SEO
Key Trends & Opportunities In Search

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%).
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.
More resources:
Featured Image: Billion Photos/Shutterstock
SEO
How Data Is Reshaping The SEO & Digital Marketer’s Landscape

There is a new data revolution happening, and it’s sweeping across the industry so quickly that many SEO and digital marketers are struggling to make sense of the insights and intelligence at their disposal.
To utilize this opportunity, marketers need to evolve their mindsets and use technology to analyze multiple data formats and understand the new opportunities it can bring.
SEO marketers of today and digital marketers of tomorrow will need to extract, structure quickly, and manipulate data to drive the most critical business outcomes.
Data has always been mission-critical to digital decision-making.
The Economist, back in 2017, declared it the world’s most valuable resource.
Fast forward to today and the future, and we can see that the exponential growth of data fuelling this revolution is staggering.
According to the IDC, the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data made since the advent of digital storage.
Think about that for a second!
Flash drives, for example, were introduced in 2000.
This means that in the next five years, marketers will have to analyze and make sense of 2x the data created in the last 22 years!
The Data Revolution Means More Sources & Complexity For SEO
The data revolution has gone on for some time now, and it’s changed our concept of what counts as “data,” rightfully so.
In the past, we thought only numbers mattered.
But, in this new digital world where everything is converted into ones and zeros, data is broader and contains text, audio, and visual information – all bits waiting to be processed!
- Machine-based and human-generated data are growing at a rate of 10x faster than conventional business data.
- Machine-created data is increasing exponentially at a 50x the growth rate. This data revolution is primarily marketing-driven and consumer-oriented who are “always on.”
- In just the last 18 months, the volume of site processing data we have been generating at BrightEdge has increased by 11x!
As a result of these increasingly demanding trends, SEO and digital marketers need to adapt and become more like data analysts and scientists in approaching the extraction of structured data insights and business intelligence – without adding more manual work.
Fortunately, SEO is well-positioned to take advantage of this new data revolution.
- Increasing your keyword universe – More keywords mean more data points to look at with reporting and fuelling insights. While focusing on conversion rate metrics is very important, it wouldn’t be possible without opening the scope of your audience and getting more people in the door. SEO has drifted away from writing for a primary dedicated keyword and is now way more advanced with advancements in search engines like Google’s understanding of intent of searches through RankBrain and BERT.
- Increasing your search footprint – will also help you discover unexplored of informing your future content strategy or ideate new keyword ideas. However, sometimes you might miss the boat, like the transition of Content Management Systems slowly turning into “Experience Platforms” as they offer more functionality to meet the needs of today’s webmaster or marketer.
Read More On SEJ
Data Is The Currency Of An Accelerated SEO & Digital Age
By 2025, Worldwide data will reach 175 zettabytes.
But unfortunately, the human brain can’t process, structure, and analyze all that data.
So technology engines have to help, and digital marketers should be the driver.
There is a massive opportunity for companies that can utilize data to create more engaging experiences.
A recent study showed that 95% of business leaders recognize this as their biggest growth lever over the next three years, which means there’s plenty at stake here!
Robust data analysis ensures decisions are evidence-based and have more accountability.
Drawing on existing and new data sources to fully integrate business acumen and analytical skills into decision making, sourcing, managing, and analyzing large amounts of unstructured data will ensure continued use and success.
SEO began with data and has evolved.
From the introduction of real-time SEO in 2019 and Page Experience Updates in 2021, SEO’s future lies again with data and the creation of intelligent systems. Here marketers can leverage combined data sources that structures data for them.
As a result, they can achieve business objectives and stay ahead during all data and digital transformation stages.
Read More On SEJ
Technology & AI Are Helping SEO Evolve
Advancements in technology and, in particular, AI and Natural Language Processing has meant that SEO and digital marketers can become data analysts without having to become an actual data scientist.
This is key to unlocking structured insights from your company’s big data to make more precise predictions about what is coming next based on existing information.
Digital marketers can evolve, understand key trends, and learn in new areas such as:
- Predictive modeling of future trends and forecasting based on multiple types of data.
- Real-time identification of opportunities and intelligence.
- Digital research at scale with both historical and real-time data.
- Leveraging automated visualizations for various stakeholders.
- Improved data security and compliance.
- Market and business intelligence at a macro level.
- Consumer behavior at the most granular level.
SEO and digital marketers can learn critical skills such as statistics, data analysis, data visualization, and strategy.
AI, NLP, and machine learning are helping them do this without needing expertise in computer programming and software applications.
What digital marketers must do is combine their communication skills and analytics skills with stakeholders who cannot think outside of the advertising box.
Read More On SEJ
Data Analysis & Intelligence As Competitive Advantage
The application of technology will be the driving force behind the next generation of data analysis technology.
Therefore, SEO and digital marketers of today should learn how to better utilize insights from data analysis.
It’s becoming more apparent that the marketing platforms of tomorrow will require the capabilities of data analysis and science infrastructure at their core.
The future of marketing will blend technological know-how, business sense, and an understanding of data analysis.
The next generation of SEO will touch all components of marketing, from video, email, and voice, to digital performance of content.
SEO and data science will converge into one evolved discipline that drives omnichannel acquisition and democratizes data.
Marketers who embrace this new era of SEO will be well-positioned to succeed in the years to come.
Data is reconfirming its role as the new competitive advantage, and as SEO and digital marketers, you must evolve if you want to be part of the future.
More resources:
Featured Image: ra2 studio/Shutterstock
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