Loans & Financing SEO Guide

One way to gauge how competitive SEO for an industry will be is to consider how much money is made within that industry. The more money that can be made, the more competitive it will be. And what can bring in more money that money itself! Working on SEO for banking, loan providers, mortgages and financing in general is also difficult decause of the number of affiliates looking to cash-in on referrals. Many of these tack advantage of everything they can to rank well, including black-hat techniques and spamming.

While other industries discussed on this site tend to be localized, nationwide financial institutions are fighting hard to top rankings for very general terms like "loans" and "mortgages". Competitive variations of these also exist, like "car loan", "student loan", "payday loan", "loan calculator" and many others.

The intense competition has resulted in a few major players buying up more than just links, but whole sites and premium domains. If a website begins ranking well for terms being targeted by a bank (even if the bank is already ranked #1) it's not unheard of for the site to be snatched up. Aaron Wall has a good post about this phenomenon.

There's no real reason for the institutions to push for ethical practices by the affiliates when they're bringing in business, so don't expect the loan spam emails to stop anytime soon.

So how can anyone compete in this space? You'll need a clearly defined strategy from the get-go, and a sizeable budget. Create multiple sites, on seperate hosts, targeting various, less competitive, financial terms. Each should provide useful information on their respective topics, tools and news items for those interested. A "mother" site targeting stronger terms can be built and linked to from these "child" sites. As each becomes stronger through independent content generation and link building efforts, this strength will be passed on to the mother site (which should not link back to its children). The mother site is also benefiting from it's own content and link building. As the main site gains trust and rankings, try targeting more difficult terms.