Helping your financial clients be found on Google requires writing optimised content that targets keywords that their readers are searching for, and setting up their website so that it meets Google’s E.A.T. requirements and is optimised for local SEO.
In this blog, I share tips for SEO for financial services so that you (as a copywriter, content writer or marketer) can help your clients attract organic clicks, leads and sales.
Here’s a quick summary of my tips for SEO for financial services clients:
SEO for financial services: tips for copywriters, marketers
Research finance industry-specific keywords (keep reading for examples of finance keywords)
Plan and execute an SEO content strategy
Write blog posts, not just service pages
Optimise their website for local SEO
Factor Google’s E.A.T. policy when creating content
Use P.R. to attract backlinks and build website authority
Researching finance-specific SEO keywords
Before planning and writing website content, perform extensive keyword research that will help you with SEO for financial services clients. If you’d rather save time and hassle doing this, you can outsource your keyword research.
Typical SEO keywords for financial services include keywords that feature “near me”, keywords that are service-specific and keywords that focus on specific financial problems that readers want solutions for.
Free tools such as Answer the Public and Google Trends can give you great potential blog ideas but I strongly recommend subscribing to a paid keyword research tool such as Keysearch.
Paid tools give you more information than just keyword query ideas. They tell you the average monthly search volumes for each keyword query and give you an indication of how easy or difficult it would be for a website to rank on page 1.
Look for low competition keywords to help your finance client get SEO results faster than if they targeted a highly competitive keyword query that requires a lot of time, money and effort to get to the top.
Want to learn how to do keyword research using the techniques I’ve used with clients and my own websites for over 5 years? My new SEO course focuses on what you need to know about SEO as a copywriter or content writer and includes training on keyword research along with templates and guides you can use. Read all about the SEO for writers course here.
Here are some examples of SEO keywords for financial services:
SEO keywords for bookkeeping
Bookkeeping services
Bookkeeping services near me
Bookkeepers near me
Online bookkeeping services
Outsourced bookkeeping services
Bookkeeper for a small business
Bookkeeper for restaurants
Bookkeeper in {add your location}
Bookkeeper services
Bookkeepers in my area
Bookkeeping and tax services
SEO keywords for financial advisors
Financial advisor near me
Independent financial advisor
Personal financial advisor
Financial planner near me
Business financial advisor
Business financial advisor near me
Certified financial advisor
Certified financial advisor near me
Certified financial planner
Certified retirement financial advisor near me
Choosing a financial advisor
Choosing a financial planner
Divorce financial advisor
Do I need a financial advisor?
Financial advisor for doctors
Financial advisor for millennials
Financial advisor for seniors near me
Financial planner for millennials
Financial planner services
Financial planning firms
SEO keywords for accountants
Accountant for small businesses
Accountant services
Accountants near me
Accounting and bookkeeping services
Accounting firms near me
Accounting services near me
Business accountant
Certified accountant
Chartered accountant
Chartered accountant near me
CPA near me
Small business accountant
Small business accounting services
Tax accountant
Tax accountant near me
Tax return accountant
Write blog posts, not just service pages
While it’s important to have well-written, optimised service pages for your client, blog content is just as important.
Well-written blog content attracts backlinks from other websites which helps boost a website’s authority. The key to SEO for financial services is growing your client’s website authority for better keyword rankings and more organic traffic.
Other websites are more likely to link to a helpful blog post than a service page.
Consistent blogging will help your client show their expertise and knowledge while also building trust with their readers.
If you have a client who is hesitant to blog or pay you to write their blogs, I’ve written a helpful blog about blogging for business.
Plan and execute an SEO content strategy
Once you’ve got your keywords, you can start planning your content.
Rather than writing about a range of different finance topics, look for themes in your keywords. Choose a topic you can write about which becomes a pillar post. Then write a cluster of other blog posts relating to the pillar post topic and link these back to the pillar post.
This method helps Google better understand the website content and positions your client as an authority on a specific topic. It also helps their readers spend more time on their website rather than leaving after viewing one page.
You can build different clusters of blog posts around different pillar posts. This is more effective for SEO than writing dozens of blog posts that have no connection to each other.
Local SEO for financial services
Local finance businesses such as bookkeepers, tax agents and accountants will benefit from focusing on local SEO to attract more leads and clients.
Your client should claim their Google My Business listing and optimise it with information about their service hours, contact details, photos and short posts about topics relating to their business.
Setting up Google My Business is the best way to get your client shown in the “3 pack” which is the top 3 businesses listed under a Google map. A business can rank in the top 3 here even if they’re not ranking on page 1 organically.
Your client should also contact their past and existing clients to ask for Google reviews. Help them write a template that they can send to their clients which makes the review writing process a lot easier.
When doing keyword research, look for location-specific keywords such as “bookkeeper Williamstown” that you could optimise your client’s service pages with.
Importance of E.A.T. for finance businesses
Finance is a tightly-regulated industry and for good reason.
Google has introduced measures and a policy around how to handle websites that fall into certain categories that can have a major impact on a person’s life. These websites are categorised as “Your money, your life” websites because they can have a direct impact on a reader’s quality of life.
E.A.T. stands for expertise, authority, trustworthiness and is something that Google’s quality checking team looks for when visiting websites. It’s mostly common sense, but there are still millions of websites that share information that hasn’t been verified, backed by science and research or is written by people without the proper qualifications and expertise.
The first industry that was impacted by E.A.T. was the health industry- you can read about it in my blog SEO tips for health writers.
If you have clients in the finance, medical, political or media industries, it pays to read more about Google’s E.A.T. policy and ways that you can help your clients with better content.
One example of how to improve E.A.T. is by having a well-written about page that shows off your client’s expertise and authority. Include information such as qualifications, accreditation and professional memberships. Photos of your client also helps Google see that there’s a real person behind the business!
Using PR to help attract website backlinks
Journalists writing articles will often put out a request for contributions from industry experts.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is an email service that sends lists of requests that journalists, bloggers and other media outlets have for upcoming articles and blogs. There are many requests for contributions from experts in all areas of finance.
Replying to HARO requests is an excellent way to boost your client’s website authority and get some referral traffic from other high-authority websites.
HARO is something that can be a bit hit or miss. I’ve been successfully using it for over a year and there are some tips and tricks to getting yourself published.
My best tips for using HARO?
Respond as soon as possible
Follow the exact requirements outlined in the request
Keep your submissions in case you find similar future requests so you can rewrite something you’ve used in the past rather than start from scratch
A final word…
When creating and implementing SEO for financial services clients, the content you write plays an important role. Well-written content that shows your client’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness and is optimised with the right keywords will keep your client in good stead.
Once the content has been published, focus on SEO tasks that will build your client’s authority and help improve their local presence.
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