SEO and PPC for financial services
Regulated, expensive to advertise in, and full of national competitors bidding on every term. Two of our engagements are in this sector — one B2B, one lending.
Nothing about search in finance is cheap, so precision pays for itself
Financial keywords are among the most expensive in Google Ads. When a click costs what it costs in this sector, broad targeting is not a mild inefficiency — it is the whole budget going to people who were never going to convert.
The second constraint is trust. Google applies a higher bar to pages that can affect someone’s money, so thin content does not rank here no matter how well optimised it is. Credentials, clear authorship and genuinely useful pages are not nice-to-haves in this vertical; they are the entry fee.
The third is the sales cycle. A lead is rarely the same week as the search. That makes conversion tracking and attribution more important than the raw traffic number, and it is the thing most accounts we look at get wrong.
- +42%More leads for a B2B financial services firm on the same ad budget — conversion rate 9.9% to 13.0%, cost per lead down a third
- 4×Search visibility growth for the same client across twelve months, from a parallel SEO programme
- +97%Organic sessions for a private hard-money real-estate lender, on zero ad spend
- 11×Growth in that lender’s monthly search appearances, from roughly 600 a month to 6,600
How we approach local search · Figures from each client’s own Google Ads, Search Console and Analytics. Full write-ups on the case studies page.
What we actually do for financial services clients
Not a package. These are the things that have moved the numbers in this sector.
Campaigns built around service lines
Each product or service gets its own campaign, budget and landing page, so spend can be judged per service instead of averaged across the account. This alone is what freed up the budget in the B2B engagement.
Negative keywords as a discipline, not a chore
In finance the wrong side of the transaction, job seekers and consumer traffic all look like your keywords. Filtering them out is continuous work, and it is where a large share of wasted spend lives.
Content that clears the trust bar
Pages that answer the questions a real buyer asks, with named expertise behind them. In a sector Google holds to a higher standard, this is what makes rankings hold rather than spike.
Tracking built for a long sales cycle
Conversions verified before spend scales, and reporting that follows a lead past the form fill. If the platform is optimising toward the wrong event, more budget makes the problem worse.
Financial services search, answered plainly
Can you work within our compliance review?
Yes, and we assume it from the start. Ad copy, landing pages and content go through your review before they go live. It slows the calendar and it is not negotiable in a regulated sector, so we plan for it rather than treat it as a delay.
Our cost per click is brutal. Is paid search even worth it?
Sometimes the honest answer is that a share of your budget should move to organic — that is exactly what the lending engagement did, on zero ad spend. Usually the answer is that the paid account is buying the wrong clicks rather than that clicks cost too much. The Search Review will tell you which of the two you have.
How long before organic does anything in this sector?
Longer than in most. Finance is competitive and the trust bar is high. Expect movement in visibility first, then rankings, then leads — over quarters rather than weeks. Anyone giving you a date is guessing.
Will you name us as a client?
Only if you ask us to. Every case study on this site is anonymised by default and published with permission. Most financial clients prefer it that way.
Find out what your search presence is doing
A free written review of your organic and paid search, back within two business days — and yours to keep whether or not we work together.
Get your free Search Review