What To Know About Google's Recent SEO updates if You Work in Financial Services

If you work in financial services and content marketing, then ranking on Google and SEO probably plays a role in your content marketing program.

Which likely means you’re also aware of the Google updates that have taken place in the past year or so, and aren’t sure how this all applies to you.

Financial services is a unique niche for SEO: Google describes it as a “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) industry, because if you give the wrong advice in an article (e.g. get the wrong type of mortgage), it could seriously negatively impact a reader. It’s also a very competitive SEO industry, since you’re competing with large publications like NerdWallet and Forbes whose sole focus is ranking on Google.

We’ve worked with multiple financial services and fintech companies on their SEO, including creating expert based content for Confused.com, ranking for BOFU keyphrases for Zai and creating BOFU content for clients like Modulr, Persona and Jeeves. Our methodology for helping financial services companies acquire customers with content relies heavily on SEO, so we’ve been closely monitoring rankings, Google updates and what others are seeing across the industry.

In this article we’ll be going through the various Google updates that have happened in the past year or so, how they might affect you if you work in financial services and what you need to know moving forward.

  1. What have been the latest Google updates and what do they mean?

    1. May Topic Authority System Update: Filtering for relevant content

    2. September Helpful Content Update: Updated guidelines on AI content

    3. November Core Update: Reader-centric content

  2. How do these updates impact you if you work in financial services?

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What Google updates should you care about and what do they mean?

In 2023, Google published quite a few algorithm updates mainly to deal with the sudden barrage of AI produced content, AI produced spam and the general way people are buying and reading online.

As mentioned earlier, financial services is YMYL industry, which means that content in this industry is held to a much higher standard. Google also introduced guidelines for quality content called “EEAT”: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

EEAT is not a ranking factor, but it’s a big part of their guidelines and can prevent a piece of content from ranking. Which means that if you work in financial services, you want to make sure your content comes from a place of expertise and authority, and helps build trustworthiness.

We’ve gone in more detail about what’s unique about SEO in financial services in other articles (linked below), but to summarize quickly:

  • Financial services SEO is highly competitive because you’re often competing against content sites with large SEO teams whose business model relies on ranking high on Google (e.g. Nerdwallet, Forbes).

  • Financial services topics are complex, which makes it harder to create high quality content.

  • Financial services content is held to a higher standard and must be based on expertise due to EEAT and the fact that it’s a YMYL industry (and also because businesses in general should care about the advice they give customers).

We go into more detail more here: SEO for Financial Services: What You Need to Know in 2024

If you work for a financial services company, it’s unlikely your site has been impacted by the recent Google updates. From what we’ve seen, it’s mainly affiliate sites (websites that make money by recommending products) that have been at a disadvantage. However, it’s a good idea to stay on top of Google updates so you know what the best practices are when it comes to rankings.

Here are the most relevant updates and what you need to know about them:

May Topic Authority System Update: Filtering for relevant content

This May Google update was focused on ranking more relevant and expert-based content on Google Search and News. According to Google, they’ve been using this system for years, but this was the first time they were public about it.

The objective of this update was to: “helps determine which expert sources are helpful to someone’s newsy query in certain specialized topic areas, such as health, politics, or finance.”

In this update, Google essentially explains that Topic Authority System looks at a few specific signals to understand the expertise of a publication. They look at:

  • Relevancy to specific topics or locations: Google understands if the website is relevant to specific topics or places.

  • Original reporting: Google looks at links, citations and other factors to see how original the piece of content is and whether it comes from someone who is familiar with the location and topic.

  • Reporting history: Google looks at links and history to see if the reporting is high-quality and recommended by other experts.

This is what Google uses as an example:

“Say, for example, there was a flood where you lived. The topic authority signal helps us identify content from publications in that region that regularly cover topics in your city or town and surface them towards the top of your search results. These are likely familiar publications that are trusted voices in the community, even though larger national outlets may be covering the flood as well.”

Key takeaway: Google is making it public that they care about content that is authoritative and original.

September Helpful Content Update: Updated guidelines on AI content

This update ran from September 14th to September 28th. In this update, Google focused on loosening its guidance on AI generated content, making it clear that they didn’t like websites that host third-party content hosted on subdomains (an SEO gimmick that you don’t need to worry about).

In their documentation, Google updated its previous guideline on AI content from this:

“Google Search’s helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”

To this:

“Google Search’s helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content created for people in search results.”

Google also updated its guidance on the Google Helpful Content Self Assessment (an assessment you can do to see if your content is helpful according to Google’s guidelines). The main changes are adding:

  • Is your content written or reviewed by an expert/enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?

  • Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?

  • Why did you write this piece of content?

Key takeaway: Google makes it clear that your content doesn’t have to be 100% from a person to rank well, however it should be reviewed/written by an expert. Google also doesn’t want you to create content simply because someone else asks you to (e.g. to embed an affiliate link). They want you to write content that is useful for humans, that answers real questions or offers useful advice.

November Core Update: Reader-centric content

The November update was launched right after the October one which focused on removing spam. In the November core update, Google focused even more on advising website owner to create content that is:

  • User-centric

  • Helpful

  • Trustworthy

But what does that mean? This is what it can be interpreted as:

1. User-centric/UX/Page experience

Google is clamping down on publications that make it hard to read content, such as publications like Forbes that have multiple ads and pop-ups covering the screen. They want to make it as easy as possible for readers to read content, so make sure your page loading time and navigation is good.

2. Helpful/high quality content

Make sure your content offers original information, is well-produced and has insightful, original insights. The content has to add value to your audience.

3. Trustworthy

Your content should have clear evidence of expertise and someone with a trustworthy background. Ideally it should be written or reviewed by experts and not have any factual errors.

Key takeaway: Google will prioritize websites that offer a good reading experience and create content that is expert-based and original.

I asked Julia-Carolin, SEO expert on her thoughts on the past few updates, and here’s what she said:

“What’s new since 2023 is the excessive use of artificial intelligence. The recent rise of AI tools has caused an increase in content creation that is essentially a spin-off of other pieces of content. Expertise and experience get lost in this process and with them goes the trustworthiness. Fact-checking should be at the heart of editorial standards and unfortunately, it often is not.

The Google updates we’ve seen in 2023 are in my opinion an attempt by the search engine to fight low-quality content spin-offs that are lacking depth and accuracy and with that are lacking E-E-A-T. At the same time, these updates and subsequent ranking changes, should be an incentive for anybody who is serious about content creation and cares about the information they provide to their readers, followers or customers. As an SEO consultant and content writer, I’m positive about these changes and feel that effort and quality will get rewarded with better rankings.”

How do these updates impact you if you work in financial services?

1. Set up a content process that creates content based on expertise

This is the recurring theme across all three updates: Google wants expert content. Gone are the days of people setting up an affiliate marketing website on a topic they know nothing about, creating 3 blog posts per week targeting specific keywords and then using Amazon affiliate links to generate an income.

If you create content for a financial services company, then it’s likely you don’t do much of this. However, it might be worth going through your current content production process and making sure your content is as expert-based as possible. If your current writing process involves finding a keyword with high traffic, putting together a two sentence brief and sending it to a generalist writer who will only do desk research, then these updates could have impacted you.

We believe this traditional approach to content marketing is fundamentally flawed for different reasons (mainly, the person doing the writing doesn’t understand the business and isn’t involved in the strategy). With these new Google updates, this process is even more flawed, simply because your content is not based on expertise.

What can you do instead? There are a few things you can try:

  • Ask your writers to interview your internal experts and create content based on those recordings.

  • Ask your experts to write the content (could be hard due to time commitment).

  • You interview the experts, record it, and send the recording to the writer who is heavily involved in the strategy (this is what we do).

  • If you create content to target a specific keyword, ask yourself: “What is the question behind the keyword?” Then provide the answer to that question.

What if the experts don’t have time? What questions should you ask in the interview? And what if you don’t have experts to interview? We cover all these questions and more in this article: Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts

Another tip is: when you publish your content, publish it in the name of your expert and then link to external resources as proof of their expertise (other content they’ve published, their LinkedIn profile, a university page, etc). You can even take it a step further, and say that it is written by one person, and then reviewed by an expert. Bankrate does this quite well:

90% of the content we create for our clients is based on interviews with internal experts, and this has allowed us to create genuine, original, expert content that ultimately got us ranking in the top spots for certain keyphrases and has ultimately brought in more business (read the case study here).

Examples are:

.

2. Create advanced, even technical, content

As we mentioned above, there is a lot of competition in the financial services and SEO space, which is why there are too many articles like “how to save money”, “retirement savings by age”, etc.

If you’re a financial services company, whether B2B or B2C, it’s time to move away from generalist topics that target the same keywords as everyone else. Instead of relying on a keyword tool to decide which keyphrases to rank for, rely on your customer research (we do this by interviewing salespeople).

If your best customers are people with advanced knowledge on certain topics, write advanced pieces of content. Instead of writing another “What is Open Banking” article, write a “How to implement an Open Banking API”. Or go into depth about what a new regulation means for the sector.

Instead of creating 20 blog articles per month that are focused on one specific “pillar topic” that covers a lot of beginner and generalist topics, create 3 - 4 pieces that are in-depth, advanced and based on expertise.

These are the types of content that Google rewards. Again, we’ve been able to rank highly on Google with much more advanced content (which we were also able to do because our content is based on interviews with experts). Examples are:

3. Build up specific profiles on your website

If you’re prioritizing expert-based and experience-based content, then you want to be able to prove that the content comes from someone who has subject matter authority. In the financial services space, this might be a CPA, a financial advisor, an insurance expert or a payment API expert.

Pick 3 - 5 people in your company who will be the designated “experts”, and build up their profiles, including their credentials and social proof of their background. Ideally, any information that shows they should be trusted, including:

  • Educational level

  • Certificates

  • Awards

  • Years of experience

This offers a much better reading experience since the reader can rest assured they’re reading an expert’s point of view. It also allows them to investigate a bit more about the author’s background, which is important especially when it comes to financial topics.

You can see how this has been done at Confused.com here:

Google has said that this doesn’t factor into ranking, but we believe this is more because not every expert has an extensive online portfolio. The most important thing is to not fill your lack of author portfolios with fake profiles. Also, although its author bios may not be a ranking factor right now, it could well be in the future as Google figures out how to manage the barrage of AI content.

4. Make sure your content is easy to read

Per the November Core Update, Google will reward websites that offer a great reading experience. The general guidelines we follow here are:

  • Font color black or dark

  • Font size between 18 - 20

  • Paragraph width of 18px and text centered

In general, you want to make it as comfortable and easy to read your content as possible. This is especially true if you’re creating BOFU content that is designed to convert: for someone to take action and make a purchasing decision, they need to be comfortable reading the piece in the first place.

When setting up your formatting, make sure to test this on mobile devices and on different screen sizes and make sure you have few pop-ups. Make your paragraphs short, use subheadings and bullet points and write descriptive headers. We also like adding a Table of Contents at the beginning of the article so people can click around and read what’s of interest to them.

5. You can use AI, but sparingly and only if it makes sense

There’s well documented evidence that publishing hundreds of AI generated posts will only lead to you getting a high amount of traffic and then those numbers crashing down.

It’s ok to use AI (and to be honest, a lot of AI content is actually better than some human written content). But ultimately, you should only use it if it makes sense and is customer centric. In our experience, AI isn’t great for creating high quality, expert-based, advanced content. If you’re going to use AI, you’re better off using it to improve content you’ve already written, for example, checking for typos, grammar and shortening sentences that are too long (although always fact-check AI content!).

Also, if you have a high readership, don’t suddenly start using AI without letting people know – Sports Illustrated did this and there was huge backlash.

6. Create content that covers topics that are relevant for your product/company/target audience

Another recurring theme throughout all the updates is: topical authority. Google rewards websites that are clearly experts on a handful of specific topics. This means you want to create content that is aligned with what you’re focused on. If you’re an investment platform, create content on investing, not on “how to set up a business”. If you’re a payments solution, create content on payments, not “how to run an event”.

If your website is ranking for too many keywords that aren’t relevant to your niche, then you may see an impact in rankings. Make sure to focus on the content you already know will be relevant.

7. Don’t spend too much time on technical SEO

Technical SEO is most useful when you’re posting a lot of pages and content – say, e-commerce websites with many products, or a news site that posts 20 news articles per week.

Financial services companies usually have less than 10,000 website pages, which is relatively low compared to other types of websites like news sites or e-commerce, which can have millions.

As a financial services company selling a product or service, the low number of pages means you don’t require much maintenance from a technical SEO viewpoint. We believe it’s good to have someone make sure your technical SEO is up to scratch at the beginning, and then do an audit every 6 months. We’ve seen too many fintech and financial services companies spend way more money than they need to on technical SEO, when really, what they should be doing is creating quality content.

And if your goal is customer acquisition, make sure you’re creating BOFU content to acquire customers: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?

What to know about the latest Google updates: create content based on expertise, make sure it’s easy to read, and make it original

SEO can be a tremendous growth channel for your financial services company when done well. We’ve helped fintech companies like Zai acquire six figure deals with content marketing by ranking for the right keyphrase and creating advanced, expert-based content.

But it’s very easy to get it wrong: creating generic content that doesn’t resonate with anyone, ranking for phrases your audience would never search for and flooding the website with tons of AI content will only lead to ranking problems.

If you stick to creating high quality, expert-based and original content written for your target customers, then you’re on the right path and don’t need to worry too much about the impact of Google updates.

Financial Services Content StrategyAraminta Robertson