AI recommendation Optimisation (AIRO)

A significant shift in search marketing is the move from traditional SEO to AI recommendation optimisation (AIRO). It’s no longer just about getting onto Google’s first page; it’s about ensuring AI engines include your firm as a reference in their answers to queries.

AIRO involves optimising content so it aligns with the algorithms of AI-powered recommendation systems. This means creating high-quality, authoritative content that AI engines deem valuable. For wealth management firms, this could involve producing in-depth analyses, whitepapers, and expert commentary on financial trends and strategies.

Additionally, leveraging structured data and schema markup can help AI engines better understand and index your content. This can improve the chances of your firm being recommended in AI-driven search results.

Voice search: The new frontier in search marketing

Voice search is becoming a significant player in the search marketing arena. As devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple’s Siri become ubiquitous, the way people search for information is changing. For wealth management firms this means optimising content for voice search is important.

Voice search queries tend to be longer and more conversational than text searches. Therefore, structure content t answers specific, nuanced questions. For example, instead of focusing on keywords like “investment strategies,” wealth management firms can target natural language phrases such as “What are the best investment strategies for retirement?”

The rise of voice search also highlights the importance of local SEO. Many voice searches are location-specific, such as “financial advisor near me.” Ensuring your firm’s local listings are accurate and optimised can significantly enhance visibility in voice search results.

AI-powered chatbots: Revolutionising client interaction

AI-powered chatbots are another transformative trend in search marketing. These chatbots leverage artificial intelligence to provide real-time, personalised responses to client queries. For wealth management firms, AI chatbots can serve multiple purposes, from answering basic inquiries to providing complex financial advice.

The key to a successful chatbot is the integration of advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. This allows the chatbot to understand and respond to nuanced financial questions effectively. Furthermore, chatbots can gather valuable data on client preferences and behaviours, which can be used to refine marketing strategies and improve service delivery.

For instance, if a chatbot frequently receives questions about retirement planning, this insight can inform content creation and SEO strategies, ensuring your firm’s website ranks highly for related search terms.

Integrate search with other digital channels

Search marketing is no longer a standalone effort. Integrating search with other digital channels, such as social media, email marketing, and content marketing, makes for a cohesive strategy. This holistic approach ensures all channels work together to enhance visibility and engagement.

For wealth management firms, this means creating a unified message across all platforms. For example, search-optimised blog posts can be promoted on social media and included in email newsletters. This drives web traffic and reinforces your firm’s expertise and thought leadership.

The further integration of search with digital advertising, particularly with platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn, allows for highly targeted campaigns. These platforms provide sophisticated targeting options based on demographics, interests, and behaviours, helping firms reach high-net-worth individuals more effectively.

Staying ahead of the curve in search marketing

To stay ahead in this evolving landscape, wealth management firms can use a proactive approach to search marketing. This involves continuous learning and adopting emerging trends and technologies. Here are a few steps you can take:

Invest in advanced SEO and content strategies: Focus on long-tail keywords and natural language phrases that align with voice search queries. Produce high-quality, authoritative content that AI engines value.

Implement and optimise AI chatbots: Ensure your chatbots have advanced NLP capabilities and can provide personalised, real-time responses to client queries.

Integrate digital channels: Create a unified marketing strategy leveraging search, social media, email, and digital advertising to maximise visibility and engagement.

Adopt AIRO techniques: Optimise content for AI engines by using structured data and schema markup. Focus on creating content AI systems recognise as authoritative and valuable.

By embracing these trends, you can not only enhance your search marketing efforts but also deliver a superior client experience in an increasingly digital world.

The post Future trends in search marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What is organic search traffic?

Organic search traffic is the number of visitors that visit your website through search engine results. With 90.63% of pages getting no organic traffic on Google, gaining organic traffic isn’t a given – your finance brand must have a strategy in place.

Focusing on improving your organic traffic is pertinent as it’s the only type of channel that can produce long-term results. In other words, there’s no end date to the results you can gain from organic traffic as people are always searching, unlike a paid media campaign for example.

With the average organic click through rate (CTR) for web pages on the first page of Google’s results being 32%, it pays to have a good marketing strategy. Content marketing is the best way finance brands can improve their search engine rankings and organic search traffic.

What benchmarks should finance brands be aiming for?

According to Conductor, a benchmark for finance brands’ organic traffic should be around 33%. Most finance brands aren’t hitting these benchmarks for organic traffic.

Below are the current average organic search traffic results for specific finance industries and indicate a need for improvement across the board:

• Insurance 32.8%
• Banking 27%
• Asset managers 25.9%

So how can finance brands improve their organic search traffic?

How content can drive your organic traffic

Content marketing is your finance brand’s secret weapon for improving organic traffic. This is because content marketing can strengthen your SEO strategy by providing you with the opportunity to include more keywords, gain backlinks and enable reshares of your content.

With every keyword, backlink and reshare, your content becomes more valuable and improves your position in search engine rankings, improving your ability to gain organic search traffic.

When it comes to perfecting your content marketing strategy to improve organic traffic, it’s critical your finance brand’s content matches what your target audience is searching for. The number one way to create content that drives organic traffic is by keeping the end user front of mind at all stages of content development.

Tips and tricks

Content marketing can help gain you the top spot in search engine rankings. But how can you optimise your content to ensure this happens? Here are our top tips to ensuring your finance brand creates content that improves your organic search traffic:

• Utilise longtail keywords
• Find and remove non-performing content
• Maximise your social media content and have a strong presence
• Create engaging video content
• Don’t forget about metadata
• Optimise website performance such as improving the speed of your site and useability
• Create regular blog content
• Always use internal links and try to gain backlinks

At the end of the day, organic traffic should be a priority for finance brands. By improving your organic traffic, your finance brand can generate more visitors, nurture leads and convert clients.

The post The financial marketer’s guide to organic search traffic appeared first on Financial Marketer.

A simple bit of SEO hygiene that’s worth doing

Optimising your SEO strategy for Google is an intelligent marketing decision. With around 86% of the world using Google on their desktop computers, ensuring your content marketing appeals to Google’s algorithm is essential. A My Business listing is a simple way of optimising your SEO content strategy for Google specifically, strengthening your position in the search engine’s rankings. On average, 56% of actions on Google My Business listings are website visits, displaying how it effectively generates further traffic to your website. Put simply, people are using My Business listings to generate leads, and not having one could mean you miss out on a range of potential customers that otherwise wouldn’t click on your website.

A simple bit of SEO hygiene, a Google My Business listing helps to put your finance brand in the best position possible to be discovered organically. Google My Business is a database of business’s information that can be used to benefit people searching for certain products and services. Google uses this information to create its search engine rankings and to populate Google Maps results. Put simply, a My Business listing is a sign of your brand’s legitimacy that also acts as added insurance to prevent your finance brand getting pushed down the SERPs.

Tap into additional analytics

A Google My Business listing also offers additional insights into how your overall content marketing ecosystem is resonating with your target audience. A My Business listing can provide you with analytics on:

• views
• what keywords are getting you discovered
• engagement
• website clicks
• audience

By utilising this information, in conjunction with your advertising and website analytics, it can ultimately help you alter and strengthen your SEO content marketing strategy.

How Google My Business boosts your reputation

Google My Business listings aren’t just about ranking higher on Google search results, they also act as a simple marketing tool to strengthen your presence and reputation online. Customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they have a My Business listing. With the ability for people to leave reviews, see who you are and get to know your business before even clicking on your website, a Google My Business listing is an important extension of your organic SEO content marketing strategy.

People are using Google My Business listings every day as another method to find financial products or services. Compared to Google ads, which have a click through rate of 1.55%, Google My Business listings have a high average conversion rate of 5%. This makes it a simple step finance brands can take to boost their visibility, complementing the other core elements of your content and distribution strategy such as SEO content, social media distribution and paid advertising.

The post Why all finance brands need a Google My Business Listing appeared first on Financial Marketer.

While the report’s findings will be a highly informative read when published in April 2021, it’s not the subject of this article. Right now it prompts the question – how do you know if you’re making the finance content your audience wants and actually needs, as opposed to the content you think they want or can just simply get your hands on?

Identifying the content your audience wants

You can solve this issue with a content and search audit to verify where you’re meeting the content needs of your audience and where you have gaps as this is where the growth opportunities lie.

Likewise it will inform if you’ve overestimated the demand for certain content topics or formats and are wasting budget by over indexing this content. If you’ve noticed a drop in your search traffic be it gradual or sudden, there are steps you can take to diagnose what’s causing it. 

A good content and search audit will realign your content with your audience’s needs which drives audience growth and the effectiveness of your content.  

“We grapple with this issue on an ongoing basis. Our publication The Financial Marketer (which you are kindly reading now!) needs to deliver content best practices and cutting-edge techniques to finance marketers globally to help them stay at the top of their professional game,” says The Dubs head of content, Ale Middleton. 

“This means the topics and themes of interest to our audience changes regularly and we need to respond as it happens.” 

How to run a content and search audit

To undertake a content and search audit does require some rigour and work but it’s quite straightforward and achievable to deliver and you’ll reap the benefits in spades.

The Dubs social media director, Andrew Frith says any of the good search engine analytical tools like SEMrush, AHREFs, Moz Pro or Google Search Console are extremely useful in providing the data to understand your content program’s relevance to your audience.

“We use SEMrush Organic Research tool to understand our SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings and traffic volumes,” says Frith. 

“This will tell you if you’re creating content for a very small audience – which can be ok if it’s a valuable niche – or if you’re missing ranking for search terms that are much more popular with your target audience.”.

With this information you can do a few things:

1. Scale back creating content that only delivers minimal search traffic results.
2. Create more content for more popular search topics that generate a greater volume of relevant audience traffic to your content hub.This helps plug the gaps and makes your content program more useful to your audience.
3. Retrofit your existing content where needed to include these more popular search terms. This is like a car engine tune up for your content to better optimise it for search results.

The other SEMrush tool we use is the Keyword Magic Tool. This allows us to explore and discover other popular search terms on key topics or learn how to better capitalise on existing articles we’ve published.

Lastly, we use a content and search audit to benchmark our content program against our key competitors.

This way we can see where we have content gaps we need to plug compared to our competitors and ensure we match the relevance of our content to the needs of the audiences whose attention we’re competing for. 

At The Dubs SEO best practice is at the core of everything we do, get in touch. 

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

The post How to create finance content your audience wants appeared first on Financial Marketer.

 “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm.” Originally a quote from writer Damian Barr, it’s a sentiment that was requoted a number of times in 2020, and one that continues to hold relevance in 2021. As wealth and health inequalities continue to impact the global population during the everchanging COVID-19 pandemic, it couldn’t be a more accurate statement. Combined with the political chaos and housing shortage in the United States this first quarter, it’s safe to assume that the uncertainty from 2020 has bled into the new year. We’re all traveling troubled waters, and as financial service providers, it’s our duty to build bridges during these difficult times.  

Both financial brands and customers approached 2020 as a year of uncertainty and it seems we’ve begun 2021 on the same foot as well. With new COVID-19 strains emerging, the general population is feeling a continued lack of stability. Disjointed, uncertain and capricious are ways our customers may feel – during this time, it’s important to remember an economic recession affects minds before wallets.

Writing from the US, with all that is going on in our country this may seem like the worst time to talk about performance marketing – but it’s not. In fact, it’s probably the single most important time (especially during Q1) to review your performance marketing and what it’s achieving. Evaluating cost per lead, cost per application and cost per acquisition are all important KPIs for financial services marketing  – but where financial marketers should be focusing their attention in these unsettled times is finding the gaps where customers most need their support. Of benefit to customers and brands alike, there’s opportunity in providing customers with the support they need. Below are a few ways financial marketers can leverage technology to provide support and instill customers with confidence.

Big data AI // machine learning and big Data to build relationships

It’s no secret that technology is a bridge used to reach customers; however, tracking effective communication and conversion can be tricky. At NRL Mortgage, we utilise big data AI through Salesforce to reach customers based on their activity or lack thereof. We all report on data, such as opened emails, clicks and time spent on website, but big data goes deeper. Deep learning tracks customer behavior by anticipating customer needs and opportunities, resolving support issues before they happen and creating predictive one-on-one journeys personalised to each customer. 

quote]At NRL Mortgage, we utilise big data AI through Salesforce to reach customers based on their activity or lack thereof.[/quote] 

Lead scoring // making sense of your database

Chances are, your financial sales reps haven’t stopped picking up the phone during the pandemic. In fact, I bet they’re making valuable touches even more than before. Lead scoring is an effective model that has allowed our business to organise a list of customers that need to be “touched” based on different actions or previous interactions. Gone are the days of “calling lists” based on time spent in a database. With lead scoring, sales reps are able to make meaningful touches, based on different actions within a sales funnel, thus converting leads. 

Account based marketing // nets vs. spears

For financial service brands that are B2B focused, account based marketing (ABM) is an advantageous model compared to traditional sales funnels. The difference can be explained by fishing with a net (left) vs. fishing with a spear (right). ABM starts with targeting a specific account, target market or audience within a market. Using personalised campaigns to the specific market, ABM takes a holistic approach of marketing that extends beyond lead generation. The customised communication that focuses on specific attributes and needs of the target market are more productive in converting leads to customers. 

While we may not be in the same boat as clients, we’re all navigating the same storm and by utilising the right marketing tools and tactics you can help both your business and customers stay afloat. 

The post Building bridges over troubled waters appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What is page experience?

According to Google, page experience is “a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its information value.”. These ranking signals will combine the recently launched Core Web Vitals with existing user experience signals such as mobile-friendliness, safe browsing and HTTPS, aiming to improve how the overall page experience is then assessed.

Core Web Vitals are an update to the former speed report within Google Search Console. The report, now known as the ‘Core Web Vitals’ report, uses data from the new Web Vitals engine that Google released earlier this May. There are three new key metrics within this new-look report that will be critical to potential page experience success:

1. Largest contentful paint (LCP): The time it takes for a page’s main content to load. An ideal LCP measurement is 2.5 seconds or faster. The largest element is typically an image or video, or perhaps a large block-level text element. This is important because it tells the reader that the URL is actually loading.
2. First input delay (FID): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (when they clicked a link, tapped on a button, and so on) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction. This measurement is taken from whatever interactive element that the user first clicks. An ideal measurement is less than 100 seconds. This is important on pages where the user needs to do something because this is when the page has become interactive.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The amount that the page layout shifts during the loading phase. The score is rated from 0–1, where zero means no shifting and 1 means the most shifting. This is important because having pages elements shift while a user is trying to interact with it is a bad user experience.

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When will Google’s page experience update roll-out?

Google has categorically stated that given the world’s focus on dealing with the impact of Covid-19, this update will not be happening until 2021. They have also stated that they will provide at least six months notice prior to rolling out, with no immediate action needed. Rather, this announcement is being made to help provide webmasters, and financial marketers, with the tools and time they need to prepare for a world where ‘page experience’ is an accepted key ranking signal. 

This announcement is being made to help provide webmasters, and financial marketers, with the tools and time they need to prepare for a world where ‘page experience’ is an accepted key ranking signal.

What should financial marketers do to prepare for this future update?

We don’t yet know how significant the page experience update will be, but we do know we can start getting prepared. First step: get comfortable with both existing and upcoming critical ranking factors – from LCP and FID to mobile-friendliness and safe browsing. Now is the time to work with your developers (they will be your best friend!) to ensure your site provides the best user experience it can. Use the tools that Google is providing: explore the Core Web Vitals report in detail and ideally plan work to improve your site’s scores across all elements. Aside from optimising your page experience, don’t forget that content still remains king. Rudy Galfi, the product lead on the Google Search ecosystem team, confirmed that content will still be the most important factor within the algorithm. So while it’s wise to get ready for this update from a page experience perspective, make sure you also have your content foundations in place first.

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool. Or, for help building these foundations or improving your SEO, get in touch. 

The post Financial marketers get the heads up on Google’s page experience update appeared first on Financial Marketer.

On 14 January, Google officially announced they would be phasing third-party cookies out of the Chrome browser in the next two years, offering its Privacy Sandbox as an alternative. So, what does an online-world without them look like for finance marketers?

A brief history of third-party cookies

For 25 years, third-party tracking cookies have been used widely across the digital media landscape, from ad targeting and audience analytics to attribution and single sign-on. While many adtech and martech platforms still heavily depend on cookies, growing concerns over their impact on user privacy have led to increased crackdowns on their use. Apple launched its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in 2017, Firefox launched its Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) in September 2019 and with Google’s latest announcement, the writing is on the wall for third-party cookies. This is a fundamental change in online media and the future is uncertain for finance marketers who depend on the power of the cookie for their advertising channels.

A cookie-less future

As the Google update won’t fully roll out for another two years, the industry has time to figure out how it will handle a cookie-less future. As the world’s largest online advertising company with the world’s most popular browser, Chrome, Google’s updates have wide-reaching consequences for their rivals as well as their own business model.

The industry has time to figure out how it will handle a cookie-less future

Google’s Privacy Sandbox aims to replace cookies with five Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Each API would provide advertisers or brands with data based on anonymised signals (not cookies) from within the Chrome browser. In a blog post by Justin Schuh, Director of Chrome Engineering at Google, the company declared that it plans to work with key industry players to test how well its new cookie-less ad functions will perform; with its first trials on cookie-less conversion measurement by the end of 2020. Following this, they will then begin to trial ad personalisation.

Potential other cookie-less alternatives could also include:

• Contextual advertising
  Previously superseded by cookies, contextual targeting could make a comeback with the loss of cookie-based targeting. Contextual targeting uses keywords or contextual-based keyword advertising to find its audiences. This simpler keyword-based targeting could prove an effective advertising alternative; meaning high-quality, relevant content will also be a growing focus. This is something to bear in mind when planning a content strategy.
• User-based targeting
  Similar to what Facebook uses, tracking a unique user rather than a unique device could also become an increased area of focus in a cookie-less world. Brands that already own first-party data thanks to subscription models are likely to have an advantage here, and it may mean greater investment in creating own brand ecosystems that we have seen to date.

Next steps for finance marketers

At this stage, a finance marketer’s best tool is to wait and see, but stay up-to-date on developments. This is a huge industry change that will affect all digital media, and a lot is likely to change over the coming months. Google’s suggested Privacy Sandbox is yet to be tested, and it remains to be seen how successful an alternative it could prove. Finance marketers should stay aware of what the alternatives are, what direction the industry is moving in and whether strategies like increasing first-party data should become a greater focus for their marketing strategy.

As the content marketing agency for the financial sector, at The Dubs we understand the nuances financial marketers face in their day-to-day roles and the news and tactics that make a difference in achieving content marketing success. Learn more about what we do.

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The post What Google’s third-party cookie phase out means for finance marketers appeared first on Financial Marketer.

More than half of all searches (50.33%) on Google ended without a click on an organic or paid search result.

Google search results pages have always been considered a stepping stone for a user, designed to help them find the best answer from the most relevant final destination. But as Google continues to optimise and evolve its results, more searches than ever are ending on search results pages with no need to find the answer on a website. A study by Sparktoro in August 2019 found that more than half of all searches (50.33%) on Google ended without a click on an organic or paid search result.

How have search results pages changed?

Mobile searches have long since overtaken desktop searches in a majority of countries and it’s here in this hard-earned real estate that the fight for brand visibility is toughest. Over 60% of all mobile searches end without a click, rising steadily since 2015. A standard search results page (SERP) could now easily include a wide variety of results that aren’t the traditional organic result, including Google Ads, Related Searches, Maps, Video & Image results, the Featured Snippet, Events, Podcasts, X results, a Knowledge Graph, the People Also Ask section and a whole host more.

Take a search like ‘mobile payments’, it’s a generic ‘short-tail’ search term that could be used by a consumer or a business at the beginning of their research. They want to know more about how mobile payments work before they look at the ‘best mobile payment apps’, potentially seek out a review of a particular app and so forth as they become more familiar with the topic.

You can see in the screenshot above that the SERP is already looking quite full, there’s a ‘Knowledge Graph’, a ‘Google Ad’, a ‘Featured Snippet’, a ‘People Also Ask’ box and some ‘News’ results. Square’s ‘top result’ is far down the page despite being in first position, and there is a lot of potential distraction for the user. The chances of that top result getting a click is relatively low, so finding opportunities to take advantage of the rest of the SERP is crucial to success.

Expand on the ‘People Also Ask’ box and you can see that Square is doing just that. Thanks to its optimised content, it is not only included as one of the ‘Also ask’ answers it’s listed as one of the best mobile payment apps on a third party site. There may be no click to site from this initial search but the searcher has already become more familiar with Square and knows the brand is highly regarded.

How can Finance brands win with zero-click searches?

The good news is a zero-click search doesn’t mean zero opportunity for your finance brands’ content to get noticed. The bad news is that it can make it harder to measure. Like outdoor, print or radio advertising, these zero-click searches are more akin to a brand awareness campaign and can be tough to track if only seen within Google. Even if a searcher does click on a ‘Featured Snippet’, for example, it’s not currently possible to track in analytics if that click came from a standard result or from a ‘Featured Snippet’. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t matter. What is certain is that Google will only continue to evolve, and that means ‘on-SERP SEO’ will grow too. So what should a forward-thinking finance brand do to make sure they don’t lose out? We’ve already discussed optimising for the ‘Featured Snippet’, enriching your site with schema and mastering your SEO content gap analysis which will all help your brand shine within the SERPs. The next step is simply to include an awareness of zero-click searches in your day-to-day content marketing strategy.

• Get to know your SERPs – what type of ‘other’ results usually show for your relevant search terms? Is your site as optimised as it can be for that ‘Featured Snippet’?
• Broaden your horizons – a win doesn’t always have to be a click to your website. Who else is showing in the SERP and can your brand feature through them?
• Expand your content types – Podcasts, X and YouTube all get great airtime in SERPS, take advantage of it.

If you haven’t diversified your content types before, this is yet another reason to jump in. SEO is a complicated beast, and Google moves the goalposts almost daily, but there’s still plenty of ground to be gained for the wiley financial marketer. We can help, get in touch.

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

Related articles

• Where to start with technical SEO
• SEO trends to watch in 2019
• The SEO tools every finance marketer needs

The post Why zero-click searches aren’t a lost opportunity for finance brands appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Should finance brands care about Featured Snippets?

Featured Snippets are enhanced organic search results that can take the form of paragraphs, lists or tables, all of which point through to the relevant ranking website. But are they important for finance brands? According to an insightful infographic produced by SEO tool, Searchmetrics, the answer is a resounding yes.

Key takeaways include:

• Featured Snippets show up most frequently in the health and finance industries. 18% of health and 27% of finance keywords return a Featured Snippet so there is a huge opportunity for finance brands to optimise.
• Finance websites get an average of 2,622 clicks to their websites from Featured Snippets per month.
• If you set up an AdWords campaign for finance keywords that return a Featured Snippet, then the average Cost-per-Click would be $5.17. This is a higher CPC than in other industries analysed and shows there’s much greater potential to save costs by pursuing a Featured Snippets spot.
• Aside from key informational sites like Wikipedia and Investopedia, brands such as Nerdwallet and Wells Fargo are excelling at Featured Snippets, winning 4.7% and 2.8% of total Featured Snippets respectively.

How to optimise finance content for Featured Snippets

1. Find out where your snippet opportunities lie
   A great place to start is to review the relevant keyphrases that are likely to have Featured Snippets you can optimise for. You can do this in a number of ways:
   – Do a lot of Googling and get to know the landscape!
   – Look at your existing top keywords in analytics and review if they, or related keyphrases, have Featured Snippets.
   – Use a tool like SerpStat to highlight keyphrases that do and don’t have a Featured Snippet.
   
2. Know your Schema
   Great for both Featured Snippet optimisation AND voice search, getting comfortable with marking up your site’s content with schema will only become increasingly important in the coming years for finance brands.
3. Keep your answers clear and concise
   According to analysis by E-consultancy, Featured Snippets are short and sweet with the optimum number of words sitting between 45 and 53. Although this varies significantly between industries, it’s worth remembering that your reader wants a clear and concise answer; and this is what Google wants to reflect. Remember to also use clear headings and subheadings to help break up your content.
   
4. Get your SEO basics right
   According to an Ahrefs study, it is 99.58% positive that Google only shows Featured Snippets for pages that already rank in the top 10. So don’t expect to get that position zero if you’re not already working on your SEO basics. Our 7 SEO best practice tips are a good place to start to ensure you have established the right foundations.

The search engine results pages are a constantly changing landscape, but Featured Snippets in all their variations look set to stay. Optimising your finance content for Featured Snippets could help future proof and grow your brand, so it’s worth experimenting to see what results you can achieve.

Need help in your hunt for position zero? We can help your finance brand establish a best-practice SEO strategy that will help your brand get found, get in touch.

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

Related articles

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Image credit: E-Consultancy

The post How finance marketers can win the ‘Featured Snippet’ appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What is Schema?

Over the last decade, the complexity of Google’s search results pages has continually evolved – from ads to images, videos, maps, shopping and more recently additional schema-driven information such as ratings, featured ‘snippets’, lists and tables.

Schema.org is a markup language that you can add to your web pages to help search engines better understand your content and its relevance to potential search queries. It is a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help webmasters provide better information about their sites to the search engines. Adding schema markup to your site has the added benefit of potentially improving visibility in search engines results by enhancing the way your results are displayed.

Schema.org is a markup language that you can add to your web pages to help search engines better understand your content and its relevance to potential search queries.

Some schema you may already be familiar with, such as ratings and reviews, but there are many more different ways in which schema can show within the search results; and a whole section dedicated to finance-specific schema for banks and financial institutions. You can choose what schema markup is most relevant to the type of content you have on your site and it will be recognised by all the major search engines.

Below is an example of what a schema snippet describing an Investment Fund would look like, using the suggestions from schema.org. The fund is identified by a name and a description. The details of the typical investment can be marked up with specifics such as “minAmount”, “maxAmount” and “interestRate”. This then provides a lot more specific information to the search engines, increasing visibility in search results.

Why does Schema matter?

The more information search engines have from how you mark up your content with schema, the more likely they are to use your content in their ‘snippets’. Should this happen, it can lead to your content sitting far higher on the page than it would normally rank.

Content with schema markup provides greater value to the user by showing at a glance whether your content addresses their needs; and whether to click through or not. As a bonus, voice-enabled assistants generally rely on schema to help them find the most relevant answers, so content with schema is far more likely to be returned in a voice search; a key future-proofing opportunity for your brand. Some examples of snippets include:

The Featured Snippet Paragraph

The Featured Snippet Table

The ‘People also ask’ Snippet

How can finance brands use Schema?

Although it can look overwhelming, schema is relatively easy to implement. There are a number of tools out there that you can use to simplify the process; although you will need to work with a developer to update your site. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool will help generate your schema code based on your existing content; while Google’s Structured Data Testing tool can be used to check that your schema is implemented correctly.

The use of schema will help search engines better understand your content, which could lead to more information being shared in search results, the potential for higher rankings and inclusion in voice search results. The effort is certainly worth the reward.

We know SEO and what it takes to boost your ranking. For help reviewing your SEO strategy and improving your technical SEO, get in touch.

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

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