A guide to financial services SEO, content and analytics

How does a financial services industry brand grow organic traffic?

Financial services, banking, mortgages, savings, lending, investment or insurance companies operate in highly competitive markets. Cost per customer acquisition is high, and customer loyalty in younger, digitally savvy audiences is on a knife edge.

Budgets are never adequate for the task in hand.

Marketing teams have never been under so much pressure to deliver more with so little, yet still they’re tasked with relentless growth.

The answer, or at least a large part of the solution, is to add breadth to the diversity of your traffic sources by investigating the opportunity that SEO and content marketing can offer.

Marketing teams have an opportunity to exploit the power of organic traffic growth from ‘free’ channels including search engines through SEO, referrals from 3rd party links using promotional tactics, PR and outreach, content marketing and social media.

Many organisations still have not reached full maturity in their organic marketing capacity, which means there’s an opportunity on the table for global competition.

Who is this article for?

This article looks at best practices in SEO, content marketing and analytics for companies operating in or around the financial services ecosystem.

It’s intended for front line to senior level marketers alike who are involved in and targeted on customer acquisition for their employers, who would like to explore developing their capabilities further.

It’s our hope that reading this guide will give you a sense of opportunity for your financial services brand and uncover new methods and insights to maximise growth from your organic (non-paid) traffic sources.

Broadly, I’ll explain what good looks like for organic digital marketing in Financial Services.

Does content marketing and SEO work for financial services companies?

If you have a comprehensive and well-executed content strategy, combined with competent technical SEO support and properly configured analytics (so that your numbers are actually correct and can stand up to scrutiny), then yes. Critical to the success of any campaign is of course an understanding of the confines of working within a marketing team in a regulated services company.

2018 was (another) record-breaking year of growth in organic performance for Towergate Insurance. Organic traffic to the domain increased by 38% and the volume of leads by 21% YOY:

Fuelling this growth was a significant increase in domain presence in Google’s organic search results, as represented by a 75% increase in Searchmetrics organic visibility:

To find out exactly what we did for Towergate, read the case study. To find out how it can be done for you, read the rest of our guide, or get in touch for an exploratory discussion.

2019, the year of uncertainty

Brexit has left its mark on the people of the UK and its economy. The value of the pound has fallen since the 2016 referendum. Already disappointing retail spending at the end of 2018 stalled even further, leaving the high street on the precipice in mid 2019. As I write this, Arcadia Group’s future as a high street retailer is entirely at the mercy of its landlords, and two local retailers in my small Buckinghamshire hometown are having closing down sales.

Usually predictable seasonal consumer behaviour has become unpredictable, leaving a lot of teams with the task of re-forecasting.

Consumers are more willing now to switch their financial services and utilities providers than ever before. Perhaps because of the weight of economic uncertainty and the need to reduce spending, perhaps because of the ease of finding a better deal online. Either way, marketing budgets will be pressured by this ongoing shift in customer lifetime value.

Source: Hitwise / CACI “UK Finance Report” 2019

Challenger banks have entered the marketplace with disruptive offers to technically savvy, digital-only consumers. They offer simpler, mobile-only services with useful features to help people understand how they spend, borrow and save. Users are more comfortable today than at any other time-consuming financial services via multi-channel, with mobile website and app growth in huge demand. Open Banking has enabled services to give consumers unprecedented levels of insight in to where best to manage their money and how it is being spent.

Be best placed for the competitive battleground ahead

Providers who can both deliver a compelling and reliable digital service model, while retaining traditional values around trust and service, will be best placed for the competitive battleground ahead. Providers who can communicate their values, while delivering insight into the uniqueness of their offer will be best placed to maximise audience and customer growth. Providers who use organic digital marketing (SEO and content marketing) to complement their paid, PR and traditional advertising will operate marketing budgets at their most effective.

Customers are spending huge amounts of time on digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Slack, WhatsApp and Discord, but search is still king. Google is a near-monopoly, owning more than 90% of web search volume in the US and Europe.

To remain relevant to customers, financial services providers need to reach people on these platforms with tailored products at the right time, with the right message. This is especially true for customers who are most open to digital innovation.

These are, of course, just words.

Action is delivery, and delivery dictates outcome

And, in my opinion (and this company’s opinion) words are meaningless without action. Action is delivery, and delivery dictates outcome. For a financial institution engaged in digital marketing, outcome is growth with a reduction in CPA cost through successful ‘organic’ channel marketing. It’s a reduction in spend on paid channels because organic is the breadwinner.

ROI on organic digital marketing spend is king, and it’s a metric all agencies should hang their hats on. We do.

Testing and developing digital marketing

For many FS companies, search and content marketing is still in its early stages as a traffic growth channel (“The Dividends of Digital Marketing Maturity”, BCG, February 2019).

SEO and content marketing have very specific, niche skill-sets that are not always completely developed in-house, even in the largest operations. Most operations are still in the process of defining and refining their strategy.

In RGAX’s “Digital Distribution Strategy Survey: 2018 Pulse of

the Industry” of small to medium size insurers, nearly half of all respondents who already had content marketing (D2C website) or SEO/SEM capabilities had plans to continue expanding the channels.

Current and Planned Testing Digital Marketing Capabilities (Source: RGAX Digital Distribution Strategy Survey: 2018 Pulse of the Industry)

Expanding the team with outside support

The majority of companies surveyed reported that they outsource to third-party agencies and engage lead generation partners for their expertise, knowledge and technology to support their digital strategy.

This feels very familiar to us, as we provide on-site support with our FS clients with a great deal of success.

Partnering with agencies is actually somewhat typical. 65% of the insurers surveyed below use an internal digital marketing team supported by their external partners. Further, 52% of the respondents later admitted to rating their own capabilities as insufficient for the task.

The companies that responded they have “moderate” or “strong” capabilities stated that they partnered with several companies or outsourced much of their digital marketing. (Source: Digital Distribution Strategy Survey: 2018 Pulse of the Industry)

Influencing the path to conversion

Before we begin on traffic generation tactics, it’s important to establish which stages in the path to conversion organic digital marketing can actually influence. Take a look at this customer consideration funnel from Facebook, in their “Eliminating friction in the financial services path to conversion” presentation:

The right content marketing strategy, empathetic to the needs of potential customers, can drive highly targeted traffic into the awareness and consideration stages of the funnel, and make sure the right pages are visible when the customer’s intent screams: “I’m ready to buy”.

Further, SEO and content are powerful allies to make sure that the right content is available at the post-purchase stage, be it for support, cross sales, personalised recommendations or reviews.

Awareness

Hiscox’s cyber crime insurance “What is a Phishing Attack?” is a highly visible, well-ranked article designed to educate a visitor who has a particular information need. The page defines the risk, and the threat posed to business justifies their call to action to find out more about their cyber and data insurance product.

Consideration

During the consideration phase, the potential customer is clearly aware of your products and they’re actively carrying out further detailed research and comparing your products to a competitor’s. Policy Genius is an example of a brand that creates comparison pages for different insurance products:

Prudential vs Pacific Life Insurance – a comparison page on Policygenius.com

There is more opportunity for this kind of thinking (and we’ll get to that in the content marketing section of this guide) as the suggested queries in this screenshot clearly demonstrate:

Post Purchase

Monzo’s goal is to “build a better bank”. One of the features of their support for the customer at the post purchase stage is their community site.

The Monzo community site features spaces for feedback and ideas, product support, announcements and more.

Communities are notoriously difficult to get to critical mass, so it’s quite a testament to the team there that this community is engaged and positively contributing.

Strategy is important, execution is everything

Features like guides, communities and comparison pages are powerful tactics, but without strategy they’re only single components in an industry that tends to prioritise branding over anything else. And without the buy-in, strategy is simply a PowerPoint presentation with no measurable return on investment.

To get buy in for a content marketing campaign, you need to be able to devise a strategy that fits with the organisation’s brand guidelines, and evidence outcomes based on initial tests or case studies.

In fact, this is an issue of industry-wide concern for financial services institutions that haven’t quite reached organic marketing maturity yet:

Source: State of Play 2019 in Financial Services Content Marketing (Editions Financial)

But before you put pen to paper on any kind of content strategy, you need to make sure your data is right.

Most of the new clients we meet have some sort of critical measurement error in their analytics configuration, meaning the data is wrong, the interpretation is wrong, or worse, the wrong decisions are being made on top of the outcomes of prior decisions based on incorrect data.

Data integrity is often one of the “quick wins” issues, a rogue JavaScript tag is all you need to artificially inflate or ignore page views. Issues like this have a knock-on impact on all reporting including paid channel ROI.

So, before any work begins, check your analytics platform is correctly implemented and its data can be reconciled to real world outcomes.

Measurement: tracking relevant metrics, correctly

Measuring performance should be deeply ingrained in any content or SEO activity.

Despite 62% of in-house marketing teams believing their content marketing budget allocations will rise, and 78% of them expecting to see their content team resourcing increase over the next three years, 54% of those marketers admit they’re not getting their analytics strategy right or aren’t even sure of what to measure and how.

In our post-Brexit economy looms a daily, existential threat to any content team that can’t answer the question: “what is the value of this campaign?”.

The existential threat of bad measurement

Today’s universe is littered with agile, data-savvy start-ups that are are challenging established, sluggish incumbents in every sector. Measurement, for them, is baked into their very DNA. Every minute spent on marketing operations has measurable value, and can be reported in terms that their boards understand.

Yet some in-house teams are spending days constructing Excel-based dashboards with standard tracking data making reporting a soul-destroying, time-consuming and pointless activity.

For one of our clients, Bravissimo (case study here), online transactions were tracked as an isolated data-point, meaning that while top-line revenue was reported accurately, the team couldn’t gain insight into the wider purchase journey – cart abandonment and checkout behaviour were unknowns. Existing processes also lacked data on customers’ engagement with content, impeding the marketing team’s ability to demonstrate ROI. By implementing Google Tag Manager and applying a measurement plan, we saved Bravissimo days a month in reporting time, buying them free time to do more of the actual marketing work.

With the right expertise, Google Tag Manager offers the ability to modify and customise your implementation of Google Analytics. This can, for example, help provide much more insight into users at various stages of awareness in the funnel.

A year on year “All Pages” report using funnel stage Content Grouping

Well configured Google Analytics tracking can be supplemented with top-of-funnel interaction data. Tracking these less overtly commercial interactions allows you to attribute value to customer engagement with any D2C content marketing assets such as your blog, guides, videos, customer reviews, campaign emails and so on.

Once you’ve audited your analytics and Google Tag Manager setup, you’re ready to automate reporting with Google Data Studio.

You can create reports geared squarely around your business’s digital KPIs, while also serving to communicate the value of the work carried out by the marketing team and its supporting agency. To read more of our work on KPI measurement and analytics, see articles from our measurement category or check out our guide to Google Analytics.

The David vs Goliath opportunity

Content marketing and SEO offer an opportunity to level the playing field.

Monzo, a relative newcomer into consumer banking are already at around 12% of the traffic levels of long established NatWest.com. That they have achieved this in little over a year should be somewhat alarming to the old guard.

A smaller brand in the marketplace can compete with much larger companies by understanding the scale of the opportunity available and how to deploy a strategy to exploit it.

This is of course a journey that starts with research, and lots of it.

We call that research “opportunity sizing”.

Opportunity sizing

Opportunity sizing is an exercise that Builtvisible has developed over almost a decade. It helps you understand the short-, medium- and long-term opportunities available to you as a financial services marketer.

In the early days, we used to use keyword research to estimate, by industry category, the potential search volume exposure a site may experience after implementing an SEO strategy. The problem with this approach was that it was very binary. The research would tell us how many people searched for a commercially relevant term, and we would assign a goal based on that single data point.

Today’s methodology is a lot more complex, but answers questions you would expect a marketer to want to ask in their journey towards creating a strategy. Despite the organic nature of these types of campaigns we can use opportunity sizing to quantify the level and type of effort required to achieve the goals established by the business.

And that’s the really important part – it’s based on KPIs set by the business. It’s an optimal revenue-focused strategy for organic growth, not dictated purely by an SEO consultant with an Excel spreadsheet.

“What’s the scale of the opportunity?”

While we can’t give away the most valuable part of our process (for free, at least), we can indicate some of the outcomes you might need to tackle with the right research if you want to create a reliable growth strategy.

These questions are really designed to help you prioritise you activities:

• Which sections of the site are lacking in links?
• Which pages need better on-page optimisation?
• Which search terms can we improve more quickly?
• How are people searching segmented by demographic profile?
• Are we lacking any pages that could answer new search queries?
• Which product areas have the biggest opportunities for growth?

Understand your customers’ search behaviour and build content to meet their needs

When you’re in opportunity hunting mode, one of the most interesting areas to explore for content and SEO development is understanding the search behaviour of your customers.

Source: Hitwise / CACI “UK Finance Report” 2019

To target these search term segments, a financial brand could execute a content marketing and link building strategy targeting phrases such as “help to buy ISA calculator”. The experience could be made to appeal to multiple customer segments by considering the mobile friendliness of the content combined with the appropriateness of the featured content and calls to action on the page.

This is, of course, a single tactic deployed that would be part of a much bigger strategic growth campaign to accelerate the organic traffic growth of an FS brand. We call this combined approach a keyword mapping and gap analysis.

Keyword mapping and content gaps analysis

The opportunity to grow traffic extends far beyond building content for a single ISA calculator.

To be able to approach the problem of large-scale, short-term traffic growth, you need to be able to combine keyword research data with competitive analysis (“what phrases do our competition rank for that we do not?”). The output from this process delivers data to be mapped to a site architecture to catch all potential traffic.

A simplified version of our process looks like this:

Creating pages with SEO site architecture best practice in mind

Once you’ve assembled your keyword mapping, it’s time to plot the information architecture on your site.

By thinking carefully about the structure of your website, you can ensure that all of the pages on your site are best placed to rank well in organic search. Site architecture for SEO is an extensive topic, but once it’s mastered transformative changes can be made to the traffic performance and UX of a site. You can read more about the subject of site architecture for SEO here, or read how those principles are applied to recruitment websites here.

Search

Growing organic search traffic for a financial services company is fraught with hurdles. The work takes flexibility and patience with respect for the regulatory processes of the organisation.

Getting started with a new Financial Services client

Getting started with a new FS client requires time to explore the inner workings of the business.

With careful exploration comes a deep understanding of the confines that the existing team are working in, and the barriers to delivery they’re experiencing. This information should be used to construct a project empathetic to the restrictions placed on the business. Used well, that information can be used to find avenues to short-term growth or ‘quick wins’.

As our Head of SEO, William Nye says:

“You’re never going to be able to exert much influence over compliance timelines. They’ll virtually always have a bigger stakeholder yelling at them about something more important to the business. Talk to your in-house counterparts in the kick off meeting and find out what the average wait is, then plan that in. For a content campaign for example, if you know you want to launch in 3 months and compliance will be a month, you actually have 2 months for the ideation, research and build, so may need to do sprints of 2 weeks rather than monthly deliverables.”

Iterate on the small things that have a big impact

Finance sites tend to be smaller on average, so the quality of every page is often paramount.

Recursively improve everything as much as possible to ensure the ratio of good to ‘needs improvement’ is acceptable. You can consolidate similar pages (reducing unnecessary bloat by many times) and actually see an improvement in organic traffic.

Strategic SEO tips to improve the overall performance of your site:

• Create new informational content and product pages to fill gaps – sometimes financial services companies have products they haven’t built web pages for yet.
• Take every opportunity to improve every existing page as much as possible.
• Iteratively audit existing content and choose whether to consolidate, improve or remove where necessary.
• Optimise product pages and continue to improve those that aren’t performing, for example, rewrite and optimise the copy and add customer enquiry driven FAQs.
• Execute a regular SEO best practices/technical audit making sure there are no ongoing technical barriers to search engine crawl and ranking.
• Activate link building via campaigns focusing on core product areas and use ongoing flexible link building for the times when compliance sign-off is slow.
• Make sure the right resources rank in the appropriate country locale by auditing your use of href=”lang” elements in your international SEO strategy.
• Execute regular competitive industry link profile analysis.
• Monitor organic results for brand issues or reputation management purposes.

Features in Google Search for FS companies

Google’s search results have evolved far beyond the classic “10 blue links” results. Today’s ecosystem provides a rich array of options for the savvy technical SEO to discover, implement and exploit.

Here is a selection of the most accessible, easy-to-implement and commonly occurring features in today’s search results.

Featured snippets

Featured snippets are boxes that appear at the top of organic search results (referred to as “position 0”) where the format of regular listings is reversed, showing a descriptive snippet from the ranking web page, then the source URL for that result immediately below.

You can achieve a featured snippet provided that your page ranks somewhere on the first page of search results. Provided that the page succinctly answers the question, getting the result is a question of using the correct markup on the page. See our research on how to get answer boxes here.

When an answer box appears in the search results, a dramatic drop in click-through traffic can be felt in the standard organic results. The incumbent of the answer box receives a significant traffic boost.

Further to this, the prevalence of these features is increasing year-on-year in the US, UK, Australia and Canada:

Source: Moz / Stat Search Analytics

Given the potential benefit from the additional traffic (and, the opportunity to take some of your competitor’s traffic), an answer box strategy is a must have in any on-going technical SEO work.

Question and answer snippets

Question and answer schema is a Schema vocabulary intended to markup any FAQ content on your pages. As you’ll see from the example below, savvy technical SEOs have found a way to grab extra screen real estate in highly competitive search results:

This is an example taken from Compare the Market’s home insurance page. As you’ll see, the design is well thought out and seems perfectly authentic:

Underneath that design, is this code, based on the Schema.org Question vocabulary.

<!-- Question and Answer Schema Markup for Financial Services Product Page -->
<section itemscope="" itemprop="mainEntity" itemtype="http://schema.org/Question">
  <h3 itemprop="name">
    What does home insurance cover?
  </h3>

  <div itemprop="suggestedAnswer acceptedAnswer" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Answer">
    <div itemprop="text">
      <p>
        It will typically protect your home and your possessions inside it against theft and damage due to fire, flood, storms, subsidence, burst pipes and water leaks.
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</section>

A reasonable method to quickly mine data for these results would be to spend time with your product owners and try to find data on the most frequently asked questions by telephone and email. Some data in your keyword research may also highlight the most popular (and therefore most sensible) questions to feature on the page.

While there is some warning that this feature might actually reduce the clicks your page is receiving, I would argue that the right Q&A feature would improve the quality of the traffic arriving at the page, and therefore, the conversion rate of your site. These features also push your competitors down in the search results!

Site links/’Fraggles’

It’s possible, with a simple HTML navigational aid in your content, to create sitelinks in your search results snippets. They’re also known as ‘jump-to’ links or ‘fraggles’.

This feature helps your snippets stand out, and with some thought you can filter the clicks your listing receives and send that traffic to somewhere more appropriate on your webpage.

Here’s the how to from Builtvisible. By adding a simple process in your content development cycle it’s likely you’ll see lots of these little features starting to appear in your search results.

Review ratings

Review ratings have been available as rich snippet results for a very long time:

In this example from Hiscox, the product rating is displayed in a small box to the left of the screen.

The code (reduced to simplify) looks like this:

<!--Code snippet taken from Hiscox Public Liability Insurance page --> 
<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/InsuranceAgency">
  <span itemprop="name">Hiscox UK</span> 
  <span itemprop="image" content="https://www.hiscox.co.uk/themes/custom/hiscox/images/logos/logo--seo-microdata.png"></span> 
  <div itemscope="" itemprop="aggregateRating" itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
    <span itemprop="ratingValue" class="visually-hidden">4.7</span> 
    <div class="ratings"> [SVG removed] </div>
  </div> 
  <p> Rated 4.7 out of 5 for satisfied customer service </p> 
  <div content="670" itemprop="reviewCount"> 670 reviews </div> 
</div>

People Also Ask

People Also Ask (PAA) boxes have become an increasingly prevalent SERP feature since their introduction in 2016. In fact, recent data from Mozcast suggests that PAA features on around 30% of the queries they monitor.

Here’s an example of an expanded PAA result:

We devised a method to collect data from these features, with the following advice for anyone wishing to expand on PAA data as a growth tactic for their SEO traffic:

You can use the questions to build your own FAQ pages. We have used this tactic on several sites and found that FAQ sections become an invaluable resource for customers.

You can use this information to inform your on-page SEO strategy by adjusting the targeting of pages via page titles and headings, or even the creation of new pages.

Finally, appealing topics related to your target keywords can easily be found using PAA data which can help build out the content of your site and give additional information to users.

Further reading: SEO resources from Builtvisible

This is a brief set of recommendations in a vast array of options for your site.

For further reading, I recommend the following outstanding technical resources to continue your research:

• Google Analytics for PWAs: Tracking offline behaviour and more
• An SEO’s guide to using Robots Exclusion Protocol
• Site speed for in-house marketers: Creating a culture of performance
• Unlocking insights with Google Tag Manager
• Using Google Lighthouse to monitor webpage performance
• A Guide to Progressive Web Apps
• Mobile Search & SEO

Content marketing

Let’s start with another David vs. Goliath story by taking a closer look at challenger bank, Monzo.com.

Monzo – the content strategy of the future?

Rapidly progressing to around 10% of the search engine visibility of established bank NatWest.com, Monzo is a mobile app-only challenger to the traditional banking market.

Monzo “want to make the world a better place and change people’s lives through Monzo”.

They have enabled bank accounts for people who have no fixed, permanent address making it possible for homeless people to get into employment, and subsequently, accomodation. This is but one of the human interest stories associated with the brand.

As a new entrant to the market, the PR buzz around their product and mission is significant. But, they’re also employing an in-depth content and SEO strategy which is a clear example of industry best practice. The result, rapid growth to over 10% of the traditional banks in the UK, in a little under two years.

How can a new website (or an established one) experience such astronomical organic growth?

When the dust settles on the offline advertising, promotional and PR activity, some brands experience periods of stagnation. A brand that can attract links to its site is one that can demonstrate sustainable growth on organic channels.

Monzo is doing exactly this:

And, despite the relatively young age of the site, organic search is already its top traffic contributor:

Data source: nachoanalytics.com

Monzo’s positive presence on social media, combined with its affiliation with developer communities brings a diverse range of referral traffic to the site too:

Data source: nachoanalytics.com

The advantage of being small

Organisations like Monzo have an advantage over established banks.

They’re lightweight, agile and can deploy and test new marketing tactics quickly.

Naturally none of this is beyond the reach of any financial services company (and we help many organisations with the transformative projects required to execute better content marketing).

Breaking down an example of modern content marketing strategy

So what are the tactics at play in Monzo’s strategy?

Blog/content strategy

Monzo publishes actionable, helpful articles for their various target demographic groups on subjects like on money saving, house deposits, interviews with their customers, energy supplier issues, veganism, weddings and more.

The list goes on and it’s very clear that their blog content targets young, savvy and technologically aware consumers.

A really interesting and diverse range of subjects catering to young, savvy audiences.

Social media

Monzo uses its growing social media presence to promoting blog content, share trends, publicly support minority groups and events and give open and honest status updates. They also hold discussion threads.

A lot of the larger banks seem to struggle with the volume of negative comments from customers, which seems to (in the end) limit the bank’s willingness to really own their social media profiles. Monzo, rightly, tends to pre-empt any issues that might affect customer service by tweeting about service issues ahead of time. They’re also very open in tackling any public complaints quickly and responsively.

Social Good

Monzo’s No Barriers to Banking campaign creates an enormous amount of positive sentiment online for the bank.

Monzo will let you use a temporary address like a hostel or a shelter to open a new account which removes one of the biggest barriers for the two million people in the UK who don’t have a bank account and are in temporary accommodation or using part-time shelters.

They look at all aspects of bank account accessibility for their customers, and as part of their #NoBarriersToBanking campaign to make financial services more inclusive, they’re involved in all sorts of initiatives including providing an audio version of their terms and conditions.

Content marketing examples

While strategy is key, single tactical pieces of content can serve to evidence the demand for larger campaigns and can offer short term SEO wins by increasing the rate of link acquisition for your site.

Some tactical items of content are more suited to financial services than others. In the list below, we’ve picked some standout, recent examples of performant or award winning content, including a few of our own.

Policy Genius – Different types of fife insurance

Explainers are items of content that break down a complex topic. Those topics don’t have to be on particularly popular subjects to gain traction, either. In fact, the more technically complex, the better.

In Policy Genius’s Different types of life insurance (UK visitors click here), a simple article with navigational jump-to links to each type of life insurance is all that is needed.

As a result of the work, Policy Genius has achieved a position 5 ranking in Google search (US) for “life insurance policy”

I might add that the page itself has attracted links, but many more times fewer than a product page would need to achieve a similar ranking position.

That’s because of the level of completeness and depth of the article.

Well-written, authoritative articles on a subject are always easier to rank than thin product pages, and recent experience shows us that we can be highly competitive with almost no links if the content is right. I’ve written about using this technique to improve the performance of retail category page SEO before. A process that can be made even more powerful by identifying the gaps in your content before rewriting it.

MoneySense – a free financial education programme for 5-18s

NatWest’s flagship financial education programme Moneysense has been recognised by the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) in its annual digital awards.

MoneySense provides engaging and interactive digital content that supports teachers and parents. This innovative content hub provides resources to equip young people with the financial skills they need to manage money now and in adulthood.

This particular content hub has an extra layer of cleverness in its delivery because it targets specific demographics, rather than trying to be a ‘one blog fits all’ attempt. The hub works for the same reason that Monzo’s blog works – it’s very specific in its audience targeting.

NFU Mutual – Rural Crime Report

NFU Mutual’s rural crime report serves as part of a flagship resources section for the farming insurance industry.

Whitepapers and downloadable PDFs are an often overlooked tactic in organic marketing, but they work. This item won coverage in various press organisations, including The Guardian:

The beauty of investing in your content is the evergreen nature of the traffic that follows. As the flywheel turns, the flywheel find its own momentum. That’s because links improve your site’s overall visibility in search, which in turn means more people find your work.

If that work is good, it converts or people share what they find. Instead of the visit being over after you’ve paid for a click, the organic opportunity has just begun.

If you’d like to talk to Builtvisible about any aspect of its work for financial services companies in the UK and internationally, just get in touch via our contact form, and we’ll get back to you for an exploratory discussion.

Further reading: Content marketing resources from Builtvisible

• The Builtvisible complete guide to outreach
• How to care in content marketing, conscientiously
• An Introductory Guide To Content Marketing
• 21 free tools to develop your content marketing strategy
• What makes content great?
• How to develop a content marketing strategy for your SME
• Content strategy: Six ways to find your target audience
• A Guide to Successfully Promoting Content to Publishers
• Get buy-in for content – the in-house marketer’s guide