With over 60 million consumers using online search engines to discover financial services, natural search is becoming an increasingly important aspect of a company’s digital strategy. In addition, a recent industry study showed online financial shoppers who utilize search, to be more valuable than those who do not. Searchers were 11% more likely to convert than non-searchers, 19% more likely to maintain a high account balance, and 1.6 times more likely to spend significant sums of money with their credit cards.

Visibility in the search engines is a critical core competency for a financial services firm looking to tap into the opportunity and drive consumers looking for financial services to their website.

Leverage Technology for Insight Into Natural Search Landscape

A major Financial Services company recently turned to Searchlight, Conductor’s enterprise SEO platform to gain insight into their natural search visibility. Their goals in using the platform was to understand how they appear in the search engines for both high-volume head terms and longer tail terms and to audit the work of an outside SEO consultant.

Short and Long Term Benefits from Searchlight

Within a short time of using Searchlight they discovered:

• Deep Insight into Natural Search Visibility: The Financial Services company gained deep insight into their natural search visibility, including discovery of keywords they were not aware they were ranking for and identification of natural search trends for their website.
• Links in ‘Bad’ Online Neighborhoods: The Financial Services company discovered links in questionable neighborhoods that, given search engines’ recent crackdown on webspam they knew could put them at risk for search ranking penalties.
• Conversion-Optimized Content on Page: The Financial Services company discovered articles on their site ranking on page one of the search rankings. These articles were driving passive traffic that could be turned into conversions with a redesign into conversion friendly pages.