Fintech SEO: Ultimate Guide for 2025

Fintech SEO is the act of executing a comprehensive SEO campaign for financial services companies that help the website rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages). The primary objective of fintech SEO is to attract ideal customer personas (ICPs) that match with the financial service offerings to generate leads, sign ups, SQLs, or other MQL metrics depending on the type of fintech company it is. In short, the digital marketing strategy is aimed at driving revenue for fintech companies.

According to Statista, “There were approximately 13,100 fintechs in the Americas, almost 1,500 more than a year before that.” That’s quite the amount of companies to have to compete with. Making fintech SEO more important than ever to get visibility and market share for your financial services company.

Key Takeaways

• Fintech SEO is the act of improving a website for accuracy, crawlability, and on-page performance to help a domain's pages rank higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages) by providing a helpful and pleasant user experience (UX) for visitors.
• The best fintech SEO is a combination of creating persona pages or transactional service pages that target very specific service lines, personas, or geographies. And ensuring those pages are highly optimized to be extremely helpful for the User, addressing key questions that they might have.
• A comprehensive fintech SEO campaign usually includes customer research, technical SEO audits, and the creation of transactional pages, informational pages, and the building of backlinks to help gain overall trust and authority.

Top Challenges with Fintech SEO

Here are some of the top challenges with fintech SEO:

1.  Compliance Challenges

• Advertising Regulations: Financial services are heavily regulated, and fintech companies can sometimes be limited by having to comply with legal requirements. Specifically, crypto fintech companies may be highly regulated. This relies on SEO more, putting more pressure on the need to grow using organic search strategies.
• Geo-Specific Compliance Issues: Different countries or states have unique regulations affecting how content should be optimized and presented to the User.

2. Building Trust and Authority

• YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) in Google's Index: Google places stringent ranking standards on sites dealing with finance as they directly impact users’ financial health. Learn more about YMYL.
• Establishing and Earning E-E-A-T: Earning EATis essential but challenging for newer fintech companies.
• Sensitive User Skepticism: Many users are concerned with new fintech products, since it deals with money, requiring SEO to prioritize transparent and trustworthy content.

3. Highly Competitive Keywords

• Dominance of Bigger Players: Traditional financial institutions and larger fintech companies often monopolize high-traffic keywords.
• Cost of PPC: Competitive niches often lead to exorbitant costs for paid ads, making organic SEO even more critical.
• Long-Tail Keyword Challenges: Identifying and ranking for very specific keywords terms that resonate with specific audiences can be challenges.

4. Complex User and Buyer Journeys

• Multi-Touchpoint Conversion Pathways: Fintech customers often require several interactions across platforms, complicating tracking and SEO targeting.
• Diverse User Intent: Search intent for financial services spans informational, navigational, and transactional queries, requiring precise content strategies.
• B2B and B2C Hybrid Models: Many fintech companies cater to both businesses and end consumers, necessitating different SEO approaches for each audience.

5. Content Production Challenges

• Simplifying Complex Topics: Translating technical financial concepts into digestible and helpful content can require special copywriters.
• Content Diversity: Balancing informational content (e.g., blogs and guides) with product-driven content that converts users can be a challenge.

6. Backlink Acquisition Challenges

• Limited Linkable Assets: Fintech websites often lack engaging content like research reports, infographics, or interactive tools that naturally attract backlinks.
• High Editorial Standards: High-authority finance-related publishes may require rigorous content quality and relevance for link-building guest posting and distribution.
• Generally Low Niche Relevant Sites: Securing backlinks from authoritative and niche-relevant sources can be challenging in the fintech space due to their limited quantity.

7. Local SEO Challenges

• Service Localization: Many fintech companies target users in certain geographies can make executing SEO campaigns challenging.
• GMB and GEO Challenges: Although fintech services are often digital, companies may need to optimize pages or the homepage for "near me" searches and local queries.

8. Adapting to Algorithm Changes

• Core Updates Impact: Google’s core algorithm updates can disproportionately affect fintech sites due to their focus on YMYL content.
• Content Refresh Needs: Regular updates to keep financial advice and product details current are necessary but can be highly resource-intensive.
• SERP Feature Dominance: Competing with answer boxes, AI overviews, People Also Ask sections, and featured snippets requires fine-tuned content optimization.

9. Industry Trends and Changing User Behavior

• Evolving Search Behavior: Shifts toward voice search, mobile queries, and AI-driven interactions require constant adaptation.
• Incorporating Emerging Topics: Fintech companies must quickly respond to trends like cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, and BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) to remain relevant.

Fintech SEO Strategy (Checklist)

Here is the fintech SEO strategy that we’re going to cover in our guide:

Foundational Fintech SEO Setup

Approaching your fintech SEO strategy from a keyword research level and readiness of your website to start attracting your ideal customer persona (ICP):

• Keyword Researchsome text
  • Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner to identify fintech-related keywords.
  • Focus on long-tail keywords like “best personal finance apps” or “how to choose a robo-advisor.”
  • Research competitor keywords for inspiration.
  • Consider user intent of each query (informational, navigational, transactional).
  • Identify local SEO opportunities (e.g., "financial services near me").
• Technical SEOsome text
  • Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive.
  • Optimize page speed (use Google PageSpeed Insights).
  • Implement SSL for secure HTTPS connections.
  • Create and submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
  • Ensure proper schema markup for financial services (e.g., FAQs, reviews).
  • Fix broken links and redirect chains.
• Website Structuresome text
  • Use a logical URL structure: domain.com/service-type/topic.
  • Implement clear navigation and internal linking.
  • Organize content by themes: personal finance, credit cards, loans, etc.

Looking to hire a fintech SEO agency? Read our guide on the top fintech SEO agencies in the market and how they can help your fintech company grow.

Fintech Content Strategy

The use of content marketing to build authority for your domain (using topical authority strategies) as well as informational content to help your visitors, which gains trust in your brand or offering:

• Educational Contentsome text
  • Publish guides on topics like budgeting, investing, or loans.
  • Use visuals like infographics to explain complex financial concepts.
  • Leverage blog articles targeting "how-to" and "what-is" queries.
• Authority Contentsome text
  • Publish whitepapers, eBooks, or case studies on industry trends.
  • Conduct original research or surveys relevant to fintech.
  • Offer financial calculators or tools to engage users.
• Localized Contentsome text
  • Write blog posts tailored to specific regions (e.g., "Best credit cards for Californians").
  • Add Google My Business for local visibility.
  • Target geo-specific keywords and local backlinks.
• Content Updatessome text
  • Regularly refresh outdated statistics or trends in older articles.
  • Add new internal links when publishing fresh content.

Related: SEO for Startups (Guide)

Fintech On-Page Optimization

Looking at how your pages are presented to ensure that they’re well optimized for search engines and ranking factors in Google:

• Optimize meta titles and descriptions with primary keywords.
• Use H1 tags for the main topic and H2/H3 tags for subtopics.
• Include keywords naturally in the content, avoiding overstuffing.
• Optimize images with alt text and compress images for faster load times (optimizing first contentful paint).
• Use structured data for financial products and services.

Related: On-Page Factors for Google (Guide)

Fintech Off-Page SEO

The act of attracting high-profile backlinks and references of your brand across the web to increase your overall authority and brand mentions (part of E-E-A-T):

• Backlink Buildingsome text
  • Collaborate with niche industry blogs for guest posts.
  • Build partnerships with fintech influencers or affiliate programs.
  • Submit your site to fintech-specific directories and forums.
  • Conduct PR campaigns to earn links from news sites or industry blogs.
• Social Signalssome text
  • Share blog posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and relevant fintech forums.
  • Encourage user engagement on social media platforms.
  • Promote user-generated content or testimonials.

Local Fintech Services SEO

Developing key pages that attract your ideal customer persona (ICP) that may be looking for financial services on a local level (by geography — city, state, or internationally):

• Claim and optimize Google My Business profile.
• Ensure consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information across directories.
• Respond to user reviews (positive and negative) professionally.
• Use local schema markup for branch locations.

User Experience (UX) Optimization

Ensuring your pages provide a good User Experience so that your visitors don’t return back to Google (causing negative User signals, which could penalize a domain):

• Ensure clear CTAs (Call-to-Action) on all pages (e.g., “Get a Free Quote”).
• Make navigation seamless and reduce clutter.
• Use trust signals like client logos, awards, and security badges.
• Include a FAQ section for quick answers to common queries.

Analytics and Monitoring

Ensuring that you have the correct fintech SEO KPIs or metrics tracked as part of your overall SEO campaign (attributing success to your organic search campaign):

• Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console for performance tracking.
• Monitor keyword rankings with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
• Analyze user behavior to improve conversion funnels.
• Set up goal tracking for leads, downloads, or signups.

E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)

The development and display of ensuring that Users recognize your content is accurate, fact-checked, and validated by licensed finance professionals:

• Display credentials of financial advisors or contributors.
• Ensure accurate and well-cited content.
• Build out an "About Us" page detailing company expertise.
• Highlight client testimonials, awards, or case studies.

Compliance and Security

Ensuring that your website is following compliance related to your financial services offerings:

• Adhere to financial regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) in all SEO content.
• Include disclaimers and compliance-related messaging.
• Ensure secure handling of user data and display privacy policies.

Emerging Fintech SEO Trends

Highlighting fintech SEO trends that attract backlinks, build trust, and establish your financial services brand as a trusted source in your space:

• Optimize for voice search with conversational queries.
• Utilize AI tools for predictive SEO and content recommendations.
• Focus on video SEO with educational content on YouTube or TikTok.
• Consider fintech podcast SEO with transcripts and topic tagging.

Want to skip this and hire the professionals? Hire us to help with your fintech SEO strategy.

Example Fintech SEO Strategy — Plaid (National)

Taking a look at how successful fintech companies are using SEO to acquire customers can be a great way to learn how these strategies work. In this example, we’re going to go over how Plaid. According to Plaid’s business profile, they are “an American financial services company based in San Francisco, California. The company builds a data transfer network that powers fintech and digital finance products.”

Plaid is primarily attracting engineers, developers, and other leadership team members at technology companies to utilize their banking APIs. For this example, we’re going to consider these three personas their primary audience and customer profile.

Architecture and Navigation (Internal Linking)

Plaid does a fantastic job of using a large global navigation to provide internal linking to all of their key pages. This robust navigation creates a connectivity and relationship of topically relevant pages (and keywords) that display authority back to Google’s machines.

Image:

Solutions Pages

Plaid has more of a B2B style SEO strategy. In particular, enterprise and B2B SEO differs from consumer SEO in that keyword research may not be the best way to measure whether your customers will be looking for what you offer.

A number of solution pages are targeting use cases like wealth management, lending, and crypto. Creating these individual persona pages is a great way to attract middle-of-funnel shoppers who know exactly what type of business they have and what type of pain point or business need they’re trying to solve.

Content Marketing

Plaid has done a great job of thinking holistically about their SEO campaign. Google, as of late, has started to rank far more informational content (guides) than it has service pages or solutions pages. The reason: more and more users have put in questions into Google expecting to get answers, informational content usually addresses these questions better than solutions pages.

Top-of-Funnel Content

Top-of-funnel content (like this “What is an open banking API?” blog post) of this kind usually has lower conversion rates. However, they can be strong drivers of topical authority.

Middle-of-Funnel Content

The middle-of-funnel content can be easier to see since it includes business pain points that are noticeable in the search query themselves. Page like this can help to address those questions and attract in-market customers.

Bottom-of-Funnel Content

Finally, bottom-of-funnel content addresses specific questions about the brand and the service to help the user who is already aware of their pain point, need, and are aware of the brand they want to choose.

Example Fintech SEO Strategy — John Griffin CPA (Local)

Here’s an example of a local fintech SEO strategy. In this example, this is a CPA who is trying to drive leads to their accounting services. Here’s what we like about the execution:

Homepage Targeting Our Geography

It’s good to see the homepage including language around the geography. For example, the homepage is highly optimized to “Chicago CPA” keywords. This can help to connect the largest keyword opportunity to the following pages we’ll speak about (that drive authority).

Service Pages

Industry pages can be a great way to attract more B2B customers. In the example of John Griffin, they created a number of pages around payroll services, outsourced accounting, and other key pages that directly align with how someone might be shopping for what they offer.

Industry pages

At times, sometimes searchers are looking for a specific financial service provider that has experience in a particular space. Real estate, technology, and construction, as John Griffin has it, is a great way to attract those searchers that are looking up things like “real estate accountant” in Google.

How to Execute a Comprehensive Fintech SEO Campaign

Here’s what you should do when it comes to executing a comprehensive fintech SEO strategy:

Step 1: Research Your Customer

• Define your target audience and their pain points.
• Identify their demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics.
• Use tools like surveys, customer interviews, and analytics to gather insights.
• Map out customer personas to guide content and campaign strategies.

Step 2: Perform a Technical SEO Audit

• Check website speed and ensure mobile responsiveness.
• Fix broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors.
• Optimize site architecture for seamless navigation and indexing.
• Implement schema markup for financial services to enhance SERP visibility.

Step 3: Understand How They Shop For Your Services

• Research the buyer’s journey specific to fintech offerings.
• Analyze search intent behind target keywords (informational, transactional, etc.).
• Leverage tools like Google Analytics and heatmaps to track behavior patterns.
• Monitor competitors’ strategies for insight into user expectations.

Step 4: Create Targeted Pages

• Build dedicated landing pages for each service or solution you offer.
• Use high-converting CTAs and optimized headlines.
• Implement localized SEO tactics to reach regional audiences.
• Optimize meta descriptions and headers with primary and secondary keywords.

Step 5: Create Informational Content

• Publish blogs, guides, and FAQs addressing common fintech queries.
• Incorporate data-driven insights and industry trends to build authority.
• Use visual content like infographics and videos to simplify complex concepts.
• Promote content through email newsletters and social media channels.

Step 1: Research Your Customer

If you’re a brand new fintech startup you may not have as much of an opportunity to perform customer research as more established brands. However, startups can utilize unique queries within Google Search Console to get a better idea of who your customers are and how they might be finding your existing website.

However, performing customer research to better understand who they are, the places they frequent, and how they ended up being a customer can be extremely helpful in framing a picture of your SEO campaign.

The ultimate goal of your campaign is to generate MQLs, SQLs, and ultimately, revenue. However, keyword research can sometimes take you away from where your customers are. In addition, it can sometimes provide false positives. For example, attracting traffic but not attracting leads or customers (usually the primary reason that VP of Marketing or CMOs don’t want to invest in SEO).

Here’s some things you can do:

1. Draft customer research questions to better learn about who your customers are.
2. Directly connect with the customer about how they found you, if they used Google, and what they may have been looking for prior to finding you.
3. Create a spreadsheet with a matrix of some of these common themes.

Step 2: Perform a Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audits can be kept quite simple. In general, the objective of a technical SEO audit should be to determine the effectiveness of how well search engines crawlers can access pages.

Using tools like ScreamingFrog and Google Search Console can be pivotal in painting a clear picture of how search engines (machines) are seeing your website. ScreamingFrog does a great job of highlighting issues, while Google Search Console typically gives you warnings that will need investigations to better understand if they’re larger issues.

Here are some of the things we want to look for:

1. Issues with our robots.txt file.
2. Pages that are being classified as no-index but shouldn’t be.
3. Warnings and issues under the “Pages” tab in Google Search Console.
4. Lack of pages being indexed that are critical (may indicate a poor internal linking strategy).
5. Look for slow page speeds through the core vitals and page experience tab which could indicate a poor User Experience (UX) on the website.

Step 3: Understand How They Shop For Your Services

Whenever we think about SEO, we should understand the general User journey that takes place. In general, it’s the same as any other kind of content marketing strategy. That’s the following journey:

Unaware

The unaware stage is when an enterprise prospect is completely unaware that they have a business problem that’s worthy of solving. For example, someone researching financial services APIs or researching how to connect to banks through developer tools, if we’re presuming the Plaid example, once more.

Related: How to Measure SaaS Content Marketing (Guide)

Problem Aware

The core part of the content marketing strategy should be to take our unaware prospects and to make them aware. The problem aware customer then knows what they’re shopping for. For example, the unaware customer wants to know how to solve a problem, the problem aware customer now knows how to classify or identify that problem. In the Plaid API example, we could presume that someone should now be looking for “Financial Service APIs.”

Solution Aware

Shared along with the problem aware stage of our prospect, the solution aware prospect should start to realize that there is a solution out there. That means they are now researching multiple providers, looking into what options are available, potentially researching pricing, and more.

Related: MQLs vs SQLs

Product/Company Aware

A key part of the product aware or company aware prospect is that they become more familiar with our brand name. The solution aware customer will start to shop and as a result, may be looking for specific insights about qualifying the product or service. This is where “About us” pages can be key, pricing pages, and other pages that don’t match with any particular keyword, however, help with funnel conversion when we bring in the customer from organic search.

Step 4: Create Targeted Pages

Creating targeted solution pages can be a critical way of attracting in-market buyers who are in the problem aware or solution aware stage. We could presume that they are keywords like the following:

• Wealth Manager in Chicago
• CPA in Northwest Chicago
• Business CPA Chicago
• Banking API for Developers
• Crypto API for Developers

We can see through these types of keywords that the variants that exist within them help us identify the type of page that we should create. For example, the variants in these keywords are things like [persona] or [city/state].

Targeted pages like this, we could call them persona or location pages, are often under the page intent type of service or transactional page intent types. These are usually executed as a page that highlights multiple benefits and other specific functionality based on the search.

Here is an example:

Image:

Best practices for creating these types of pages:

1. Focus on driving a helpful page (don’t try to over optimize for SEO).
2. Include your keyword in the page title, meta description, and H1.
3. Create multiple pages that are highly targeted and speak to your core customer.
4. Highlight your competitive features, pricing, and more.
5. Ensure that you have a comprehensive internal linking strategy that supports search engine crawlers recognizing that these pages should get indexed.

Step 5: Create Informational Content

Informational content, like guides, can be lower converting, however, can be great ways to display to Google that we’re a trusted source. One of the misconceptions about topical authority and E-E-A-T is that it's primarily displayed through the authors of pages or a website. However, Google uses a much more comprehensive method to measure trust and authority.

The method: analyzing pages across an entire domain for information gain scoring (or a P-value) to determine how well a website reflects its own understanding of the information graph against that particular topic. This is where entities and other more modern SEO methods are starting to become far more effective.

For example, if we’re a CPA, talking about taxes and tax rules would be highly applicable to show our knowledge of our subject matter. However, speaking about protein powder would be extremely far away. Knowing what topics to discuss and publish can be critical.

Informational keywords could be something like the following:

1. What is a CPA?
2. How do CPAs work?
3. Tax Implications of Selling a Home
4. [State] Tax Laws

These types of queries would be highly applicable to use if we were a CPA firm. As a result of writing these pages in a comprehensive and knowledgeable way, Google’s machines better understand what our website is about and how well we know the subject.

Here’s our recommendation on what to do:

1. Don’t neglect top-of-funnel content or veer away from it as it can be extremely helpful in ranking some of your “money pages” or solutions pages (from the above) that can attract the most leads.
2. Ensure that you’re writing content that’s highly relevant to your service line or business. And generate a topical authority map where you know what types of topics you should discuss to generate authority and how they’re going to help in your overall fintech SEO strategy.
3. Take time to ensure your written informational content is high quality. Analyze the other competitors for the keywords you’re going after and determine: what they’re talking about, what they’re not talking about, and how helpful the page is for the User (the way it’s structured and how quickly it addresses key questions a User might have when they visit the page).

Fintech SEO Common Questions

Here are common questions and answers about Fintech SEO:

Why is SEO important for fintech companies?

SEO helps fintech companies establish credibility, reach their target audience, and compete in a highly competitive digital landscape (noted by our statistic of more than 14,000 fintech companies being in the market as of 2024). It also drives organic traffic and reduces reliance on paid advertising, which can be extremely costly for financial services due to their high CPC (cost per click).

How long does it take to see results from fintech SEO?

Results can be highly dependent on how well the SEO strategy has been planned and what types of opportunities exist in the SERPs. However, it can take around 3 to 6 months to show noticeable improvements in rankings, depending on competition, existing site health, and the effectiveness of the SEO strategy.

What’s the best fintech SEO strategy?

The best fintech SEO strategy is identifying questions that Users have that are not being addressed by any competitor in the SERPs. As a result, this would show us that there is quite literally a content gap in the market to help Google surface our page to qualified Users and help them get answers to the questions that they have. In addition, combining this with a topical authority approach can be a great way to get traction very quickly.

How can a fintech company compete with established players in search rankings?

Focus on niche services or use cases. This will result in the creation of high-quality content or transactional pages targeting underserved search queries, and optimize for long-tail keywords. For example, drilling down into specific geographies or specialities in your financial services space can be a great way to start being specific about your approach. Remember, keyword search volume may not be the best indicator of whether or not you should create a page.

Should fintech companies invest in paid search alongside SEO?

While SEO provides long-term benefits over time, paid search can complement it by targeting high-intent queries for immediate results. An integrated approach often works best. Especially in building new brand awareness up for startup companies that don’t have any recognition in the market, yet.

How should fintech companies approach keyword research?

The best method is to focus on high-intent keywords that are highly related to your services. There could be a number of keyword themes to go after depending on who you offer your services to, what those services are, and where you might offer them. These would be keywords such as "best payment gateway for small businesses" or "how to choose a robo-advisor."