Many financial websites face a problem with their SEO. Namely, old blog posts which are cluttering up their site and possibly dragging down their search engine rankings.
What can investment managers, financial advisers and FOREX companies do about this situation? Of course, you could simply just scrap your blog completely. Yet this is typically a very harmful thing to do to your search engine rankings.
In this article, we’re going to show you why it is important to address old blog posts in financial SEO, and what you can do about it. As always, if you’d like to speak to us directly about any issues you may be encountering with your financial SEO, one of our friendly team would be delighted to speak with you.
Why address old blog posts?
For many financial websites, the sheer quantity of blog posts is sufficient to consider deleting or optimising some of them. Managing such a huge set of content can be hugely challenging and take up considerable staff time and resources.
It varies from website to website, but quite often scaling back your old blog posts can actually make it easier for Google to crawl your website. Indeed, if Google has to investigate over 2000 pages on your website in order to find 200 good ones to rank, then the search engine might not devote as much time to crawling your website in the future compared to a smaller website.
From a pure marketing standpoint, your website content is hugely important not just for your SEO – it also represents your brand. It shows your thinking to the world and gives you the chance to show thought leadership which establishes you more as an industry authority. By optimising and pruning your content so that you prioritise quality over quantity, you thus provide more compelling brand value to your target audience.
Deciding which posts to retain for your financial SEO
Of course, optimising your set of content does not necessarily mean just getting rid of blog posts which are older than, say, 2 years. After all, there might be some really valuable content in some of those posts which are causing your website to increase its search engine rankings.
It is therefore crucial that you conduct a thorough inventory of your blog posts, to give an accurate picture of all your content. Specify the URLs and metadata (e.g. meta titles and descriptions), as this information will come in useful later.
From here, you need to assess which posts are worth keeping for financial SEO purposes. So, to determine which will make the cut, you need to ask yourself at least 5 questions:
#1 Does it provide a benefit to the user?
If the post holds value to your target market (i.e. it addresses their pain points and answers their questions), then that’s a positive sign. Trouble-shooting walkthroughs and financial planning guides are quite handy in this respect and are often worth holding on to.
#2 Does it help you?
Is the post bringing in traffic to your financial website, and is it ranking significantly in the search engines? Is the post driving any conversions? Does it demonstrate thought leadership, therefore providing great brand value?
#3 What is the quality like?
When you read the content, does it come across as high-quality? Does it appear rushed or superficial?
#4 What’s the relevance?
If you are a financial planner, does your blog contain any articles about football? Unless you have a powerful reason to keep content on your website which is not relevant to your industry, then you should seriously consider scrapping it.
#5 Which problems is it causing?
Is any of the content causing issues with compliance? Is any of it causing more issues with your clients than it is solving (e.g. by making them needlessly worried about the markets)?
When you have your final list…
So, by now you should have identified which blog posts are worth holding on to. So what do you do next?
Broadly, here are some of your options in order to improve your financial SEO:
#1 Optimise
If your old article still has legs, then start by taking a look at how it can be improved with regards to its use of English. Are there any grammatical or spelling errors that need ironing out, for instance?
Furthermore, check that the content is focused on the topic at hand, and does not include lots of needless, irrelevant information which might be there just to “beef the article out a bit.”
Once the content has been improved, it’s time to add the technical aspects of your financial SEO to the piece. This process might include adding alt tags to images to your articles, for instance, or adding meta descriptions to those without one.
#2 Broaden / update
Some articles do not necessarily need improving in the manner outlined above. However, they could well do with an expansion of the topic they are addressing. For instance, perhaps you have an old article on final salary pension transfers which could be broadened out and brought up to date.
#3 Publicise
Since you have gone to all of this trouble in optimising your post, it’s worth promoting it to your target audience so that they see it and engage with it. This could be achieved through a short Google Ads display campaign for instance, or via sharing on your business social media profiles.
Where to go from here
From this point, you are going to want to keep an eye on how your blog improvements are performing. One huge indicator of success is witnessing an increase in organic search rankings and website traffic from the blog posts you worked on. Other metrics you might want to monitor include dwell time on the web page and conversions.
Whatever you choose to focus on, make sure you have realistic expectations. You are unlikely to see a dramatic change to your website rankings and performance overnight as a result of the hard work you have put in. However, as the months progress and as you monitor your web metrics, you should hopefully start to see an improvement.