The Future of SEO Optimization: Emerging Trends and Technologies to Watch Out For
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, has played an integral and essential part in the social media strategy of fintech companies all over the world. With a significant shift towards online e-commerce in today’s digital age, it’s essential for every business, regardless of industry, to establish a strong online presence to enhance brand recognition among consumers worldwide.
A robust SEO practice helps a business improve its online visibility, engagement with customers, and the gathering of consumer insights and data to aid in the decision-making processes of an organization.
In order to maximize an organization’s SEO optimization, fintech companies are on the lookout for emerging trends to capitalize on. These trends range from specifying trending keywords to implement into blog posts and articles to new SEO optimization strategies and technologies for social media marketing.
In recent years an SEO strategy deployed by many fintechs has been to write content solely for the purpose of ranking well on search engines as opposed to writing content that serves the companies’ consumers and potential target audiences. The idea was to check off all of the necessary requirements to show up on the first page of a search engine such as Google or Bing while potentially compromising the integrity and degrading the quality of blog content on the company’s website. At times the quality of written content and this particular SEO strategy would clash, so companies would purposely diminish the quality of their website content in order to fill all the requirements SEO engineers deemed as requirements for the search engine. An example of such a strategy included keeping a very high keyword density of a certain keyword which would show up too often within the article making the article seem very brash and repetitive. This often would make the piece close to unreadable even if it were to end up on the front page of Google. This type of content is called “search engine-first content” and is very frustrating to potential consumers leading to unhelpful web pages that rank well but don’t provide or satisfy any purpose.
Now the strategy has changed to make high-quality content that is curated for the consumer’s benefit and learning. Beginning at the start of 2023, Google has rolled out a new content system update in order to combat the development of search engine-first content with genuine, helpful, and readable content. Google has developed an improved search algorithm to help searchers find high-quality content by rewarding pages with more valuable resources and helpful content written for humans to help users. By making content a consumer would genuinely want to read and learn about, companies can avoid having their websites downgraded and instead get promoted to Google’s front page. This is all in part to Google’s strategy of its “ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in search.”
Competition in the fintech sector is ever so intensifying. In such a competitive industry, natural exposure, such as the front page of Google, is an elusive goal that can take time to reach. Having a good SEO strategy is vital in order to get discovered by new businesses and consumers. One way to improve a company’s SEO is by focusing efforts on improving the user experience of the website or the UI/UX. Fintech companies wanting to be competitive in organic search and convert visitors in 2023 have to consider their web user experience and if it is up to par with the industry’s standards. Not only does the performance and design of the desktop version of the website have to be at a top level, but so does the mobile version when the website is converted into a mobile format. This is often a step companies overlook, especially if most of their users access the website through a computer.
As early as 2017, Google has begun rolling out a mobile-first indexing system. Historically, Google’s web crawling systems typically indexed the desktop version of a page’s content. However, with the increase in mobile users in today’s digital age, Google has decided to prioritize user experience on mobile devices over the desktop experience. With mobile-first indexing, Google has started crawling and indexing the mobile versions of pages instead of the desktop version when categorizing which pages end up on the first page of Google and which do not. This means that in order to have greater visibility on the internet and to show up on the first page of Google, one’s mobile site version has to be in top condition, as websites with poor mobile website design do not end up on the first page.
