SEO Strategies for Banks and Credit Unions

Are you looking to drive more traffic to your bank's or credit union's website? Need more loan applicants? The most cost-effective way to accomplish this is to fully optimize your website for organic search.

Follow the best practices below, and you will begin to improve your bank's search engine results page (SERP) rankings. To win at the SEO game you need common sense, curiosity, basic analytical skills and patience. Below are DMZ Interactive's top 10 search engine optimization strategies for banks and credit unions. These are proven techniques for improving your search engine rankings; enjoy!

10 SEO Tips for Banks and Credit Unions

1. Leverage Google local search. Make sure all your branches are listed in Google local search (Google Places). It's free and it's a no-brainer. Customers are always looking for the nearest branch.
2. Use online review sites to boost traffic and build trust. Unlock your business account with Yelp.com (https://biz.yelp.com/support/using_business_account). Encourage your customers to write reviews on Yelp. Quickly respond to both negative and positive reviews. Reach out to any disgruntled customers with phone calls and emails. Assign an internal employee to manage the reviews and comments posted on Yelp.
3. Create a YouTube Channel for the bank and post interviews with loan officers, HR heads, and the CEO. Optimize your video content with SEO tags. (According to Forrester Research, YouTube can have substantial impact on your SEO SERP rankings.)
4. Make sure you have a basic mobile version of your website. Customers should be able to pull up your website on an iPhone or Android and easily see your locations on a Google map, along with bank hours, phone numbers, and your current loan rates.
5. Drive repeat traffic on your website by creating content that is based on Google keyword search volume data. Content such as loan rates, loan calculators, home mortgage calculators, how to buy a house, currency conversion calculators, tips and advice for small business banking, and financial planning are all good places to start.
6. Create a blog for your website and publish content regularly. Optimize your blog content for SEO. Put keywords in the blog titles.
7. Once you've developed your SEO keyword-based content, you can begin your on-page keyword optimization based on your targeted keywords. You should have a list of the top 100 keywords you plan to target and the corresponding search volume data.
8. Optimize the HTML tags on your website for SEO. Specifically, optimize the page title, meta description and H1 tags with keywords. These are the most important tags. The description tag is often displayed in search results; having a concise and coherent description tag can result in more clicks and traffic. Limit the length of the description tag to 160 characters.
9. Install Google Analytics on your website (http://www.google.com/analytics/). If you've already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.
10. Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find it. Even better, leverage your CMS engine's ability to automatically update your site map every time you post content. Use Google's webmaster's tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly (http://www.google.com/webmasters/).

Which bank or credit union search marketing techniques are working for you? Feel free to share your comments and suggestions!