SEO Marketing Guide
for Banks and Credit Unions
If you’re a bank or credit union, now is the time to invest in optimizing your website through search engine optimization (SEO). This SEO marketing guide serves as a starting point to help you pinpoint activities and maintenance needed to improve your organization’s online presence, specifically its organic Google ranking. Google is the most-used search engine in the world, owning nearly 93 percent of the market share. As a result, SEO should be a key element in your digital marketing plan to ensure prospective customers/members can easily get to your website through relevant Google searches, and so that your website also functions as a highly strategic new business development tool.
The following SEO marketing guide can help your bank or credit union rank higher than your competitors in relevant Google searches, and ultimately, increase revenue.
- Create a list of the keywords you want to rank for in Google. This should include the products and services you offer to the communities you serve. It’s a quick straightforward process and is something you should audit regularly, especially as you enhance your customer or member offerings.
The keyword list should help you develop SEO-enhanced content on the back- and front-end of your organization’s website, moving forward. Remember, if you don’t have a page dedicated to a product or service, it will never appear in search results, and is a major missed opportunity.
- Identify your top competitors. After you’ve determined the keywords in which you want to rank, create a list of your top competitors. This will provide insight into how you rank against your competitors for the products and services you offer to customers/members.
- Perform keyword research. Once you have your keyword and competitor lists finalized, perform keyword research to gauge how your organization ranks compared to its competitors. This will provide the data you need to develop a SEO roadmap for your website to strengthen your Google rankings over competitors.
- Conduct a technical SEO audit. The goal of a technical SEO audit is to identify vulnerabilities and opportunities to improve your digital presence to help increase brand awareness and attract new customers/members. A technical SEO audit will identify issues with page load speed, ways to improve meta writing (the content Google typically uses for the headline and description in search results), mobile errors, broken links, and more. All these items can impact your search rankings since Google is more likely to give priority to fast-loading, properly functioning websites.
- Follow SEO best practices. Back-end content works together with front-end content to help a website perform better in relevant Google searches. In addition to the content users see on the front-end of the website, or the pages people read and scroll through on your website, the back end also provides an opportunity to optimize SEO. The back-end of your website is what your website visitors do not see and include some of the items listed in the previous technical audit section.
Front-end page content is perhaps the most important element on the website since it is the primary source of information that a search engine will review when viewing and indexing the website overall. It is critical to provide quality, unique content throughout the website in various ways to gain an upper hand on industry competitors, and to improve overall website rankings, traffic, and ultimately revenue for your organization.
Is your bank or credit union seeking to outrank competitors in Google search results? Launching a new product or service and want to land in the top search results? You must step up your SEO marketing game.
At Chartwell Agency, we have a team of marketing experts that can help your bank or credit union leverage the power of a strong SEO marketing plan to help reach your business goals. For more about conducting a full SEO audit of your organization’s website and to learn more about SEO best practices, connect with us today!
