Fintech SEO is a dying art.
Getting attention for a startup fintech business used to be about traditional SEO. The founders would hire a B2B SEO agency with experience in SEO for fintech startups.
That agency did keyword research, which would guide the company’s content strategy.
Unfortunately, traditional SEO — ranking in a static set of search results placed in front of every user — is becoming less effective.
Traditional SEO for Fintech Startups Doesn’t Work Anymore
Traditional SEO is about helping search engines understand what’s on the page by optimizing site architecture, page titles, tags, and meta-descriptions, then adding as many links from other sites as possible to increase Google’s perception of that page’s relevance and domain authority.
But Google has gotten better at figuring out what websites are relevant to a particular user’s search queries — even if those sites aren’t terribly well-optimized.
Of course, Google has long catered content directly to the searcher, with location and language, for example. But lately, it is going much deeper.
As more content accumulates on the web, Google will leverage user personas to become more suggestion-based and less keyword-based.
As Google gets smarter, getting organic traffic will become less about catering to search engines (as traditionally defined), and more about catering to users.
It has adapted to the huge influx of content online by beginning to operate less like a traditional search engine, and more like a content-suggestion algorithm.
It copes by operating more like a suggestion algorithm.
Like YouTube or Instagram, it suggests content for you based on your profile and engagement history.
The days of optimizing for traditional search engines, where SEOs rank content in a static set of search results for a given range of keywords, are over.
And backlinks, while still a ranking factor, have become less important in recent years.
Where Fintech SEO is Going
If Google will become more like a recommended content engine and less like a traditional search engine, getting traffic going forward is not about getting in the top 10 search results for high-volume keywords.
This is because the top 10 search results are unlikely to be the same across users.
This development makes the keyword research performed by traditional SEO agencies less effective than it once was.
Fintech startups looking to grow their brand should focus on getting engagement with their content from the right personas. Then, they need to cater that content to those users — not to search engines.
If the right people engage with the brand’s content, Google and other platforms become more likely to recommend their content to the right people.
Why SEO for Fintech Startups Still Has a (Limited) Place
This is not to say that on-page SEO fundamentals, like optimizing title tags and H1s, don’t have a place.
Other elements of traditional SEO, like optimizing page titles for click-through rates, are here to stay.
To recommend your content, Google needs to understand what your pages are about, and getting the basics right remains important.
And user experience, particularly page speed, will become increasingly important in 2021.
Fortunately, unless you’re running a massive legacy site, getting the basics right has never been easier, given the availability of easy-to-use CMS platforms, plugins like Yoast, and low-cost, high-performance hosting.
But the days where companies got successful by building a content strategy around keywords are over.
Conclusion
Going forward, startups — fintech or otherwise — need to build their content strategy around personas, rather than keywords, because that’s how search engine algorithms are increasingly built.
To learn about the marketing agencies who get where things are going, check out our guide to the Top 10 Fintech Marketing Agencies.