With reputation and trust carrying enormous amounts of weight in the financial services industry, search engine rankings are often dominated by the bigger companies. Not only that, but Google looks at financial services websites with an extra dose of scrutiny, looking out for expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT).
With a lot to consider and some industry giants to compete with, setting your website’s landing pages up for success can be challenging. To help you make a headstart, Leicestershire-based digital marketing agency ASSISTED., specialising in financial services SEO, recently conducted a study across 100 of the top-ranking financial services landing pages. From this data, they have pulled together five simple tips to improve the performance of your financial services landing pages.
Table of Contents
1. Improve your page speed
These days, users are totally spoilt for choice. If they can’t find what they need on one website, it won’t take them long to seek it out on another. That’s why no website can afford to be a victim of slow page speed. Over half of users leave a website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds, so first impressions really do count.
Not only this but if Google recognises that your page has a high bounce rate, it will negatively impact where they position your page in the rankings. You can check your page speed and find recommendations on how to improve it via Page Speed Insights. Ideally, you want to aim for a mobile loading speed of 50+ and a desktop loading speed of 80+.
2. Utilise Schema markup
If you haven’t heard of schema markup before, it is essentially a code that explicitly tells search engines about the content of your website and what it offers. This helps search engines return helpful and accurate results to users.
Let’s say for example that you run an insurance agency. Using the terms “FinancialProduct” and “InsuranceAgency” within your website’s schema will act as a signal that this is what you’re all about. You can also use schema to offer information about the resources that your page offers, such as “FAQ”, “VideoObject” and “NewsArticle”. This helps your website to appear in featured snippets of text, again helping with visibility and rankings.
3. Write a lot of content
You know what they say – ‘content is king’. Your content is undoubtedly the most important part of your website. Everything else supports this. It’s really important that you provide your potential customers with the information they need, and relay your products or services in the right way.
Top ranking financial services landing pages contain around 2000 words of content, including headings, image captions, downloadable policy documents, FAQs and featured blog posts. Within the financial services particularly, it’s important to deliver value and be thorough with your content – which is why high word counts are preferred.
Just ensure that you don’t just try and build up your word count in order to tick a box. The information and resources on your landing page need to be valuable and worth the user’s time. Once you get going and begin including everything you could possibly need to include, you’ll be surprised at how quickly that wordcount climbs.
4. Use Google’s Natural Language API
Google’s Natural Language API is really handy to get an idea of how Google is reading your landing page. By running all your copy through the tool, it provides you with a list of top words and phrases within your copy that it has picked up on. This could be due to how many times a particular word or phrase has been mentioned, where they are mentioned and the context in which they are mentioned.
Ideally, you want your focus keywords to appear in the top three salience scores. You may need to tweak the copy in order to achieve this – little changes can have a big impact. Focus on the first few sentences and the headings within your copy to start with. Try and ensure that your number one salience score is at 0.08 as a minimum.
5. Don’t underestimate the power of a heading tag
And finally, it may seem obvious to some but utilising heading tags is very important. You should always use your focus keyword in your H1 and split up your copy with relevant H2s. On top of this though, try and use H3s, 4s and 5s too where possible. Across the 100 top ranking financial services pages, 90% have only one H1 and on average, six H2 tags, eight H3 tags, four H4 tags and one H5 tag.
It’s a good idea to think of your landing page like a book. Your H1 is the title of your book and lets the user know what to expect. Your H2s are the chapters and any headings that follow are subheadings to control how your copy is displayed. Optimising all of these headings and keeping them short and clear is helpful both for SEO and your user.
These five simple SEO tips will help to give your financial services landing page a boost, building up the fundamental foundations and creating a landing page that is rich in content and resources.
About Carson Derrow
