As our world becomes increasingly all-digital-all-the-time, search engines play an integral role in how we discover products and services, especially in the fintech sector. Operating primarily online, fintechs rely heavily on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies to capture customer attention and drive conversions.
Topical relevance, in the realm of SEO, is a process aimed at bolstering your website’s domain authority and improving your search rankings by making your content more relevant (mainly in the eyes of Google) to users’ search queries.
Topical relevance is more than just a buzzword; it serves as a key pillar of sound digital marketing in 2023. It performs three major roles:
- Enlightening your audience about your products/services.
- Strengthening your domain authority in search engine rankings.
- Fostering lasting customer loyalty.
In essence, it is a strategy designed to amplify your website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), thereby facilitating a connection between your audience and the products, services, or information they’re seeking.
Note: If you need more SEO basics, check out our comprehensive guide to SEO; it’s a great place to start before exploring topical relevance.
In this piece, we’ll explore how topical relevance functions and provide practical steps for implementation—from intelligent keyword research to maintaining a consistent output of high-quality content.
Let’s dive in and equip your fintech brand with the strategic advantage of topical relevance.
What Is Topical Relevance?
The evolution of SEO over the past decade has shifted its focus away from merely measuring keyword density (i.e., where context was often misunderstood or overlooked).
Instead, the emphasis has moved towards understanding the relevance of content in relation to keywords, improving the overall user experience and the value of search results.
This transformation began with the development of the “Knowledge Graph” around 2012 and was further enhanced by the implementation of sophisticated algorithms like Hummingbird in 2013, followed by RankBrain and BERT. These improvements have significantly empowered Google to comprehend the context surrounding keywords (see a history of Google’s search updates here).
Today, topical relevance serves as the tool search engines employ to assess the relevance of your webpage to a user’s search query. Google consistently aims to deliver the most appropriate, high-authority results at the top of its results page. To this end, Google evaluates your topical relevance to a query by examining your page content, backlinks, and usage of keywords.
Topical relevance suggests that the bulk, if not all, of a website’s content must be related to a specific topic or theme. This attribute, often referred to as topical authority, underlines the significance of in-depth and detailed content in establishing your position as a subject matter expert and trusted thought leader within your industry.
By leveraging topical relevance, you can elevate your website’s search rankings and start competing with the established players in your industry niche (think Wells Fargo vs. a brand new digital bank).
Why Fintechs Should Care
In the densely packed financial services landscape, one teeming with numerous websites and vast data vying for Google’s recognition, a meticulously crafted SEO strategy is crucial. Such a strategy ensures that search engines rank your content favorably for pertinent queries, thereby connecting your target audience with the products/services you offer.
Success hinges on developing topically related and interlinked content, enabling Google’s crawlers to recognize your brand as a subject authority.
If you do this, you will help Google understand and rank your content effectively. Potential benefits include:
- More Authority: When your website produces comprehensive and quality content around related topics, it sends a signal to search engines that your site has substantial expertise in that area. This increases your perceived authority, and search engines, like Google, are more likely to rank your pages higher.
- An Improved User Experience: Topically relevant content can significantly enhance the user experience. When your site’s content is interconnected and centers around similar themes, users can navigate and understand your site better. This improved user experience can increase on-site time, decrease bounce rates, and improve other user engagement metrics, which in turn boost SEO.
- Better Keyword Research: Topical relevance refines your keyword strategy. Instead of relying on individual keywords, you create a network of related content. This holistic approach allows Google’s crawlers to understand your content’s context better, further improving your visibility in search results.
- Ability to Compete Against Industry Stalwarts (Eventually): Again, fintech is a crowded market, but topical relevance provides a competitive edge. It can help your site stand out and rank higher as search engines begin to recognize your content’s depth and breadth.
With topical relevance, you will turn your website into a resource hub, ultimately driving meaningful and organic engagement while reaching a broader audience.
5 Strategies for Improving Topical Relevance
Now that we’ve laid out the importance and benefits of topical relevance, it’s time to put theory into practice. In this section, we’ll walk you through some of the best practices to effectively implement topical relevance in your SEO strategy.
1. Identify Core Topics
Identifying the core topics that are relevant to your brand and industry is a fundamental first step towards enhancing topical relevance. These core topics should align with your brand’s offerings and the expertise that your organization possesses.
Think about the broad areas that encapsulate what you do and offer, and how these areas could be broken down into more specific subtopics.
Consider the questions your target audience might have related to your products or services, and use these questions to guide your identification of core topics. Remember that these topics should be broad enough to generate a wide range of content, yet specific enough to your niche to demonstrate your authority and expertise.
In most cases, your content won’t rank well if it’s not related to your area of expertise.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
Once you have identified your core topics, the next step is to find related keywords that your target audience might use when searching for information about these topics.
Keyword research helps you understand what your audience needs and how to provide the best solutions to their problems. If you are just getting started, focus on keyword difficulty, keyword popularity (as measured by the number of monthly searches), and what keywords (and strings of them) your competitors are using in their content. You can utilize tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs to uncover these keywords (more on tools below).
Important: don’t limit yourself to obvious or highly competitive keywords. Search for long-tail keywords, which are more specific and often less competitive.
Additionally, look for commonly asked questions in your industry to ensure your content answers real inquiries from your audience. Remember, the aim here is not just to pepper your content with keywords (in 2023 keyword “stuffing” is a big no-no), but to better understand the search intent of your audience.
3. Create Comprehensive Content
Once you have your core topics and keywords, it’s time to start creating content. Again, it’s not enough to simply produce content stuffed with keywords. Your focus should be on creating comprehensive, quality content that delivers value to your audience.
By “comprehensive,” we mean in-depth articles that cover a topic thoroughly, providing insightful and useful information that goes beyond the surface level. Such content not only demonstrates your authority and expertise on the subject but also satisfies the user’s search intent, making them more likely to stay on your site and engage with your content.
4. Use a “Cluster” Content Strategy
A cluster content strategy involves creating a “pillar” page for each of your core topics, and then producing related “cluster” content that links back to the pillar page. This approach not only helps to organize your content and make it easier for visitors to navigate your site, but it also helps search engines understand the relationship between your pages, boosting your topical relevance.
Each piece of cluster content should focus on a specific keyword related to the core topic, and provide detailed information on the topic at hand. Make sure to leverage a sound internal linking strategy to connect your cluster content with your pillar pages. Also, keep in mind where this content falls in your sales funnel.
I.e., top of funnel education content, or middle/bottom of funnel content that is more focused on a specific conversion goal.
Most of your content assets will likely fall under the former.
5. Update Existing Content
Topical relevance isn’t just about creating new content; it also involves updating your existing content. By refreshing old posts and pages, you can improve their relevance, add links to new content, and ensure they’re still accurate and valuable.
Given the dynamic nature of the fintech industry, updating existing content is an absolute necessity. Technological advancements, regulatory changes, evolving consumer behavior, and market trends all contribute to the constant flux of this industry. As such, the content you create today may not be entirely relevant or accurate in a year or even a few months from now.
Regularly review your content to identify any outdated information or areas where new insights could be added. You might find that a piece of content you created a while back could benefit from a data/source refresh, the addition of new industry developments, or simply some new language to resonate more effectively with your audience of the present.
When you keep your content current, you not only maintain its relevance but also ensure that your audience always gets the most accurate and up-to-date information. This can go a long way in establishing your brand as a reliable, trustworthy authority in the fintech industry. Also, regularly updated content is more likely to achieve higher rankings, as search engines prioritize content that is fresh and pertinent.
Tools That Can Help
There are a lot of tools out there to help you build your topical relevance/SEO strategies. The trick is to try a bunch and see what works best for you. We’ve found that three tool “suites” consistently deliver results: Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google.
Whether you’re a digital marketing beginner or an SEO veteran, these platforms offer a wide range of features for all skill-sets. Let’s take a look at each one to see how they can help you make your mark in the fintech space.
Semrush
Semrush is a marketing toolkit that helps you tackle processes like keyword research, content optimization, and website audits.
Semrush touts that they offer the largest keyword database on the market today with over 20 billion keywords. On top of keyword research to build out both your SEO and PPC (pay-per-click or paid advertising) strategies, they have tools directly related to enhancing your site’s relevancy.
Domain comparisons to your competitors’ websites will allow you to see what keywords they use. They even offer an SEO Writing Assistant to help your content creation process, based on an analysis of the top 10 competitors results for the query.
Having these tools makes it easy to evaluate how visible your brand is among your competitors and how you can increase organic traffic.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs brings to the table an all-inclusive suite of SEO tools, prominently featuring some of the industry’s most impressive competitor research capabilities.
Their competitor analysis features dig deep, helping you analyze your rivals’ content strategies, organic keyword use, and backlink approaches. The insights gained from such comprehensive analysis can fuel your own strategic planning and optimization efforts.
Ahrefs also provides a robust rank tracking tool. This tool empowers you to monitor your standing among competitors, delivering key insights about your website’s performance in real-time.
Beyond this, Ahrefs offers backlink building tools, comprehensive keyword research capabilities, and thorough website audit tools to detect and rectify any SEO issues in your content.
With an index of over 421 billion pages, Ahrefs not only brings sheer volume to your SEO efforts, but also ensures unparalleled accuracy, making it a trustworthy partner (and our tool of choice) in your pursuit of topical relevance and online visibility.
As the world’s largest search engine, Google offers a treasure trove of data that can guide your topical relevance strategy. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner help you find new keywords and see what your competitors are targeting… and no, Keyword Planner is not just a tool for paid media specialists.
Finally, don’t forget to explore the “related searches” and “people also ask” sections of the Google SERPs. You can identify popular keywords/topics, helping to illuminate new ideas for content creation.
3 Mistakes Fintechs Should Avoid
If you want your content to rank—and if you’ve made it this far, I’m assuming you do—there are some things you’ll need to avoid if you want your website to land on Google’s first page.
1. Using Black Hat SEO Tactics
Black Hat is the term for SEO practices that bad actors use to essentially rig the system in their favor to gain higher search engine rankings.
These practices are banned in Google’s user agreement and can lead to penalties if they catch you.
In fact, your website could lose its domain authority, or even get de-indexed completely—and that means no one can find you.
It’s best to play by the rules and not take the risk, as most of these ill-gotten gains in rankings are only temporary, anyway. Black Hat SEO tactics are ever-changing. However, the main Black Hat SEO practices to avoid (or remedy if you’ve done some already) are keyword stuffing and link stuffing, including buying links.
2. Ignoring User Intent
A key ingredient in SEO strategy is user intent. If you lack insight about what your users intend to find when searching for a specific topic, your content will suffer from low engagement and poor rankings.
You need to make the intent and context of your content explicitly clear. This will help Google understand where it falls within a topic and rank it with the most relevant search queries. Google aims to deliver the best possible resources to its users. Topical authority, domain authority, and building a strong backlink network all play a role in getting your website to the top page one.
If you’re having a hard time defining your keywords and the user intent of your audience, look at Google’s “people also ask” section to give you an idea of what people are searching for.
3. Fluff
Fluff is anything extra in your content that doesn’t add value.
We’ve all visited a website with the hope of getting a simple answer to a simple question, only to find ourselves reading some long-winded post that obscures the solution to our problem with meaningless copy. I’m sure the prose is lovely, but get to the point, please.
And fluff is a huge turn-off to both searchers and to Google. Remember, in 2023, you have about .2 seconds to catch a visitor’s attention before they move on.
Give the people something they can use, be it industry insights, data, advice, or entertainment, as long as it provides value.
How can you ensure you’re avoiding fluff? Scan your content for overly wordy phrases, empty clichés, repetition, and digression.
Keep Your Fintech Marketing Topical with CSTMR
Topical relevance plays an instrumental role in enhancing your fintech SEO. It bolsters visibility and can help establish your authority in the fintech sector.
The core strategies to achieve this include: a detailed understanding of your niche and its trending topics, consistently creating quality content, carrying out comprehensive keyword research, effectively interlinking related content, procuring valuable backlinks, and keeping your content updated to reflect the ever-evolving fintech landscape.
The importance of tools such as Google, SEMrush, and Ahrefs cannot be overstated as they provide invaluable insights and analysis to help fine-tune your approach to topical relevance.
Yet, effective topical relevance (and SEO for that matter) is a demanding task that requires significant time and expertise. That’s where CSTMR steps in. Our team of digital marketing professionals has years of experience with both SEO and financial services, and is ready to guide your fintech business.
Want to elevate your fintech’s topical relevance? Get in touch with us today and let’s start your journey to higher rankings and increased visibility, together.
