If you’ve been working in financial services marketing over the last decade, then you know the importance of ranking high on Google. Google is still the most dominant search engine with over 8.5 billion searches daily. If your forex brokerage, payments firm, neobank or fintech is not at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages), then you’re missing out on potential clients. In this article, we’ll look at what happens when your competitors outrank you, and how to rank higher on Google.
Why It Matters To Rank Higher on Google
Here are eight important reasons why you should care about your SERPs.
- Attention and Traffic: The top 3 results on Google get 75% of ALL clicks. If you’re not in the top 3, you’re missing out on valuable traffic that you can convert into clients.
- Credibility and Trust: In a highly regulated industry, trust is even more important. Higher ranked sites engender more authority and credibility. This is why SEO is important to your online reputation management (ORM).
- Increased Conversions: Statistics show that ranking on top of SERP in your niche generates 39.8% CTR.
- More Competitive: If you aren’t in those top spots then your competitors are. Ranking higher means you get more market share and brand recognition.
- Cost-Effective: Once you’ve reached top ranking, staying there is fairly cost-effective, especially compared to paid traffic.
- Optimises your PPC: While PPC can get you to the top of a search page, the top 10 organic searches are more likely to get clicks. Get the best of both worlds by appearing in both.
- Hypertargeting: You have the ability to reach prospects throughout their buyer journey. SEO tactics and thoughtful content can help nurture leads from awareness to consideration to decision making.
- Quantifiable Results: You can easily measure and analyse your organic traffic, rankings, traffic and conversions, and tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.
Need well crafted, strategic content to work alongside your SEO strategy? Speak to the team at Contentworks
Interesting Fact
For the last few months you will have seen that Google is placing AI snippets in search results. Many SEO managers worried about the impact to clickthrough rates, but in September last year Google began to link to sources in the AI overviews. As of January 2025, these links have been getting CTRs in the top 3-5 search results. More importantly, search results with AI overviews have seen little impact to organic CTRs, which have remained high but ad clicks are greatly reduced. Read more on how to optimise your content for AI.
Best Practices for Ranking Higher on Google
It all begins with a click! If you want to outrank your competitors and get to the top of SERPs, here’s what you need to do.
Keyword (KW) Research
In-depth KW research includes understanding your target user’s intent. This is the foundation of your SEO strategy and your ability to rank higher on Google. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner will help you identify high-volume, low-competition KWs relevant to your finance brand. Anyone working in forex knows how hard it is to rank high for keywords like ‘forex’, ‘trading’ and ‘broker’. Instead focus on long-tail keywords like “forex trading tips for beginners”.
Optimise Your Website
Ensure your website is SEO optimised to aim for higher ranking. Here are some quick tips to follow:
- Responsiveness: 60%+ of searches are on mobile. Google also rewards mobile responsive sites.
- Loading speed: If your site is taking more than 3 seconds to load, then you’ll be getting high bounce rates. Use Google PageSpeed Insights and speed up your site.
- Security: Ensure your sight has an SSL certificate (HTTPS) as Google prefers secure sites.
- Easy navigation: Clear site architecture with internal linking improves your UX and helps your SEO rankings.
- Improve on-page SEO: Include KW-rich meta titles and descriptions, alt text for images, and keywords in your header tags for H1, H2, H3.
- Technical SEO: Submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Fix broken links. Use canonical tags correctly.
Awesome Content
Creating high-quality, authoritative content is the holy grail of SEO marketing. Create expert-level blogs and white papers, write educational guides and offer market insights. Keep Google’s EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) in mind when creating your finance content. Aim to get into Google snippets and PAA by answering questions directly and succinctly.
Top tip: Tools like AnswerThePublic are a good way to find frequently asked questions in the finance sector.
Local SEO and Backlinking
Additional best practices include leveraging local SEO by claiming Google My Business (GMB). Ensure your profile is accurate with your products, services and client reviews. Also list your business in relevant directories and encourage reviews. Build high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites. This signals to Google that your content is valuable. Offer to guest post with backlinks to your site. And look to partner with finfluencers for mentions and backlinks.
Content Marketing Mix
Google likes pages with multimedia as they keep a user engaged longer on the page. Mix up your content with explainer videos, infographics and charts to illustrate your points. They also help simplify complex financial concepts. Host webinars to drive traffic to your website. And remain active on your social media. Share blogs, market updates, industry news on your social channels. Interact with your fans by replying to comments and share insights to establish authority. Collaborating with finance industry experts in interviews or trainings are a great way to generate authoritative content and rank higher on Google.
Measure, Analyse and Tweak your SEO Strategy
SEO is not a one-time activity. You need to track your performance on a regular basis and troubleshoot any technical issues. Content creation and analysing results can help you strategise what content to focus on. A/B testing is a good way to experiment with different formats, keywords and call to actions (CTAs) to discover what works best for your target audience. Google Analytics and Search Console are your best friends here. You will monitor traffic, keywords, competitor keywords and technical issues with your site.
Need a comprehensive technical and content SEO site audit? Book in for a quick zoom with the Contentworks team.
Ready to Compete on Google?
Combined with all your other marketing activity, SEO may seem to be a handful. Continuous keyword research, content creation in volume, ongoing technical optimisation and link building can take up a lot of marketing department resources. But if ranking higher than your competitors on Google is a KPI, then this is what you will have to do. And it can take 3-6 months to begin to see any results. Like many success stories in business, consistency is key. Your finance brand won’t rank in the top three overnight. Your brand authority won’t be recognised by publishing a couple of press releases. It is a long term strategy that is vital to any successful finance brand.
Contact the team at Contentworks for SEO strategies to help you rank higher on Google.