Your website looks beautiful: crisp copy, a clear message, and a stunning design. It’s ready to welcome customers to your door.
So, you wait.
And wait.
And wait.
But no one visits.
The problem?
More often than not, technical SEO is to blame.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website is or compelling your copy. If your site’s technical SEO is not on point, your audience won’t be able to find your website at all, because search engines are not aware your website exists—let alone consider your site relevant and valuable.
To help you avoid the problem, we’re covering everything you need to know about technical SEO, starting with what it is, why it matters, and how it works.
What Is Technical SEO?
Before we dig into the nitty-gritty details of technical SEO, let’s briefly revisit the definition of SEO.
SEO—or Search Engine Optimization—is the process of optimizing your website to improve your site’s ranking on search pages. When your site ranks higher on Google, Bing, and other search engines, searchers are more likely to be aware of your brand and visit your site.
Several ranking factors impact where your website lands on the search engine results page (SERP). They can be broken down into three subcategories:
- On-page SEO involves optimizing content, page structure, and topic cluster development. In other words, it considers what’s “on the page.”
- Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website, like backlink outreach, which help build website authority—which ultimately helps to bring organic traffic into your site. The more backlinks you obtain, the more relevant your content is to search engines.
- Technical SEO considers the structure of your website—including navigation, sitemaps, and metadata—page speed, and user experience design to determine whether your website provides a positive browsing experience.
Some experts consider technical SEO a part of on-page SEO. However, there’s a distinct difference: On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages’ content on your website—like the content in a blog article—while technical SEO considers your website as a whole.
But how does it work, you ask?
When you publish your website, search engines crawl and review its content. Think of it as spiders that crawl around your site like a web, exploring how your pages are connected, how the site is structured, and how your content fits together.
The search engine then indexes your web pages (i.e., stores and organizes), based on what it now understands about your website, and ranks your pages accordingly.
In just a few words, technical SEO is about helping search engines discover, organize, and make your website discoverable to users.
Why Does Technical SEO Matter for Fintechs?
Technical SEO is a complex discipline, especially for non-marketers without SEO expertise.
However, ignoring it will set you back in rankings—and ultimately in brand awareness, website traffic, and sales.
That makes it a critical ingredient in any comprehensive marketing strategy.
But that’s not the only reason. Technical SEO also impacts:
Trust
Technical SEO is about building a secure, efficient, and user-friendly online presence–the first step to building a trusting relationship with potential customers.
In an industry where trust is often a blocker to conversion, fintechs/financial services organizations should prioritize activities that garner trust, including technical SEO.
Security
Many fintechs and financial services organizations handle personal and financial data, making security a vital issue for customers and prospects.
Ensuring that your website is technically optimized with proper security protocols—like HTTPS and SSL certificates—improves rankings and reassures users that their data is protected.
User Experience
Have you ever landed on a website where the pages load slower than you can pour yourself a new cup of coffee?
It makes you want to walk away.
Providing an enjoyable, seamless browsing experience is part of helping potential customers make informed buying decisions. Technical SEO is a key building block for a standout website user experience.
In fact, Google’s Core Web Vitals are a key ranking factor, and they focus on site speed, interactivity, and layout stability. Optimizing these metrics helps your site maintain high search engine visibility and provide a seamless user experience.
Mobile-First Indexing
Did you know Google ranks your website’s mobile version higher than your site’s desktop version in search?
This is called mobile-first indexing—and it’s Google’s preferred means of indexing.
Because mobile devices generate nearly 59% of global website traffic, fintechs should prioritize optimizing the mobile version of their website first and foremost.
Regulatory Compliance
It’s no secret that fintechs and financial services organizations operate within a highly regulated environment where data privacy and payment security are top priorities. Technical SEO can help ensure that regulatory compliance aligns with search engine guidelines, reducing the likelihood of search penalties or user distrust.
For example, HTTPS ensures secure data transfers, which is a compliance requirement under several laws relevant to fintech, including GDPR, PCI-DSS, and CCPA.
Crawling: How Search Engines Discover Your Website
As we previously mentioned, crawling is where search engine bots navigate your website, follow internal links, and gather information from each page. Technical SEO best practices ensure your website is properly configured for optimal crawling.
When crawlers take a peek around your website, they will consider several key components that influence how they later index and rank your site:
- Link structure: Think of the internal linking structure of a fintech website as the framing of a house. Just as the skeleton structure holds up the roof and walls and provides the structure for a well-constructed home, links provide the structure of a website. Googlebot uses links to navigate a site, so an organized, well-structured hierarchy ensures that all necessary pages are easily found and crawled.
- Robots.txt file: This file tells crawlers which parts of the website they can access. Fintechs should block crawlers from accessing sensitive areas, such as login portals or user account dashboards, while allowing search engines to access key pages, like product pages, FAQs, or blog content.
- Crawl budget: Every website has a crawl budget that indicates the number of pages a search engine can crawl on your site within a certain period. For sites with numerous service offerings and pages, it’s crucial to prioritize important pages, like core financial services or blog content, and remove unnecessary or duplicate pages so they don’t eat into your crawl budget. This can be managed by effective internal linking and XML sitemaps.
Optimizing your website for crawling makes it discoverable. But that doesn’t mean anything if your website pages aren’t indexed.
Indexing: Making Your Content Searchable
Once crawling is complete, search engines analyze the collected data and add your pages to their index—a massive catalog of pages from all over the web.
Indexing is the reason your content appears in search results—or not. If a page is not indexed, it will not rank, meaning it cannot be found by users.
Search engines consider three main factors when indexing your website:
- Content quality: Google knows its job is to serve the most valuable information to its users, so it prioritizes high-quality, unique, and valuable content in its index. That’s why content quality is one of the most critical factors in indexing. Remember, SEO is no longer about keyword stuffing. It’s about providing as much value as possible to readers.
- Canonical tags: Fintechs may have dedicated product pages for different user segments. This is a sticky situation because having multiple URLs with the same or similar content will penalize your site. The canonical tag helps indicate which page version should be indexed, preventing duplicate content issues that can hurt SEO.
- Noindex tags: In some cases, you may have pages that should not appear in search results. Internal dashboards, privacy policies, or terms and conditions will clutter your site’s index. Using the noindex meta tag ensures that these pages are crawled but not indexed, keeping the focus on important pages.
After your website has been crawled and indexed, search engines are ready to give it a ranking on their SERP.
The Role of XML Sitemaps
As we briefly touched upon earlier, XML sitemaps are the blueprint for search engines to find the most important pages on your website. When you make it easy for crawlers to do their job, your pages are more likely to be indexed appropriately.
Put briefly: it’s essential that your XML sitemap is updated and clear.
A website isn’t necessarily a linear experience. XML sitemaps help search engines discover pages that may not be easily accessible, or are buried deep within the site. And you don’t want crawlers to miss content that you deem valuable.
XML sitemaps list your site’s page URLs alongside their corresponding metadata, which includes information such as the date each page was last updated, and its priority relative to other pages on the site.
For example, you want your XML sitemap to indicate whenever you publish new blog content, so search engines know to re-crawl the blog page for new information. After all, the blog content you produce should be valuable to users, in which case search engines will crawl and rank your site high up.
The sitemap also allows you to set the priority of certain pages. For instance, your core service pages can be marked as high-priority in the sitemap, encouraging search engines to focus their crawl budget on the most critical parts of your site.
Technical SEO Checklist
Indeed, technical SEO is no cakewalk.
It involves a deep understanding of the technical backend factors influencing how search engines discover, index, and rank your site. To help you get started, the checklist below covers several of the most important factors you should consider.
Keep in mind that this checklist is by no means exhaustive—this article would go on and on if it covered all the factors that influence technical SEO.
1. Check Your Site’s Indexing Status
Regularly monitoring your site’s indexing status ensures that the most important pages on your website, like product or service pages and blog content, are properly indexed. It also helps you keep tabs on irrelevant pages that may require a noindex tag to stay out of search results.
Tools like Google Search Console allow you to view your pages’ indexing status. Navigate to the Page Indexing report to see which pages are indexed, excluded, and why.
2. Reclaim Lost Links
Links can become broken if pages are removed or links are changed. When links are lost or broken across your site, fix them so crawlers don’t hit a wall as they navigate. Reclaiming these lost links can restore their SEO value.
Use tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to find broken backlinks or pages that have lost their links. Reach out to webmasters or partners to request they update links to the new URL.
3. Focus on Internal Linking
Internal links help both users and search engines navigate your website. It guides search engines to high-value pages, distributes link equity across your site, and allows readers to access other content they may find helpful.
Use descriptive anchor text that includes relevant keywords related to your financial services offerings, and ensure all key pages are linked from somewhere within the website.
4. Configure Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data that helps search engines understand your website’s content more effectively. This can be particularly useful for displaying rich snippets related to financial products or services, enhancing visibility in search results.
Use tools like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to check and implement the appropriate schema for financial services. To maximize value, implement a product-specific schema for each key service you offer.
5. Fix Crawl Errors
Crawl errors prevent search engines from properly crawling your site, leading to missed ranking opportunities. Regularly checking for and fixing crawl errors means search engines can fully access and rank your content.
Use Google Search Console to monitor and address crawl errors, such as 404 errors, server errors, and other common issues. You can set up 301 redirects for broken links to quickly fix these errors.
6. Conduct General Maintenance
Technical SEO is not a one-time task. It requires ongoing attention and maintenance to make a real impact on your rankings and searchability.
Conducting regular SEO audits can give you confidence that your website is continually optimized and continues to rank well in search results. Your audit should include monitoring website performance and page speed, especially after adding new high-value pages and blog content.
Finally, keep up-to-date with Google algorithm updates. Google is always tinkering with the algorithm, and operating on old information could impact which pages are indexed and how your website ranks.
In fact, it’s not uncommon for fintech companies to encounter new security requirements or updates that require changes to their technical SEO.
Meet Your Lean, Mean, Technical SEO Team
Technical SEO doesn’t hide what it is: technical.
While complex and difficult to master without experience, technical SEO pays off in droves when done correctly.
If getting into the technical details is not your forte or something you feel comfortable tackling without expert guidance, we’re here to help.
CSTMR helps fintech and financial services brands address their marketing challenges to grow into captivating brands.
With growth programs for early-stage, emerging, and established companies across the financial services and fintech vertical, CSTMR drives strategic SEO and marketing plans designed for your unique needs.
If you’re ready to kick off your technical SEO strategy, reach out for a free consultation. Our SEO experts are eager to help you.
