Fintech SEO: How to Turn Your Website Into a Customer Acquisition Channel
If you’re doing research on doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a fintech company, you’ll see that many of the articles focus on the technical aspects of SEO and how to implement it as a strategy to grow website traffic.
But few talk focus on what is likely your main priority when it comes to implementing SEO: how to use SEO to acquire customers.
SEO is typically seen as a marketing strategy that focuses on building your brand awareness and educating your audience — which are all true. But at the end of the day, you work for a fintech business, which means that it’s likely that you are held accountable for business metrics like SQLs, MQLs and revenue.
In this article, we want to talk about how to use fintech SEO to help you acquire high quality customers.
At Mint Studios, we’ve worked with many fintech companies on their SEO and content marketing, including companies like Jeeves, Persona and Confused.com. Our experience working with fintech companies and the results we were able to achieve with them has allowed us to build our own process to implementing fintech SEO.
In this article, we’ll be covering:
Note: if you’re looking for SEO and content marketing support for your fintech company, reach out to us to learn more about how we can help you.
What’s unique about SEO in the fintech industry?
If you’ve worked in SEO in a separate industry, you might be interested in learning more about how the fintech industry is different. Here are a few ways:
1. There’s a big opportunity to acquire customers and build trust
In fintech, there is a big opportunity to acquire customers and build trust with SEO. That’s because for complex topics like taxes, mortgages and investing (which we aren’t usually taught in school) consumers do a lot of research online.
Personal finance is also a topic that’s important: getting the wrong mortgage or wrong type of investment account isn’t the same as buying furniture or opening up a new social media account. Incorrect content can have serious negative consequences.
People therefore tend to do in-depth research when it comes to personal finance topics and will turn to Google to get a lot of their information. This is where there’s a lot of opportunity for fintech and financial services companies to help educate consumers, build trust and use content to acquire customers.
It’s also why content-only personal finance sites like NerdWallet, Credit Karma and Money Saving Expert are able to operate as businesses alone: they’re able to build an audience educating them on topics related to personal finance, and then monetise that online presence via partnerships and sponsorships.
But this is not just for B2C: B2B topics like payments, invoice financing and compliance are also complex and fundamental to a business. In B2B, you’re also selling to a buying committee that will almost always involve a person whose main role is to do research – which is usually done online.
In both B2B and B2C fintech, you’re targeting people who are trying to understand important, complex topics that if incorrect, could lead to negative consequences. Catering to them by ranking for the right keyphrases and producing high quality fintech content will put you at a huge advantage as prospects trust you more and will come to you to do business.
2. However, there is a lot of competition
Having said that, there is a lot of competition in SEO, especially in the B2C space. As mentioned in the section above, there are large websites whose sole focus is ranking on Google and creating content that answers readers’ questions. They have large SEO teams and use all the tricks to stay high in the rankings.
This is why it’s a lot harder to rank for general keywords that are more Top of the Funnel in the buying journey. Target keywords like “best business bank account” or “what is a budget” are what the NerdWallets and Credit Karmas are focusing on, and although we’ve been able to rank above them in the past, there is no denying it’s a lot harder to rank for those key phrases.
That’s why, when it comes to SEO and content, it’s important to be strategic and think carefully about the keywords you want to rank for. If you follow the same strategy as everyone else, you’ll struggle to see success. If your focus for fintech SEO is acquiring customers and generating leads, then you want to implement a strategy that focuses primarily on that – not just rankings and organic traffic. We go through how you can do that down below.
3. You don’t need to invest so much in technical SEO
Generally, SEO is divided into technical and content SEO. Technical SEO focuses on ensuring the structure of the website works, link building, the pagespeed is high and adding technical parts like meta descriptions and title tags.
Technical SEO is incredibly important if you have thousands of pages on your website and one small mistake could lead to millions in lost revenue.
But as a fintech website, it’s likely you won’t have that many pages. If you have under 10,000 web pages, then it’s very unlikely you’ll have technical issues and therefore technical SEO isn’t as important.
Instead, your SEO focus will be more on content SEO: that’s because it’s easier to rank for specific keywords your audience is searching for online with content, and also because you often need to create long form content so people understand what your product does (you can’t sell a tax product if your audience doesn’t first understand how taxes work).
To summarise, don’t worry too much about technical SEO – do an audit once every 6 months, and you should be fine.
5. Your content should come from a place of authority and trustworthiness
Google considers financial topics Your Money or Your Life industries (YMYL). That’s because these are industries where the wrong advice or a mistake can lead to serious consequences for the consumer.
This includes fintech companies, which is why it’s even more important that your content comes from a place of expertise and authority. In fact, Google’s EAT (Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) guidelines were updated to include another E for “Expertise”. Although they are not ranking factors themselves, it might be harder to rank for a phrase if your content is not high quality.
Ideally, your content is either written by an expert or based on an interview with an expert, and you want to make that clear in your content. Confused.com, for example, do a good job of adding an author bio with the expert who’s written the piece of content:
As a fintech startup, your content will be under even more scrutiny from Google and therefore it’s even more important that your content is based on expertise and authority. You also want to be careful with:
Using AI to create content
Outsourcing your content to a freelancer or agency that doesn’t have access to experts
How to acquire customers – not just traffic – with SEO
As we established above, if you work for a financial technology company and are doing research on implementing SEO, it’s most likely that you’re looking to implement SEO to acquire customers – not just to generate traffic.
However, a lot of marketers, agencies and freelancers will focus the majority of their SEO efforts on getting as much traffic as possible. The problem with that is that an increase in traffic does not always equal an increase in leads and conversions.
In fact, based on our analysis, we’ve found that it’s often the articles with the lower traffic that bring in the most leads and conversions. We call these articles Bottom of the Funnel, as they’re targeting people who already know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution (which is different to Top of the Funnel, which is typically targeting anyone who would be interested in the topic).
This is why we advocate for an SEO strategy that prioritises leads and conversions over traffic. The fintech marketing strategy we’re going to lay out here will be implementing fintech SEO via high quality, expert-based content.
This is the strategy we’ve implemented that has helped fintech companies like Zai generate $1M+ in business opportunity, helped bring in lead growth month over month and rank well above large websites.
Here’s how it works in practice:
Content strategy based on customer research and focused on Bottom of the Funnel
A lot of marketers will start their SEO strategy by first doing research via a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush. But that’s an easy way to end up competing with all the NerdWallets of the world. When it’s this competitive, using the same tools as everyone else will make it a lot harder for you to rank for these keywords.
Instead, we advocate for starting instead with your customers. That means either interview them directly or interview your salespeople to understand:
Who your best customers are
What are their pain points
Based on those interviews, you want to try and understand what is your ideal customer searching on Google that indicates that they are close to buying. Here are some examples of questions we like to ask people:
What was the last prospect/company that you had a really easy time closing? What type of prospects are the ones that are the easiest to close?
What are you usually compared to? What are the alternatives?
What is the most common reason for buying your product?
How do they currently solve X and how much does it cost to do so?
What happened last time their problem came up? What did they do?
You can also find great keywords by going through your PPC campaigns and seeing which keywords are performing the best.
You can get a full PDF of questions to ask your team here:
Once you’ve done that research, you can then use your keyword research tool to see which specific keyphrases people are using, what are the current search engine results (SERPs)and what their organic search volume is.
And what’s important here is: you want to prioritise by search intent. That means, start by targeting the specific keywords that you think will bring in the most amount of conversions. We call this BOFU content, or sometimes they’re called long-tail keywords
Some examples of keyphrases that you would target are. If you’re a payment API company, that may be keyphrases like:
Split payment API
Faster payments solutions
If you’re a small business bank for rural businesses, that would be keyphrases like:
Storage financing
Solar farm financing
If you’re an investment app, that would be keyphrases like:
Top investment apps for beginners
[Competitor A] vs [You]
What’s important to note here is that by starting with your customers, you can uncover keyphrases that the NerdWallets and Credit Karmas would never target and would have no interest targeting. This is often because these keyphrases have low search volume – but again, that doesn’t matter if your focus is on acquiring potential customers rather than bringing website traffic.
For example, for our client, Jeeves, a corporate expense card, we uncovered that some of the easiest customers to close were those looking for a cheaper alternative to Amex. One of the first pieces we created targeted the keyphrase “amex business card no annual fee”. We were able to rank above Amex and bring in multiple high quality customers – all because we had interviewed the salesperson (the article has now been taken down as Jeeves has adjusted their product).
Learn more here: Low Volume, High ROI Keywords: Why You Should Include Them in Your Content Strategy
2. Create content written for the level of your reader
When you are targeting advanced buyers who have a certain knowledge of the sector, you don’t want to write beginner content. For example, if you’re targeting CFOs, an article on “What is a Profit and Loss statement” won’t be interesting at all to them.
When putting together your content strategy, you need to pick advanced topics that you know your target audience would want to read. The content itself has to also be advanced. You want to use the words they use, examples they would understand and not be afraid to get technical. See how we’ve created more advanced content targeting advanced buyers here:
Compare that with the regular content you’ll find online, and you’ll see how different it is. With this type of content we are focusing on getting the right information to the reader. We’re not trying to hook them, we’re not trying to use flowery language and give them a history lesson on money. We understand that the reader has a certain level of knowledge and just wants to get done.
A good way to think about it is: think about the last time you were looking for a recipe and you wanted to start cooking right away. You were getting frustrated with the long intros about the backstory of how the recipe came into the family. You just wanted a recipe so you could start cooking! This is the type of person you are targeting with this type of content: they are ready to buy, they are looking for very specific information and just want to move on. So there’s no need to “entertain” them.
When you write for the level of knowledge for the reader, the reader will also understand that you understand them and their pain points, and are therefore more likely to trust you and reach out. This is also how you’ll be able to rank above competitors who are writing for the wrong audience and don’t go as in-depth.
The last thing to note is that when writing for this audience, don’t be afraid to go into detail about the product. Someone who is comparing spend management solutions wants to learn about your features. So this is a type of content where it’s ok to talk about your product – but that doesn’t mean that you have to be salesy. We’ve written about this in more detail here: How to Write About Your Product In Your Content [And Increase Conversions]
3. Create content based on interviews with experts
If you’ve ever done any research online, then you’ll know that a lot of SEO content tends to be regurgitated and repeated from elsewhere. That’s because the content is often outsourced to other writers, or worse AI, who have no expertise in the topic and can’t write about it in-depth.
If your objective is to rank higher on Google or even to create content that positions you as a thought leader, then the best way is to create expert-based content. This is even more true nowadays with Google’s update that clearly states that content should be written by or revised by content – which is especially true in YMYL industries like financial services.
There are many benefits to creating content based on interviews with experts:
Your content is genuinely original and adds value -- that's the best way to truly position your company as a thought leader.
Your content will be more advanced or technical -- especially important if you're targeting a B2B audience.
You'll be able to easily include specific product features -- ones that make sense to include and don't come across as a hard sell.
You'll be able to easily include use cases and a story -- the expert will give you stories and examples that you can include in your article and help you make it more compelling
You can read more about how to do that here: Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts
4. Track marketing and sales metrics
When it comes to evaluating the success of SEO, most people only track the traffic they get via Google. But again, as a fintech brand you want to know the business metrics: what business impact is your investment into content and SEO giving you?
You can only do this by having the right tracking and reporting set up. With Google Analytics and Hubspot, you can track first and last click attribution for new contacts. As a reminder:
First click attribution is giving attribution to the first piece of content the contact read on your website.
Last click attribution is giving attribution to the last piece of content the contact read on your website.
With content marketing and SEO, it’s important to be tracking both of those, so you know how your content is influencing a sale. You also want to be able to track which leads came through your content and turned into deals, as well as the size of those deals. This will help you understand if you’re bringing in the right quality.
For example, with our client Zai, we were able to prove that the content and SEO efforts were bringing in $1M+ in business opportunity with content:
This type of information also helps direct your content strategy, as this tells you which content will bring in revenue. You can read about how to set up Hubspot reports here: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 Hubspot Reports]
How this fintech company generated $1M+ in customers with SEO and content marketing
Zai is a B2B payments company that helps fintech and non fintech companies leverage payment orchestration technology. With their API, Zai helps customers collect, split and make complex payment workflows.
Zai engaged us because they were looking to invest in lower funnel content that would help drive more conversions. In the CMO, Andrea Linehan’s, own words:
“We were a new brand, expanding globally with aggressive growth targets. Coupled with the fact that we are B2B with long sales cycles, it was imperative that we accelerated the lead-to-customer journey and get to revenue quickly.
We decided to invest more heavily in the 5%-10% of potential customers that are ‘in-market’, those that are actively searching for a solution to a pre-defined problem. And the way to do that is with BOFU content.”
As per our process, when we started working with Zai, we started by first doing in-depth interviews with people on their team who were close to customers, such as salespeople and product managers. We were able to get a better understanding of who their best customers were and pain points.
Based on that initial research and then our own research, we were able to put together a collection of keyphrases that would target people who were already aware they had a problem and were actively looking for a solution. Examples of these keyphrases include:
Split payments API
Top direct debit solutions
PayID API
We were targeting Head of Product, commercial leads, which meant we had to make sure the content was written at their knowledge level. By creating content based on interviews with their team, we were able to write:
In-depth, technical content that couldn’t be found anywhere else
Go into detail about how the Zai product worked
Include case studies and success stories explaining how their specific feature
You can read some examples here:
Within one year of our engagement, we were bringing over $1M in business opportunities to Zai via content. It was all via SEO and high quality content. By first taking the time to understand our target audience, and creating complex, in-depth content, we were able to get incredible results
You can read the full case study here: Case Study: How We Helped Zai Gain Multiple SQLs Per Month with Content
We’ve done this for multiple fintech clients including Jeeves, Persona, Parpera, which you can read here: Results
Fintech SEO: when done well, it’s a great acquisition channel
As mentioned at the beginning, there is a big opportunity to implement SEO in the fintech industry as a way to build trust and acquire customers. However, you need to make sure your SEO is strategic so you don’t end up competing with all the large players with huge SEO teams.
By implementing a methodology like BOFU content marketing and SEO, you can therefore target keyphrases that are less competitive and more relevant to your business, and therefore helping you reach your ultimate goal: more customers.
If you’re keen on learning more about this methodology, click below to learn more about what we do!