As an owner or marketer of any finance-related website, you’re probably curious about how you can rank higher in the search engine results. After all, you make most of your money from people visiting your website. If the traffic dries up, so does your income.
In search engine optimization (SEO), the rules and best practices change constantly. That’s why we always have to stay on top of new developments in the field, while making sure that the techniques we use are not outdated.
Some SEO trends, however, do not really change, but instead grows in significance over time. In this article, we therefore take a look at some of the most important SEO trends for finance websites in 2019 and beyond.
Content, content…and content
To rank in Google in 2019, you need to go out of your way to create content that really stands out.
“Ultimate guide”-type articles are a good start. These articles should contain absolutely everything a reader would ever need to know about a particular niche topic, so that when he is finished reading it, he knows exactly what to do and has no more questions.
These days, content is often said to be the most important part of any SEO strategy. No matter how you look at it, the websites with the best content tends to outrank websites with not so good content.
Thanks to updates to Google’s search algorithm, the old “black hat” SEO techniques that used to be so effective are now less effective than ever.
However, the good news is that with great content, your website will attract traffic organically, you’ll get engagement in social media, you’ll get inbound links to your site by people who like your content and therefore link to it, which will lead to your site naturally ranking higher in Google.
This cycle then repeats itself over and over again, resulting in the best websites taking over the search engine results pages, and the bad websites almost disappearing.
Useful SEO tools for finance companies
When you have decided to put money and effort into good content marketing, it’s also important to track your results. To do this, there are a few tools that you shouldn’t be without:
Google Analytics is the ultimate tool out there for any serious website owner. If you don’t already use it, you should go and sign up right away. It’s absolutely free to use, and provides lots of good insights that you can use to improve your reach and conversions even more.- Google Search Console is another service from Google that let’s users track their website’s performance. Although this is a more basic service than Analytics, it’s extremely easy to use while providing accurate insights on the most important metrics to watch. Among other things, Search Console lets you see how Google indexes your pages, and whether or not there are any errors on your site.
- Google Keyword Planner is the ultimate free tool for researching relevant keywords related to your business. You can use this tool to enter keywords you are already using on your site, or ideas you have for keywords, and then get suggestions from Google about other related keywords. The great thing is that Google even tells you how competitive it is to rank for the various keywords, thus giving you a chance to target the less competitive keywords that you’ll have a better chance to rank for.
Google keyword planner is a useful tool for any finance website.
Voice search is coming
Voice searches are becoming more common.
An important development in recent years has been the emergence of voice searches online.
The popularity of this way of searching for information has undoubtedly been driven by the many “smart speakers” that people are now placing in their homes, such as Amazon’s Alexa speaker Google Home. This of course comes in addition to already existing technologies like Apple’s Siri and Google voice search.
According to a Gartner prediction from 2016, 30% of searches will be done without a screen by the year 2020. That’s a huge change from just a few years back, and it requires us as content creators to adapt.
One thing to mention when it comes to voice searches is that you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Users often use voice searches on mobile devices, but if your website don’t look good on mobile, the user will quickly leave again.
Another important thing to keep in mind with the emergence of voice search is that having a natural and “conversational” tone now matters more than ever before.
Think about how people write in a search box compared to how they would be asking a question to a friend. The trend is definitely moving towards more natural human communication online.
Focus on user experience
Not considered very important in the early days of SEO, user experience is today key to be able to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Generally, we can say that what’s good for the user is also good for SEO.
This includes things like making content more readable, with short paragraphs, bullet points, and lots of visuals. It also means that you should keep your site organized and structured, with simple navigation, and fix all old broken links on your site.
According to many SEO experts, fixing broken links will often yield better returns in terms of your search engine rank than just continuing to add new content to the site.
What is for sure is that the trend of relying on good user experience in search engine results has only just started. Because search engines are ultimately created to help humans, not the other way around!