Strengthen Your Local Search Presence: SEO Tips for Financial Firms

Today, customers can engage with your financial services organization through countless digital channels. From traditional search to social media to AI tools, there are more ways than ever for a customer to find a branch, a product, or a financial professional as part of their customer journey.

Showing up with the right information at the right time can mean the difference between a customer choosing your firm or your professionals over the competition. In fact, 91% of customers say it's important for information to be accurate when making a purchase decision, and 64% are likely to choose a different brand if they encounter incorrect or missing information.* But keeping all of the necessary information updated and accurate across all of these touchpoints is a massive undertaking.

Ready to help your organization stand out more effectively? Here's what marketers at financial firms need to do in order to win in the "new era" of SEO.

The first key to SEO success is boosting your organization's signal to search engines through a robust digital presence.

This requires updating your organization's information - including, for example, branch location hours, addresses, phone numbers, and financial professional profiles - across an extended network of publishers. Taking these actions boosts your relevancy, accuracy, and consistency (among other factors).

An effective listings strategy needs to focus on more than the "big 5" major sites like Google, Facebook, Bing, Apple Maps, and Yelp. Why? Search engines reference information across a wide range of sites - even the smaller ones. When information is consistent across a diverse network of publishers, there is increased confidence that the information is correct. If your organization isn't consistently showing up across sites, or if your competitors are doing it better, that can impact your results and how you rank in search.

To test this theory, we conducted a first-of-its-kind study to see if managing information across a broader network boosts your signal, and therefore performance, on Google.

Yext analyzed over 620,000 global locations across 15 industries and discovered individual locations see up to 186% more website clicks from their Google Business Profile when they sync to at least 75% of the publishers in the Yext network.

The research included 132K global locations for financial services and insurance - and the results held up. When financial services organizations managed information across a higher number of publishers, they saw more website clicks from Google.

Wondering if the number of locations you manage matters? If you're a large organization with thousands of locations or professionals, it might feel unfair to compare your performance to that of a small bank with several locations, for example. So, we split up the study based on size.

We found that, regardless of business size, syncing information to a wider network of publishers has a strong correlation on performance from Google.

The second key to SEO success is increasing the depth of your information to surface beyond traditional search. The impact of managing information across publishers goes beyond website clicks - it also affects how (and if) your brand appears in search generative experiences.

AI models like Google Gemini and ChatGPT source their information about local businesses from a variety of different places, too – including both big and small publisher websites. How do we know? Learn more in our blog post where we asked each major AI model, "Where do you get your local business information from?"

But search generative experiences do add a new layer of complexity to your SEO strategy. Consider a simple search query like "open a checking account in Coral Springs, FL." When you ask that same question to both Google Search and Gemini (Google's AI model powering AI Overviews), you'll see a different, more detailed answer from Gemini.

This shift shows why providing more detailed information online (beyond name, address, phone number) is so important in generative search. Here, Gemini is (likely) pulling from many location listings as well as website pages and/or customer reviews to generate an answer in full-sentence form. And with 67% of people saying they already use generative search and AI tools,* the importance of managing how these models find and surface information will only grow.

To succeed, your financial services organization first needs to be present across as many publishers as possible.

When it comes to optimizing for SEO, it's clear that having robust, recent, and consistent information across the widest network of publishers is a winning strategy.

With the largest publisher network of direct API integrations, Yext is uniquely able to provide financial firms with access to the largest and most comprehensive publisher network rate – something that other vendors that rely heavily on data aggregators are not able to do.

Interested in learning more? Check out how Yext Listings can help your organization show up everywhere customers search.

*The asterisked data results from an online survey of 2,312 adults, 18+, who purchased something online within the past year. The survey was fielded by Researchscape from June 14 to 25, 2024. Respondents were from 5 different countries. Check back next month for the full published report.