SEO for Financial Services: 10 tips for higher rankings

Focus on keywords that aren’t just competitive, but carry high user intent and ones that reflect complex decision-making. Using long-tail, product-specific terms allows your content to attract more qualified leads. For example, “best employee benefits insurance for SMEs” will probably bring far stronger conversions than broad keywords like “insurance quotes”.

The research process typically includes:

• Start with core product & regulatory mapping
  List your products, services, and regulated terminology (e.g., “SME health insurance,” “professional indemnity,” “ISA limits”).
• Analyse search intent at every stage
  Financial decisions are multi-step and research-heavy. Map keywords to the full funnel:
  • Top-funnel: “what is excess liability insurance”
  • Mid-funnel: “best liability insurance for small businesses”
  • Bottom-funnel: “excess liability insurance quote UK” This helps build clearly defined content for both education and conversion.
• Analyse competitor & aggregator positioning
  Review rankings for major competitors, comparison sites, and fintech disruptors. Aggregators often claim top spots.
• Build long-tail, high-intent variations
  Financial searchers love specifics. Expand broad terms:
  • “life insurance” → “life insurance for new parents UK”
  • “business loan” → “unsecured business loan for startups UK”
  • “SME health cover” → “health insurance for companies with under 20 employees”
    These avoid head-term competition and attract decision-ready users
• Use data tools for volume & difficulty
  Tools like SEMrush, ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner help you evaluate search volume, keyword difficulty and CPC (often high in FS, indicating competition)

Finance web pages fall under Google’s Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) category, meaning they must uphold the highest levels of quality. Strengthening your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) begins with credible authors, transparent sourcing, and consistent compliance review. Three simple improvements can go a long way to strengthen your E-E-A-T:

• Display expert bios, certifications, and regulatory information.
• Add clear definitions for complex terms.
• Ensure every page is factually correct and backed by vetted data.

Trust-breakers to avoid: In 2023, a number of high-profile celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan and Jake Paul were charged $400,000 for violating disclosure rules. They were paid to promote crypto tokens, but failed to disclose that. This should serve as a reminder that financial services compliance applies not just to content on site but also on the wider web. Misleading consumers with insincere reviews is illegal, and will hurt the perceived trust of any site indulging in such deceptive practices.

Google’s quality raters look for signals that indicate your content won’t mislead users making financial decisions. AI-based search platforms like ChatGPT also consider the same principles of E-E-A-T when scoring finance website and app reliability. To learn more, read our guide to YMYL Trust: E-E-A-T for Financial Services SEO.

Financial users demand exceptionally smooth experiences. Slow, unstable, or unsecure websites fail Google and ChatGPT’s high standards instantly. Optimise Core Web Vitals, reduce unnecessary scripts, and ensure fast-loading mobile pages. Finance sector apps and sites must also maintain top-level security hygiene: full HTTPS coverage, secure form handling, and no broken redirects.

Technical errors can directly reduce conversions; a single second of delay lowers conversion rates by 7%. In financial services, where trust is everything, performance and security directly influence brand perception.

Image source: Cloudflare

Search is rapidly shifting from traditional 10-blue-links to AI-generated answers. Google’s AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Search, and Perplexity are increasingly shaping how users discover financial information. To ensure your financial brand is included in answers on these structured, conversational engines, focus on:

• Clear, structured content with concise summaries and well-defined headings
• Factual, citation-friendly information (AI models rely heavily on trustworthy sources)
• Compliance proofing, since AI systems avoid unreliable or unverified content
• Expanded topical depth, answering the full context behind a query
• Strong E-E-A-T, as models prefer authoritative financial voices

Partnering with a GEO agency is quickly becoming essential for financial brand marketing, since AI engines may drastically reduce click-through to websites if a brand is not considered as the trusted source.

A recent breakdown shows that for finance queries, AI Overview visibility increases dramatically with longer, more informational searches – finance AIO visibility goes from 11% on short queries to almost 79% on very long ones (9-10 word queries).

We recommend starting with a GEO workshop, followed by a benchmarking exercise to help your team work through the complexities of GEO layered on SEO.

Structured data markup can help search engines and AI LLMs interpret your key financial content with precision. This is especially important on large banking sites and complex, dynamic fintech and insurtech websites. Adding schema like FinancialService, FinancialProduct, BankAccount or PaymentCard allows algorithms to better understand structured content on your pages, and increases the likelihood of your content being cited by AI engines and appearing in enhanced search engine results features.

Schema also supports compliance by clearly defining the nature of your financial products or services, reducing the risk of misinterpretation by search algorithms. Our experts recommend:

• Add finance-relevant schema types where relevant.
• Mark up rates, fees, services, and processes where possible.
• Add FAQ schema to improve AIO and rich-result eligibility.
• Use HowTo schema for step-based processes (e.g., “How to apply for a loan”).
• Maintain structured data hygiene to avoid errors in Google Search Console.

Our guide to technical SEO for financial institutions provides further information on implementing schema for financial services rich results.