SEO

Key Trends & Opportunities In Search

Published

3 years ago

January 25, 2022

Optimizing your site and webpages for search is complex enough without the additional regulatory concerns and other challenges inherent to the financial industry.

Digital governance, consumer privacy and trust, information accuracy, and the rapid pace of innovation in the sector are among the going concerns for financial brands.

Whether you’re in insurance, banking, wealth management, mortgages, fintech, or another facet of the financial services industry, there are some additional issues to work into your SEO strategy (on top of general SEO best practices).

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the key trends that leaders in marketing and SEO need to keep an eye on in the months and years ahead.

You’ll also find proven tips throughout to help improve the efficacy of your efforts to rank higher in search, convert more searchers to customers, and protect your brand while enhancing your online visibility in search.

1. Digital Transformation Is Driving Evolving Customer Needs

Even prior to the onset of the pandemic, Adobe’s 2021 Digital Trends: Financial Services & Insurance in Focus report found that 54% of financial services and insurance firms surveyed had reported unusual growth in digital/mobile visitors in the six months prior to that early 2021 survey.

Then COVID-19 changed everything.

Customers’ informational needs and the ways in which appointments, consultations, transactions, and contracts were handled changed almost overnight as much of the world went into lockdown.

Fintech and the promise of decentralized finance via cryptocurrencies had already shaken up antiquated, paper-based legacy systems and the pandemic accelerated the pace of change by years.

Adobe’s survey also found that 61% of retail banks said legacy systems were a top challenge holding their marketing and customer experience organizations back (followed by workflow issues for 44% and a lack of digital skills/capabilities for 42%).

Screenshot from Econsultancy, January 2022.

Operational costs for fintech brands may be up to 70% lower than traditional banks, thanks to their lean operating models and structures.

Even so, says KPMG’s Anton Ruddenklau, Global Co-Leader – Fintech:

“Before COVID-19, we were already seeing an increase in the corporate venture arms of the large banks actively buying up promising fintechs and start-ups. As we emerge into the recovery and beyond, we can expect this to accelerate.

The incumbent giants are likely to acknowledge that they need a greater degree of scaled collaboration with fintech players to bring more digitized services and benefits to their customers.”

Fintech is not a clear winner in the search space by virtue of its digitized services and benefits; not by a long shot.

We’ve moved beyond all transactions and inquiries taking place in person or over the phone.

Today, financial services customers expect self-serve options at every stage of their journey, from discovery and comparing their options through consultation, transaction, and service.

Brands that are best able to meet these expectations and customers’ increasing informational needs are best-positioned to succeed in search.

How you convey these offerings in organic and local search is key.

Financial brands not only have to create the best experiences but be able to demonstrate to search engines that they are the best answer to relevant queries, as well.

Tips And Takeaways

Leverage Proper Schema Markup For All Webpages

The most commonly used Schema types in banking are Articles, Image Objects, and FAQ.

Though not specific to banking, they help search engines like Google to better understand your content.

Make Sure You Know Who Your Competitors Are

It may not be who you think.

In addition to direct competitors in your space, you may also be competing against industry publications and media, regulatory bodies and other informational sources, local businesses, YouTube channels, podcasts, and more for share of voice in the SERPs.

Conduct Surveys And Analyze Your Seo Data For Customer Insights

Consumer-centric media and ecommerce experiences have raised the bar as far as what consumers expect of content personalization.

They now expect that the technologies they interact with will programmatically learn their preferences and tailor the experience accordingly.

2. Your Opportunities To Appear In The SERPs Are Growing

As Google strives to better understand searcher intent and provide better answers to increasingly complex queries, we’re seeing more differentiation than ever in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google’s new Multitask Unified Model, or MUM, technology is already in play.

MUM enables Google to better understand content in different languages, formats, and content types.

Now, we’re seeing new results types being tested, such as this enhanced Autocomplete box that adds an extra dimension to the results, depending on what Google perceives the searcher’s intent to be.

Optimizing for Featured Snippets is a best practice that can present valuable opportunities to expand your presence in search.

Structuring and marking up content in specific ways – as a numbered or bulleted list, or table, for example – can help Google understand when your webpage might be a good candidate for a featured snippet.

Research by BrightEdge (disclosure: my company) shows that the SERPs for financial services queries tend to contain a variety of universal listing elements depending on the type of query.

We’ve seen that higher-funnel, “I-Want-To-Know” queries like [best investment apps] and [how to invest] bring back Quick answers boxes and People Also Ask dropdowns, for example.

Understanding which SERP features are available by keyword and search intent is essential for this strategy.

Incorporating original, high-quality video and imagery in your webpage content gives you more opportunities to appear in rich results, as well.

And in local search results (the Map Pack), we saw the addition of new attributes for various sectors of the financial services industry added throughout the pandemic

Which Google Business Profile attributes are available to your listing depends on its primary category.

Banks, insurance agencies, and mortgage brokers, for example, can use attributes for online appointments, appointment links, ATMs, drive-thru services, and more.

More broadly available attributes enable you to share health and safety information, COVID-19 guidelines and safety measures, accessibility information, and more.

See the Complete Guide to Google Attributes for Local SEO to learn more.

Tips And Takeaways

Explore SERPs For Your Most Valuable Keywords

Look for opportunities to outrank competitors in unique SERPs features or by being the first-mover where opportunities for richer results may exist.

When Creating And Optimizing Content, Focus On Topical Relevance And Context

As opposed to making sure you use the keyword multiple times on a page.

Of the top 1000 banking terms, our research has found that pages that rank #1 use that top keyword just once, on average.

Context is more important than keyword density for banking.

Consider New Content Length Carefully

While we know word count is not a ranking factor, our research has found that the average word count for pages in the top three positions across the top 1000 banking terms is 1,240 words.

While this shouldn’t be considered a hard and fast rule, we do see more comprehensive content achieving higher rankings in this sector.

Be sure to analyze your own SERPs and aim to provide the most comprehensive and highest quality content for each target keyword.

3. Consumer Trust And Information Accuracy Are Increasingly Important In SEO

COVID-19 brought with it a massive transition to online and unfortunately, an associated onslaught of misinformation, cyber-attacks, scams, and fraud.

Bad actors raced to capitalize on increased online searches around and searches for payday loans, grants, jobs, and other help as consumers’ financial concerns grew.

In its pursuit to always provide the best answer for each query, Google has had its hands full algorithmically weeding out results that have the potential to negatively impact searchers.

Finance sites fall into a category Google calls Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), in which websites are held to a higher standard

A concept called E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – factors heavily into YMYL site rankings as Google aims to surface the highest quality answers in its rankings.

Google recommends that those in the YMYL category self-assess your content, asking, “Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?”

Tips And Takeaways

Get To Know Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines

Though not a ranking factor themselves, Google encourages content publishers to refer to this resource “for advice on great content.”

Incorporate Regular Content Audits And Updates Into Your SEO Strategy

Ensure that any outdated information is promptly removed from Google Posts, the blog, etc.

This is not only an SEO best practice but a regulatory requirement for many in the financial services sector, as well.

Don’t Ignore Your Presence In Social Media

When we look at who has the top share of voice for the top 1000 banking terms, Facebook is in the top 5 for organic winning many bank names and even non-brand terms.

Ensuring your profiles are complete and using targeted terms can give you another resource to win visibility in search beyond your website’s listings.

4. Finance Becomes Mobile-First

Visiting ATMs to withdraw for cash purchases, meeting up with a financial advisor, and visiting the local branch for lending needs are not yet obsolete but certainly giving way to more self-serve options.

Digital natives – that is, those who prefer to conduct their banking digitally and have no use for branches or offices at all – made up 32% of PwC’s 2021 Digital Banking Consumer Survey.

And often, consumers are conducting these activities on their mobile phones.

Retail banking has become an omnichannel experience for many.

And as McKinsey experts said in their article Transforming the US consumer bank for the next normal.

“To boost digital customer experience, banks need to design their solutions based on a deep understanding of what drives customer perceptions of convenience. For a long time, this meant a branch on every corner.

Today, while physical presence remains important, convenience also correlates with the ease, speed, and simplicity of an omnichannel experience.”

Google understands the importance of this ease of use, simplicity, and speed – so much so that its Page Experience update and Core Web Vitals metrics made meeting these objectives even more impactful in its search ranking algorithms.

Finance consumers are looking for intuitive apps, seamless cross-channel experiences, personalized service and offers, and near real-time decisions.

Transactions such as loan applications or mortgage pre-approvals that used to involve a series of in-person appointments and a great deal of paperwork can now come back in minutes.

It is imperative that the pages these tools live on and other informational content load near-instantly – or consumers will move on to the next result.

Tips And Takeaways

Mobile Security Is Mission-critical

With digital adoption comes enhanced consumer expectations that their privacy and financial data are being protected.

Optimize For Voice Search

With greater reliance on mobile devices and the proliferation of voice-enabled in-home assistants such as Google Home and Alexa, optimizing for these types of queries is key.

Fully 71% of consumers prefer to use voice for search queries as opposed to typing, according to PwC.

Voice-optimized content may differ in a variety of ways including structure, the intent being targeted, content length, format, and markup.

Measure And Optimize For Core Web Vitals

Your rankings will not suffer directly if this is not an area of focus. However, Google gives those who meet its CWV requirements a “boost” in search rankings and in competitive finance spaces, this could really move the needle.

Conclusion

Following Google’s best practices and keeping pace with algorithmic change is essential for SEO in the Financial Services sector.

It is also equally as important to ensure that marketers utilize market insights to stay ahead of category and consumer trends and automate to quickly fix site content for search compliance.

The competition is always high in the finance and banking sectors and with the rise of fintech, SEO can help financial brands stay on top.

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Related Topics:Key Opportunities Search Trends

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SEO

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

17 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

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SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

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SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

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