Technical SEO and security compliance is critical for establishing a website’s trustworthiness and expertise (E-E-A-T), which is paramount in the financial services sector. Data breaches and security failures in financial institutions often make headline news and can lead to a catastrophic loss in customer confidence.
Establishing a secure foundation is perhaps the single most important task for any financial services SEO agency. To master technical SEO, you must understand how site speed, secure indexing, core web vitals, and strict compliance with regulations to drive organic growth.
Why technical seo is non-negotiable in finance
Technical SEO has a significant role in Your-Money-Your-Life (YMYL) sectors like finance. The added layer of scrutiny for firms operating in the sector requires special attention to building trust and establishing authority. The E-E-A-T requirements of Google and AI platforms such as ChatGPT prevent low quality or misleading information from surfacing in prominent search results or AI answers.
Poor performance or security directly impacts customer trust and can expose your organisation to regulatory risk.
Optimising core web vitals and site architecture for financial users
Addressing Google’s fundamental ranking factors, the core web vitals (CWV) and specific complex structural issues common to large financial sites not only helps improve organic search ranking but also improves the user experience.
Page speed optimisation
It’s common knowledge that faster websites retain users. Google research found that over half (53%) of mobile site visits are abandoned if the site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. WP Engine quantified the impact of page speed, they found a 1-second delay in page load time can lead to approximately 7% reduction in conversion rates.
The most common culprits reducing page speed in financial sites are:
- Uncompressed or poorly sized images
- Excessive scripts, especially third-party scripts
- Not prioritising above-the-fold content
- Heavy compliance banners or consent managers
- Over-engineered security and compliance layers
- Bloated frameworks and legacy content management systems
- Lack of caching and CDN use
Crawlability and indexation
Use of sitemaps (HTML and XML) can increase discovery and indexing, especially for large enterprise site. Conversely, appropriate setup of the robots.txt directives can stop confidential information from being crawled and prevent wasting crawl budget on unimportant pages.
Canonical URL and hreflang declarations can reduce page duplication and facilitate identification of local versions of any content on the site. This is especially important for multi-national, multilingual financial sites. Read our detailed article to learn how to optimise global enterprise sites for multilingual & multi-market search.
Mobile-first indexing
Ensuring mobile-friendliness for key pages on your site will improve user experience, but this shouldn’t just be limited to your product and services pages. Interactive tools, financial calculators, and economic reports may also be read on mobile devices, making it just as important to ensure all your content renders well for mobile device users.
About the Author
Paul is CMO of the Financial Services practice at AccuraCast. During a 25 year career at AXA, as Global Brand Director, he undertook a complete transformation of the brand, taking it from an institutional brand to a top 3 global Financial Services brand. He then oversaw the rapid European growth of Huboo. Paul is an expert in brand building and a trained marketer and holds a Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma.
Lourenço is a Senior SEO Executive at AccuraCast, responsible for the strategic and tactical elements of Organic channel acquisition. He has over 10 years of experience working with international financial services, travel and retail brands in Europe, North and South America.
