Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Banks
Want people to find your website when searching online for local banks and financial solutions? Invest in search engine optimization to improve your website’s relevance, accessibility, and presence in search results.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of increasing “organic” or “non-paid’ traffic to your website by improving your presence in search engine results. Search engines like Google use hundreds of variables to grade the relevance of your website pages to determine when and how high you’ll show up in search results.
What Can Your Bank Do With SEO?
In contrast to pay per click advertising (PPC) where your bank must pay a fee for each visitor sent to your website, SEO offers your bank the ability to send users to your site without a click charge. The amount of organic traffic your website receives is dependent upon the search queries (otherwise known as keywords) your website ranks for in search results. SEO is a long-term strategy that allows your website to rank for new keywords and earn higher placement in search results for those keywords.
Why Run In Tandem With Your Bank’s PPC Ads?
SEO and PPC are most effective when run together. While SEO can bring in large swaths of traffic at all levels of the buyer journey, PPC is especially effective for precision targeting of specific website visitors based on user data. Visitors who may have found your website organically but left without converting can be brought back with targeted PPC ads. With search results pages becoming increasingly crowded and the buyer journey ever more fragmented, it’s crucial to incorporate multiple channels into your marketing mix to ensure a holistic approach that reaches the right people in the right place with relevant messaging.
What role does your website play in SEO?
In order to improve your organic rankings in the search engine results pages, your website must be designed and maintained according to SEO best practices. Google examines your website for over 200 ranking factors in order to determine your position in the search results in relation to a user’s search query. If your bank website isn’t developed with SEO in mind, then you are likely going to be outranked by your competitors. Additionally, an optimally-designed bank website will help guide your visitors through the next step of the sales funnel once they arrive on a landing page, ensuring that they become a new lead.
Why Is SEO So Effective for Community Banks?
Recent studies have found that organic listings in the top 5 results within Google search account for upwards of 60% of all clicks. Many people remain skeptical about clicking on advertisements and simply prefer to click on organic results instead.
How can SEO benefit your bank?
An effective SEO strategy will allow your branch locations to show up in “local” results, and your website in “organic” results. SEO can boost the online visibility of your physical footprint while bringing new visitors to your website who are searching for solutions to their financial goals or in need of a specific product you offer – from increasing deposits to growing commercial & residential mortgage leads.
What Costs Are Involved?
SEO is a long-term strategy, never believe any agency that tells you otherwise. You will need to invest in continual optimization and new content for your website to achieve results from SEO. Should you decide to partner with BankBound for SEO, you’ll make a one-time investment up front for initial setup and optimization of your website and related properties like Google My Business, Bing, and Facebook. Thereafter, your investment in SEO will be a set monthly cost.
Local SEO
With local SEO, we’re focused on earning top positions in the “local pack” part of search results. This is where Google and Bing show users relevant business listings nearby. There are lots of factors that influence which businesses are promoted in the local pack, but a large emphasis is placed on the consistency of your name, address, and phone (NAP) for each location across various data providers.
Organic SEO
With organic SEO, these results are more content driven but also involve a large number of variables. With SEO, we want to ensure search engines can access and understand everything about your website, and that they find the pages on your bank’s website to be the most relevant for what their users are searching for.
What’s Included With BankBound SEO Services?
Contact us about a custom SEO strategy for your financial institution. Our strategies always include the foundational best practices of search engine optimization along with an emphasis on high-quality content. The specific deliverables for your bank will be tailored for the needs of your website and internet presence.
Have An SEO Strategy Already?
Ask us about a complimentary analysis of your existing search engine optimization strategy to receive actionable insights for improving your on-site and off-site SEO. Unlike other internet marketing companies, our agency works exclusively with financial institutions which allows us to truly become an extension of your team.