Getting backlinks for a finance website legitimately can be tough, especially if you’re not a big bank or finance brand.
Big banks are spending more on marketing every year, and search engine marketing (a term for advertising in search engines) is one of the top channels that they’re investing in.
So, how can small finance companies compete?
The good news is, you don’t have to spend millions on ads to get clicks from popular keywords like “credit card” to get traffic and customers like the big banks are doing.
Instead, whether you’re a financial advisor, local credit union, or are offering any other financial services, you can improve your organic traffic and online visibility by getting high-quality backlinks!
Based on our decade of link building experience, we’re going to share the 5 most effective link building strategies for finance websites to get backlinks that Google’s algorithm will love.
If you find yourself wanting to outsource this, check our our link building services!
1. Guest blogging
Guest blogging is one of the most common link building campaigns used by search engine optimization (SEO) professionals because it brings predictable results.
Basically, guest blogging is where you write articles for blogs other than your own. Usually, you link to your website somewhere in the body of the article you wrote.
Because you can control the link placement with guest blogging, you can use it to build relevant links to any page on your website (like important landing pages) rather than just content pages.
In finance, Google keeps a close eye on content quality, so websites are strict about the type of content they publish.
This is actually a good thing, though, because if you get on these high-authority websites, Google will put lots of weight towards the backlink you earn.
So for this tactic to work for you, you need to be a subject matter expert in the topics you’re writing about.
For example, to get this article published for our client, we needed a subject matter expert in stocks to write the content.
If you’re a finance expert and want to leverage this tactic, the first step is to find websites to pitch content ideas to.
To find websites that accept guest content, we can use Google’s search operators.
Google lets us use quotation marks to force it to find exact quotes on a page, so we can use the following search strings to find opportunities:
- finance + “write for us”
- finance + “guest blog”
- finance + “guest post”
- finance + “submit an article”
- finance + “submit a guest post”
- finance + “contribute guest post”
You can also just search Google for a list of finance blogs and email the editors at the ones you feel you’re fit to write for.
After you’ve found the websites you want to write for, you can brainstorm some content ideas by looking at the type of content they’re writing, understanding why they write it, and looking for gaps.
So ask yourself questions like:
- What have they not covered that their audience would like to know?
- How can I add context to a popular piece of content with a new article?
- Will this content idea help them make money by featuring their product or service, or driving clicks through to landing pages?
Once you have your ideas, you can send your pitch using one of these guest blogging email templates.
2. Reach out to “Best finance blog” lists
If you have a blog on your website and are publishing deep, unique, and helpful content (as you should if you take SEO seriously), then you can get some easy links by pitching your blog to “best finance blog” lists like this one:
The best part about list outreach is that people search these when they’re actively looking for blogs to read, so it’s very likely that you’ll get some referral traffic.
If your content is good, that traffic will convert into email subscribers that you can continue to nurture by sending them the content that you publish on your blog.
You can find lists of blogs by searching Google for things like “best finance blogs”, “best blogs about money”, or “best investment blogs”.
Work through the results on the first page and send the writer or editor a friendly email pitching your blog to be added to the list.
3. Pitch your content to resource pages
Resource pages are pages that exist simply to link out to helpful resources on the internet. These pages are designed to be a list of helpful content to a website’s audience.
For example, MIT links to finance resources that may be helpful to their students on this page:
You can see that they link to a number of different websites here, so if you have some content that’s helpful to students, it would make sense to pitch that to be added here.
If you have a piece of content that’s a great fit for the page, you won’t have to try so hard to get your backlinks.
The first step is to find resource pages in your niche that link out to external sources.
Resource pages often contain phrases like “helpful links” or “resources” on the page itself, so we can use some Google search strings to find them.
Here are a few to try:
- Finance inurl:resources
- Finance “best resources”
- Finance” helpful resources”
- Finance intitle:links
- Finance “helpful links”
From there, we sift through the search results and pick out the ones that look like they’d be interested in adding a link to your content.
Once you’ve found one that’s a fit, send the webmaster a pitch asking for your link to be added!
If you need help drafting your email pitch, Backlinko’s resource page link building guide has some great templates that can give you a solid start.
Be sure to customize the pitch and rework the template. Templates become popular when published online and, over time, stop working as website owners become used to them.
4. Digital PR
Digital PR in the context of finance link building is exactly what it sounds like. It’s PR targeted at digital outlets.
An effective digital PR campaign is often the source of the most powerful backlinks you can get.
Not only do the links come from news sites that are super high domain authority (or domain rating, depending on your tool of choice), but because of the urgency in the news cycle, these links also get placed very quickly.
This means that if you’re successful in executing a digital PR campaign, your search rankings improve much faster than with other tactics.
These sites usually have a sizable audience of their own, and journalists share the stories on social media very frequently, so you may get some referral traffic as well.
This tactic is used in industries where link building is particularly difficult, like gambling, health, and yes, finance.
It gets placements like this.
Before you can run a digital PR campaign effectively, you need to brainstorm a newsworthy, data-focused story that journalists in the finance niche will want to pick up.
When brainstorming digital PR ideas, find story ideas that leverage data in a way that evokes one of these emotions:
- Awe 🤯
- Surprise 😲
- Anger 😡
- Anxiety 😰
- Interest 🤔
The above example gets a combination of interest, surprise, and awe by showcasing lots of huge numbers from lottery winnings. This is a great example of using data that’s tied to finance to build a relevant story.
Here are some examples of ways you can use data to generate some finance industry digital PR story ideas that influencers, journalists, and bloggers will love:
- Build a Financial Trends Analysis Report: Compile and analyze data from various sources to create a comprehensive report on current financial trends. This report could cover topics such as stock market performance, consumer spending habits, interest rate fluctuations, or emerging investment opportunities. Use visualizations such as charts, graphs, and infographics to present the data in an engaging and easy-to-understand format.
- Run a Personal Finance Survey: Conduct a survey to gather data on personal finance habits, attitudes, and challenges among consumers. Ask questions about budgeting, saving, investing, debt management, and financial goals. Analyze the survey results to identify key trends, insights, and pain points within your target audience. Use the findings to create a data-driven press release or whitepaper highlighting the most compelling statistics and takeaways. You can use SurveyMonkey for this.
- Rank the Performance of Different Investment Types: Develop a ranking or comparison of investment products, such as mutual funds, ETFs, or robo-advisors, based on their performance over a specific time period. Utilize data from reputable sources or conduct your own analysis to evaluate factors such as returns, risk-adjusted performance, expense ratios, and fund management. Publish the rankings on your website or blog, accompanied by detailed analysis and commentary on the methodology used.
Whatever idea you go with, make sure you include some graphics, as graphics are one of the most common forms of media journalists request. High-quality content is the key to success in digital PR campaigns.
Once you have your story published, reach out to finance publications and investment websites to share the rankings and offer to provide insights or quotes from your team on the implications for investors.
5. Bait links with content
If you can’t build backlinks from outreach, you can absolutely bait journalists and bloggers to link to your website by putting your content marketing hat on and publishing data-driven content.
For one of our clients, we published a guide on boat maintenance costs, and as a result, the asset got linked to from outlets like Bankrate, Progressive, and Consumer Affairs; all with zero outreach!
So essentially, after publishing the content, we were getting backlinks for free.
If you’re in finance, you already know the value of something being free.
The trick here is to aim your keyword research at keywords that journalists and bloggers are searching for.
While journalists and bloggers write, they search for data to prove a point to their readers, so data-focused keywords make the most sense here.
So using your a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, or Ubersuggest, find keywords that have words like “statistics” or “cost” in them that indicate the searcher may be looking for data to link to.
If you want to run a link bait campaign, you can read more about how to execute this campaign in our link bait guide.
Conclusion
Ready to start earning valuable, relevant backlinks to your finance website?
Start with the easy tactics at the beginning of this article to quickly build up your backlink profile, like guest blogging and list outreach. As you gain confidence and develop an understanding of how the link outreach process works, move on to the more complex techniques near the end.
With the right digital marketing and SEO strategy to win finance backlinks, you can compete against the best of them and come out on top.
Whatever backlink strategy you decide to run with, if you feel the need to outsource this instead of doing it in-house, check our our link building services or digital PR services where we run the above campaigns for you!
