Banking SEO
For many years now the financial and banking sectors have been at the forefront of utilizing new technological advancements to provide their customers with faster, more convenient, and more holistic services. However, when it comes to maintaining their client base and attracting new customers, many banks seem to be using the same tactics as ever before to do this, like referrals and leafleting. While it can be argued that they “work” in the modern age there are far more lucrative ways for these businesses to bring in more customers, one of the best is industry-specific Banking SEO.
SEO has long been utilized by many different industries to target major relevant audiences online at the time when they are most likely to convert as a customer. However, for some reason, the banking industry has fallen behind the times, and with the Google term “banks near me” sometimes receiving over 70,000 searches a month, it’s important for the future of the industry that banks are actively targeting this massive source of interest. If a user is looking for a bank in a location that is near one of your branches, it is vital that yours stands out from the myriad different options available to them.
How will Banking SEO help drive more customers?
In today’s world, when a potential customer needs a service, they will more than likely pull out their mobile phone or laptop and use a search engine to find both local services and international products. First page positions can gain at least 71%+ of all organic search clicks that originate from any given search term, therefore targeting these first-place positions for keywords that are highly relevant should be a priority for any business looking to find customers online
Algorithms to analyze and rank for keywords relevant to what you offer. Banking SEO will look specifically at which keywords people will be searching when they need banking or financial services and optimizing both the content and background programming of your website to most effectively rank for the most lucrative keywords that apply to your business.
How is Banking SEO performed?
1. Local SEO
For many businesses online, marketing to their local audience is not specifically necessary, however for businesses that rely on physical premises to do business in, such as restaurants, stores, and yes, banks, the opposite is true. As we said before, vast amounts of people search for banking services or bank branches within a specific location.
Making sure that those looking for relevant services in areas that you offer them are easily able to find you on places like Google My Business is paramount to your success. Google My Business (and other platforms like it) will trigger a map-based search result that will show the user the most relevant local listings based on their search. Coming as close to the top of this list as possible will naturally drive more clicks through to your site from interested, local parties looking for a new branch to bank with.
2. Targeting
If your particular bank has many branches in different areas that all offer different services, it’s important that each branch is targeting not only the most relevant area but that the SEO campaign is directing the correct customers to the correct branch which provides the services they are looking for.
It follows then that in order to ensure this is happening, that a lot more scrutiny will be required when it comes to which keywords branches are targeting in relation to the services they provide. Otherwise, you can find yourself pouring money into an SEO campaign that may be driving the wrong types of enquires.
3. Content
What is written on your site is not entirely for the benefit of your customers, but also for the benefit of search engine algorithms in their quest to properly categorize and rank your site. Therefore, it is important that the content you have reads well and is informative for your customers, as well as following content best practices laid out by search engines in order to make it easier for them to rank you.
Ensure that all content is well written and not too stuffed with target keywords, along with making sure there are sufficient amounts of it and you should be well on your way to success.
4. Mobile Compatibility
Many customers when they need something on the go will simply pull out their smartphones and jump straight on the internet to look at mobile-friendly web pages suggested by search engines. Making sure that your site is able to adapt and resize to individual users is important not only for your customer’s ease of finding a local branch but also for your SEO rankings. Google and other search engines have a preference towards sites that actively attempt to provide their visitors with a high-quality experience.
This means sites that load quickly, do not have too many 404 pages, and in a more recent development, sites that cater for mobile device users. So, making your site mobile responsive is not just a matter of convenience, it can mean the difference between the success and failure of your SEO campaign.
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