company silos. Good SEO requires collaboration with wider marketing, editorial and product teams. Often SEO will be put in a category of its own, and as a result the SEO team are unable to make the changes required to get results.
Poor strategy. There is a ton of misinformation around SEO. The most difficult part is cutting through this noise and focusing on the (very few) initiatives that will actually make a difference.
Crafting Your FinTech SEO Strategy
The role SEO plays in your wider marketing strategy will depend heavily on your specific business. For example, B2C SEO usually focuses on user acquisition while B2B tends to focus on lead generation.
A crypto exchange might focus their efforts on building high quality landing Buy and Sell pages, while a company offering B2B payments solutions might focus on detailed guides educating their customers on topics like international payment fees.
Generally speaking however, the core of a great SEO strategy is relatively universal.
1. Identify What Your Ideal Customer Is Searching For On Google
This process is traditionally known as keyword research, but you should think in terms of topics rather than keywords.
The best way to do this is to embody your ideal customer and use critical thinking to guess how they would search to solve their pain points. You can then validate demand for these topics using a keyword research tool.
I highly recommend this article on Pain Point SEO by Grow and Convert, which goes into detail on some frameworks to do this.
Here are the other sources I recommend:
- Competitor analysis: Use Ahrefs’ or Semrush’s top pages report understand what topics are driving significant traffic to competitors in your industry.
- Interviews with customer-facing employees: Engage with frontline staff to gather firsthand insights into common pain points and inquiries from customers.
- Platforms like Reddit and Medium: These platforms offer valuable insights into trending topics and discussions within your target audience.
- Industry publications: Scrape high quality industry blogs and news sites to see what topics are generating the most traffic.
- Podcasts: This might seem like a strange one, but listening to podcasts your target audience might listen to is a great way to find ‘hidden gem’ topics which your competitors have missed
2. Build Web Pages That Rank At The Top Of Google For Those Terms
It’s really important to create the right type of pages for the topics you’re capturing.
For example, if you want to rank for ‘buy bitcoin’, your page needs to allow users to do just that. Or if you want to rank for ‘what is bitcoin’, you’ll want to provide comprehensive information and explanations on the topic.
The main types of pages you can choose from are:
Product Marketing Pages: These are usually custom designed feature or use case pages. These are great for targeting people already familiar with the solution they seek, such as ‘b2b payments’, ‘send money abroad’, or ‘buy ethereum with a debit card’.
Wise’s product marketing page ranks prominently in Google for ‘international money transfers’ and related keywords.
Blog Posts: These are informational content pieces aimed at capturing users in the middle and top of the funnel. They typically target individuals searching for solutions to their pain points and answers to their questions, such as ‘how to choose the right payment gateway’, ‘how to get a bitcoin backed loan’, or ‘how do I set up automated trading strategy without code’.
Stripe’s blog post ranks on page one of Google for ‘how to choose a payment gateway’.
Programmatic Pages: These pages generated automatically by a system or algorithm based on predefined rules and parameters. Unlike static pages that are manually created and updated by humans, programmatic pages are generated dynamically in real-time, pulling content from databases or external sources.
Related content: 7 examples of programmatic SEO in the FinTech space
An example of one of Robinhood’s programmatically generated stock pricing pages, which ranks on page one of Google for ‘buy TSLA stock’ and related keywords.
3. Convince User To Take Action
Encouraging user action is vital for translating targeted traffic into tangible business outcomes. The goal is to motivate as many visitors as possible to engage with your offering. Depending on your business objectives, desired actions may include:
- Create an account
- Submit an enquiry
- Schedule a demo
- Submit an email address in exchange for a helpful resource
If your conversion rate is really low, it suggests that either your product presentation is not quite up to scratch or you need to re-think your targeting.
Kraken’s landing page contains a clear CTA to capitalise on the organic traffic it generates for ‘doge to usdt’ and related keywords.
Building The Business Case
Having a good strategy is great, but it will never be implemented without strong communication to executives. This is where many good SEO strategists fall short in my opinion.
Building the business case in the language of executives is therefore crucial. The best way to do this is to offer some version of ‘If we input X, we’ll get out Y’.
For example, ‘if we invest $100,000 in building an in-house SEO content team, we expect $500,000 in annual recurring revenue’.
This means building some kind of model or forecast. There are lots of ways to do this and none of them are perfect, but they reduce uncertainty and provide a benchmark to judge progress against.
Tom Critchlow’s How to Make an SEO Strategy article is a great resource on this.
It might look something like this:
Structuring A Fintech SEO Team
The costs you use in the model above will depend on how you intend on fulfilling the work. You options are using a FinTech SEO agency, hiring in-house, or using freelancers.
None of these options are mutually exclusive. For example, you might hire a team with an in-house core, then use freelancers or an agency to help out with things like content creation.
Side note: If you’re looking for quality freelancers, I highly recommend using Passionfruit.
Here are some examples of effective team structures I’ve seen in the FinTech SEO space.
Minimalist SEO Content Team
This format is pretty effectively honestly. I’ve witnessed some great results with this set up. The main drawback is obvious lack of scalability, but also the SEO manager will need to wear a lot of hats.
Their main focus will be on keyword research and identifying topics for the writers, but they’ll also need to be good at brief creation, data analysis, editing, project management, design, reporting to executives, technical SEO, and even low fidelity wireframing.
Advanced SEO Content Team
This structure enables you to create higher quality content and at a bigger scale.
In this set up, the SEO Manager is able to play more of a strategic / managerial role. They are in charge of defining the strategy, overseeing the execution, collaborating with other departments, and reporting to executives.
The Content Editor can project manage content production and edit the output. The SEO analyst can help out with data analysis, content briefs and topic research.
The UX designer is on-hand to build out SEO-led landing pages, such as features pages. The graphic designer is responsible for making content more appealing by adding well crafted featured images and illustrations.
Advanced SEO Content Team & Programmatic
This team structure enables you to pursue programmatic strategies as well as content.
Here you will want an ‘SEO Product Manager’ – a relatively new roll who is a hybrid between SEO and product. They are able to come up with the overarching programmatic strategy, create wireframes to articulate their concept, collaborate with product teams (i.e. write PRDs, create tickets in Jira), and have general strong technical SEO knowledge.
FinTech SEO Case Studies
Here are some of the best examples of SEO in the FinTech arena. I’d recommend digging into these sites if you want to explore successful implementations of FinTech SEO strategies.
1. Wise
Monthly traffic: 53.7M
Wise are the undisputed kings of programmatic SEO in the Fintech space, generating 42 million (82% of their total traffic) visits per month to their programmatically created currency converter pages.
We dug into their strategy in more depth here: Wise SEO Deep Dive
An example of one of Wise’s 240k programmatically generated currency converter pages, which ranks on page one of google for ‘us dollars to philippine pesos’.
2. Gocardless
Monthly traffic: 1.1M
Gocardless is an excellent example of editorial SEO done exceptionally well at scale. 73% of their traffic goes to their guides section, which contains around 5,000 pages covering topics closely related to online payments.
The challenge with editorial SEO at scale is maintaning relevance and quality, and they do that really well.
An example of one of Gocardless’s guides, which ranks number one for ‘international payment gateway’.
3. Kraken
Monthly traffic: 1.6M
Kraken is a good example of a challenger crypto exchange that leverages both programmatic and editorial SEO for impressive growth.
Their ‘buy {token}’ pages are a great example of product-led SEO, where their organic search presence aligns very closely to their core product offering.
Read The: Kraken SEO Deep Dive
An example of Kraken’s well optimised landing pages, which ranks on page one of Google for ‘Buy Ethereum’ and related terms
Actionable Fintech SEO Tips
We’ve covered a lot of theory around strategy in this article. But how can I improve my rankings today?
Here are some hard-won actionable tips from the FinTech SEO trenches. I’ve deliberately filtered these to tips I know have a demonstrable impact. Enjoy!
1. Target People Searching For The Best Tool, App, Software Or Platform In Your Category
This is a really good way to target people who have decided on a solution to their problem. These blog posts have a really high conversion rate (often even up to 5%!).
The best way to do this is in a listicle format, with your product in the number 1 spot. You’ll naturally need to be comfortable talking about competitors in the subsequent spots which might feel unnatural, but the numbers on these posts speak for themselves.
https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/best-b2b-payment-solutions-for-smb/
2. Create Competitor Alternative & Comparison Pages
People increasingly research competitors before making a decision. You can use this to your advantage by targeting these touch points in organic search.
The keyword patterns here are:
‘{Competitor Name} vs {Your Brand Name}’, and
‘{Competitor Name} alternative’.
For example, this page from Koinly ranks at the top of Google for the query ‘Coinledger alternative’ (100 searches per month).
And we can see CoinLedger are doing the exact same thing with Koinly:
CoinLedger’s page ranks on page one of Google for ‘Koinly alternative’ and ‘Coinledger vs Koinly’.
3. Improve Internal Linking Between Pages
This is one of the easiest quick wins I often find. Google’s PageRank algorithm relies on links between pages to determine contextual relevance and priority.
What does that mean in human speak? Make sure that your most important pages are linked to from relevant pages.
The simplest way to do this is crawling the site using Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) and seeing the number of internal links each page has. Key pages should have at least ten internal links pointing to them, ideally with contextual anchor text.
Internal link visualisation of Robinhood.com using Screaming Frog’s internal link graph feature.
4. Invest In Blog UX
Enhancing the user experience of your blog is key to boosting engagement, establishing your brand, and attracting organic backlinks.
Here’s a simple checklist for a superior blog UX:
- Responsive Design: Ensure your blog is fully responsive, providing a clean viewing experience across desktop, tablet and mobile.
- Clear Navigation: Consider using a table of contents for longer articles and breadcrumbs for site-wide navigation. This approach ensures readers can easily understand their location within your blog and navigate to specific sections or back to previous pages easily.
- Engaging Visuals: Incorporate high-quality images, videos, and infographics to complement your written content. Visuals can break up text, illustrate complex ideas more clearly, and enhance the overall appeal of your articles.
- Readability: Focus on making your content easy to read. Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and a consistent heading structure to break up text. Select fonts and font sizes that are easy on the eyes, and ensure there’s enough contrast between your text and the background.
5. Improve Your EEAT
Google places extra weight on EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, And Trustworthiness) when financial advice is at play.
In practical terms, this means your content must:
- Demonstrate first hand experience in the topic
- Be written by an expert, and
- Have transparent authorship.
You do this by ensuring your writers provide unique insight which isn’t readily available online, and also ensuring your blog clearly shows who the writer is.
Nerdwallet.com follow best practice in highlighting credibility in their blog UX.
6. Add Review Schema To Services Pages
Incorporating review schema enhances search visibility through rich snippets, showcasing customer ratings and reviews directly in search results.
This boosts click-through rates by providing social proof and credibility at a glance.
Capitalontap.com use Review schema to generate a rich result in Google’s results for their cashback business card offering
7. Create Industry Statistics Pages
Link building in the Fintech space is hard. Most industry publications will try and charge you for links. While I’m certainly not against paying for the odd link, what if you could build quality links without even having to outreach?
This is the art of passive link building, and industry statistics pages are a brilliant way to do this. Writers and journalists are constantly looking for data to support their articles, and so by ranking for terms like ‘defi statistics’ or ‘trading statistics’, journalists will quote your statistics and link back to your page.
Here’s how it works.
- Do keyword research to see what statistics people are researching relevant to your industry.
- Create a blog post aggregating and visualising statistics for the topic, adding your own data where possible.
- Sit back and wait for links to roll in.
I’ve seen client sites generate hundreds of really high quality links from a these types of posts, all without a single outreach email sent!
Nansen’s blog post ranks on page one for ‘Defi statistics’ and has subsequently generated 227 backlinks from high quality domains, such as bitcoin.com, inder.com, and many more!
8. Do PR Around Company Milestones
Leveraging traditional PR to spotlight key milestones, especially for startups during funding rounds, can significantly amplify brand visibility and credibility.
Sharing these achievements through press releases and social media attracts attention in the form of branded searches, backlinks, and interest from investors and customers.
9. Launch A Podcast
Okay, this is less of a quick win, but launching a podcast is a low-cost way to build trust signals, like backlinks, brand searches, and social media traffic. Creating content that resonates with and educates your audience not only positions your brand as a thought leader in your industry but also encourages engagement across platforms.
Podcasts can feature expert interviews, discussions on industry trends, and insights into your company culture, providing rich content that listeners are likely to share. This multi-channel approach not only diversifies your content strategy but also increases the size of your digital footprint, enhancing both brand visibility and SEO.
10. Build Calculators & Tools
Crafting interactive tools and calculators offers free value to potential customers while creating linkable assets.
These resources help users solve problems or find answers related to your industry, making your website a trusted source of valuable information. By providing these tools for free, you boost user engagement and increase the chances of your content being shared.
This approach not only showcases your brand as helpful and authoritative but also improves SEO through natural backlinks and increased branded traffic.
Pensionbee’s calculator has generated 186 backlinks as well as ~15k monthly SEO visits
11. Cover Reddit Conversations
Sophisticated tech-savvy customers will often use reddit to research your product before making a purchase decision. The most common way to do this is to google your brand name and append ‘review reddit’ to the search.
Google autosuggests ‘reddit’ when searching ‘robinhood review’.
It’s important to be aware of the top ranking results when people search for your brand on reddit. I suggest jumping into the conversation while being transparent you work for the company. Most users tend to appreciate the honesty!
Closing Thoughts
We’ve covered the reasons why SEO can be such a transformative channel for FinTech’s to acquire new customers. We looked at the most common mistakes people make and the best approach for creating your own strategy, as well as getting it implemented. We then walked through some actionable tips to improve your rankings.
If you work at a FinTech and want to explore how many customers SEO can generate for you, then please feel free to book a call with me on the link in the footer!