Is your website stuck in the search engines?
Are you blogging, but your rankings still seem to stay largely where they are?
It’s a common frustration for financial firms trying their hand at inbound finance marketing. You’re told that you need to be producing excellent content if you want to improve your SEO (search engine optimisation). Yet you do so, and nothing seems to happen.
What’s going on? To find out, lets take a step back for a moment and take a wider look around.
Is finance marketing simply about putting out great content? No. Broadly, if you want to improve your SEO you need great backlinks and great content.
We’ve covered financial content marketing in other posts. So here we’re going to break down what backlinks are, how they affect financial SEO, and how you can use them to improve your finance marketing.
What Are Backlinks?
Simply, a “backlink” is made when another website links back to yours.
More specifically, these are known as external backlinks. Internal backlinks are made when you link different pages on your website.
Why would anyone link to your site? Content. This is why, in finance marketing, content needs backlinks and backlinks need content. They are two sides of the same coin.
No one is going to want to link to your content unless it is high quality, and offers real value. You need to pour time, commitment and investment over it if this is going to happen.
So how do backlinks affect your financial firm’s SEO?
Google likes to push up websites in its search engine which are deemed “authoritative”, or “trustworthy”. If other, credible/quality websites are pointing links at you, then Google takes that as a positive signal about your website content.
If no one is pointing at you, then Google assumes your content isn’t in demand. It isn’t as trustworthy, say, as your competitor’s content which receives lots of decent backlinks.
There is, however, another implication for your finance marketing. If you have lots of low quality backlinks pointing at your website, then Google doesn’t like that either.
What is a “low quality” backlink? Basically, any website Google deems untrustworthy. You can find out which websites fall into this category using a tool like Open site Explorer.
How To Get Great Backlinks
So how do you go about building high quality backlinks to your content?
It possible to do yourself. However, it does take a lot of time and effort. You also need to know what you’re doing.
Here are a few ideas to get your finance marketing started with backlinks:
- Social media. Start sharing your content on your social profiles if you are not already. If you don’t have social media accounts, then you should secure them at the very least. Twitter and Facebook are usually the bare minimum.
- Business citations/listings. You need to be careful here. Don’t go adding your website to any old directory on the internet. However, if you can find trusted business listings, then Google actually considers this a valuable part of their local search algorithm. Check out niche-specific directories and also geo-specific directories as well.
- Guest posting. You shouldn’t be just looking to publish content on your own blog. For your finance marketing to build solid links, a great approach is to approach other publications and offer to post quality content on there. Again, be careful here. You should make sure that the website doesn’t simply accept content. There should be editorial control. Google will tend to trust these sites more. Moreover, the publication should be relevant to your service/industry and hold real value to the website’s visitors. Do not push out salesy material. Offer compelling insights to the readers, and establish yourself within that community over time as a thought leader and industry authority. This will require taking the time to build relationships with bloggers, so getting these kinds of backlinks isn’t easy. However, it’s well worth it in the long run.
- Backlink scraping. This approach involves finding an expired domain, scraping its backlinks, and then reaching out to the linkers to inform them they are linking to an expired resource. Let them know that you have an alternative, high-quality and up-to-date alternative resource (i.e. yours) that they can link to instead.
Phil Teale is the Sales & Marketing Manager at MarketingAdviser, an agency specialising in marketing for financial services – and especially for financial advisers. Along with our sister company, CreativeAdviser, we also provide bespoke website design, branding, graphic design and video production services to financial clients.
Contact us on 01923 232840 or email me: phil@creativeadviser.co.uk
