You may be wondering if you need Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a financial website. The answer is that any website can benefit from SEO.

Optimizing your site to make it more discoverable by search engines and people who use them will save you time and money. It brings targeted visitors directly to your doorstep. Instead of selling to the masses, you will get more visitors who are actively looking for your services. There’s no need for the hard sell when you make it easy enough for the right people to find you.

But you need more than SEO. While SEO brings visitors to your website, you then need a great-looking, usable, and useful site to convert them into customers.

More About Search Engine Optimization

SEO is no longer about cramming your website with as many keywords and keyphrases as you can fit on the screen. This is a good thing. The changes to SEO and how search engines operate mean that the focus is firmly on creating positive, valuable experiences for web users. Optimizing your site for search engines means creating content that your ideal audience would like to see and delivering it in a way that helps this existing audience find you.

If you focus on quality content, rather than looking for ways to trick the system, you will be rewarded with better rankings.

SEO is More Than Keywords and Page Titles

Trust and reputation are of major importance in the financial industry. You need to convince your visitors that they will be safe if they do business with your firm and that you know and care about their needs.

Many of your visitors will come from referrals. They may have no knowledge of how well you are doing according to Google. Like everyone else who visits your website, from any source, ultimately they will be deciding whether to do business with you based on the quality, usefulness, and usability of your site, all of which are considered when you embark upon SEO.

Image Matters

In short, you need your website to look the part. The content of your site is critical and everyone knows the saying about how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but in those first seconds of seeing your website, your visitors will make decisions about the trustworthiness of your business and how they feel about doing business with you.

Think about the qualities you want people to take from your business and make sure that your site is saying the same thing. Your website should display your branding clearly and consistently. It needs to look professional and considered.

For a financial website, you might want a design that appears solid, grounded, and dependable. Alternatively, you might look for a design that is modern and forward-looking.

Yes, the information you provide via web content is important, but so is making an impression. Don’t cut corners with your web design or your visitors may not stay on your site long enough to read more than a couple of your well-crafted sentences.

Note also that Google has staff to provide the human touch when it comes to assessing websites for quality. Make sure you look your best when Google comes to town.

Think Fast

We’ve established that your visitors will make an evaluation of your page within seconds. This applies even if your page takes more than a few seconds to load. According to KissMetrics, 4 out of 10 web users will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Take 3 seconds to let that statistic sink in.

If your site doesn’t load quickly, you could be losing almost half of your hard-earned traffic. There are lots of cold sweat-inducing statistics like this on the web. Optimizing your pages so that they load more quickly is a big deal.

You can achieve fast page loading speeds by paying for quality, dedicated hosting, but that won’t necessarily save you if your site is poorly designed. One way to make your pages load more quickly is to make the file sizes of your images as small as possible. It can take some skill to do this without sacrificing the quality of your images, but it’s worth doing to provide the best experience possible for your visitors, who are increasingly using mobile devices to perform searches.

If your site isn’t loading within a couple of seconds, it might be worth seeking help to check your code and optimize your images. A professional will be able to help you achieve fast page loading without sacrificing the quality of your visuals.

The speed of your site affects how usable it is. Thus, it also affects your ranking on Google.

Get Mobile

Ever tried surfing the web on a mobile device? At times, this can be the definition of frustrating. This is less and less frequently the case, however, as more businesses catch on to the fact that people like to use the internet while on the move.

As mobile technology improves, and becomes cheaper, more people are taking to the net while way from home or the office. At the end of 2016, mobile usage of the internet surpassed desktop usage. Making sure that your site works on mobile devices is essential if you want to compete in almost any industry.

Google’s algorithms favor sites that are mobile ready.

Provide Proper Navigation

Imagine a bricks-and-mortar financial institution with pillars and steps and banners announcing great deals for new customers. Now imagine that inside the building are dozens of corridors and hundreds of doors, none of which are labeled. What would be the result?

Proper navigation helps your users find what they are looking for. If people don’t know where to look for what they need, they will click away.

There are various navigational structures for websites. Navigation needs some planning to make sure that all the parts of your site are clearly identified and within easy reach.

Just as people need to be able to find their way around your website, so do Google’s spiders. If there are dead ends, broken links, or pages that are hard to find on your website, Google may take longer to index them or they may not be indexed at all. Provide coherent navigation and a thoughtful navigational structure so you don’t lose visitors when they arrive on your website.

High-Quality Content

To attract potential customers, creating and sharing high-quality content should be a major part of your marketing plan.

People often ask whether they should be creating content for people or for machines, i.e., Google. The answer is that you can do both. If your content satisfies Google’s requirements for a Google-friendly site, you’ll be satisfying your potential customers as well as Google’s spiders and algorithms.

If you own a company, you have probably heard of search engine optimization. Essentially, this is what allows your company’s website to be one of the first websites shown on the results list after a search has been made. Having better search engine optimization can lead to more individuals seeing your website and, as a result, having more potential customers. However, the entire process of improving your company’s search engine optimization can be extremely difficult, especially for those who are not as knowledgeable in the area of technology.

Today, many business owners are trusting their website’s creation and search engine optimization to the experts, they are hiring professionals to handle this for them. If you are an India based company, there are many options available to you, but finding the perfect fit is key. There is a good chance that you know other business owners and one of the first steps to finding the perfect company to help you will be to ask others who they use. Once you have a list of potential companies, you can do your own online research to narrow down your search, but there are some things you should ask the company directly before making an official hire.

First, it can be beneficial to ask who their past and current clients are. This can give you an idea of the types and status of the companies that they have worked with before. Also, you may be able to use these past companies as a reference point. If you could speak to an owner of one of these companies it can give you a direct idea of how they were treated and if the company did in fact improve their SEO.

Next, you should inquire on how the company will improve your search engine rankings and the results you should expect. The key to this question is that they give you a realistic answer, as it is practically impossible to give you a top search results on every search engine out there. Each company you speak to should have a specific plant they follow when working with customers. Though these plans may vary, you can expect them to stick to something like an initial website review, weeding out problems that lower your ranking, on page optimization, improving website URL, developing page titles, headings, and tags.

Of course, most popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have specific guidelines that they expect companies to follow and breaking these rules can result in lowered search results and even banning from the results completely. You will want to ask the company you are considering if they follow these rules, which are called webmaster guidelines. For example, Google prohibits twelve SEO tricks that can lead to incorrect optimization. Ensuring that the company you choose avoids breaking these guidelines is extremely important.

Another thing to consider is obviously the price you are willing to pay for your SEO help and if the companies you are considering fits this budget. You will want to ask if you will need to pay by hour or by project and what you can expect your overall costs to be. Another important question is how often and how you will be contacted if needed throughout the process. You will want to stay up to date on the changes being made on your website and the results you are receiving with the SEO changes being made.

Overall, improving your company’s search engine optimization can lead to more potential customers seeing your website. Learning how to make your website SEO friendly and changing things that are setting you back can be a lengthy and difficult process for business owners. This is why you should hire a professional team to handle the search engine optimization of your site.

Rank Brain: How it affects our search patterns and ranking

Google’s artificial intelligence program is responsible for interpreting all the queries which internet users have typed on Google in the past months. It’s also effective when it comes to the never before searched queries on the search engine. It catches similar phrases or words and then filters accordingly to show the result which is the closest to the actual research.

It affects the ranking and also favors different results in distinct countries. Rank brain has higher success rate when it comes to correct guessing in comparison to Google search engines. So to make it clear, it can be said that Rank Brain has the capability to recognize and learn new patterns as well as revising the page results of the search engines based on its own artificial intelligence and knowledge.

Importance of Rank Brain

Rank Brain would easily help in the filtering of billions of pages and showing the most relevant results on the top. For any particular query, rank brain uses its entire knowledge and skills and after effective filtering of the results, it shows the most relevant ones in order.

Relevancy is the right word, for understanding how Rank Brain works for us This program can even think beyond keywords and is designed to think like a human. It does work efficiently with Google’s algorithm ranking signals show the results which the users would find really useful and relevant.

Affecting search patterns & SEO Ranking

Although a machine learning system, it requires the users to give certain inputs so that it can work. Since it’s considered among the most important ranking signals, it’s bound to have some effect on the search patterns and even on the SEO Rankings.

The technical side of your search engine optimization must be totally in line with this AI, as it can make or even break your earned SEO. With Rank Brain, Google’s algorithm is constantly changing and learning, so the SEO campaign and keyword targeting have to be really adaptive and flexible.

This is the only way which would assure your presence among the top results and your SEO would be totally in accordance with Google and search engines. This amazing Google program has been developed by the experts to ensure that all algorithms are used efficiently while the result pages are filtered in a manner which ensures ease for the users and reduction in complex searching.

Vishal shares his views on the latest revolutionary topic- the Rank Brain. He loves to write and share his views on the topics that are trending. With lots of knowledge on Tech, Gadgets and Software, he writes passionately to let readers have an insight on the Tech topics.

Local search engine optimization has become the thorn in many online marketing specialists side. In fact, companies that aren’t using professional internet marketing agencies to assist them with their online marketing haven’t all incorporated local into their sites and marketing, which means that they are probably being penalized right now by the top search engines.

Google introduced local SEO as one of their algorithms some time back, but still many companies aren’t embracing this requirement, which means that they are losing out on valuable business on a daily basis. Local SEO is a great way to reach your local audience. The focus of this algorithm is to introduce searchers to products and services that match their search requirements within their local area, before showing them results from other locations. The benefit to this, is that searchers find relevant results, while companies get to reach their local audience and boost their brand visibility.

So where do you start? The first thing you can do is start incorporating local into your keywords. A good example is if you are selling essential oils, your keywords could be “essential oils,” or “high quality essential oils.” Now you want to introduce local, so you turn your keyword into a long tailed keyword with location, such as “essential oils London” or “essential oils in New York” as examples.

Your keywords will help the search engine identify your location and what you do so that you can be ranked and your audience can reach you moving forward.

From where you need to make some essential changes to your website to ensure that every single one of your pages in ranked and not penalised. This means adding your address, phone number and email to each of your website pages. Up until the algorithm was introduced, having a contact page was good enough, now you need to add it to each page to ensure every page is ranked correctly and your audience can find you based on all your pages, increasing the chances of your increasing your website traffic in the long run.

You can incorporate local search engine optimisation into your social media campaign. Ensure you provide accurate location information in the about section on your social media page and use location specific keywords to reach your audience. Remember the search engines also use social media to find websites and companies, so this can benefit you greatly in the long run.

Next you want to ensure you cover all the areas that you work in. So if you do provide a global service, you are going to want to include keywords that cover all countries that you supply to ensure you are ranked around the world and that the search engine is aware of the areas you cover, so that they can rank you accordingly.

Another thing you need to know about local search engine optimization is that you want to enlist with as many well-known and reputable online directories as you can. Ensure that you include your details accurately so that the search engines can pick you up and push your business forward for you in the long run.

Remember to be consistent in your marketing efforts. This means you want to ensure you constantly monitor your progress and your website, ensuring any links are repaired and that you have incorporated local accurately.

It is advisable if you don’t have the time to enlist the services of a local search engine optimization specialist company who can assist you with your marketing efforts moving forward.