Link Building for Financial Services (Benefits, Tips & Tactics)

Do you work in financial services? Are you looking for ways to build links and improve your SEO? If so, you’ve come to the right place!

In this blog post, we’ll discuss 5 effective link building tactics for the FinTech niche you can’t afford to ignore. You’ll also learn what tactics work best for financial companies such as Bankly and CryptoMonday.

Read on to uncover valuable insights.

Why is Link Building for Financial Websites Important?

For starters, link building helps build trust and credibility with potential clients. Plus, high-quality backlinks are imperative to improving search engine rankings since links are a part of the PageRank algorithm. Let’s learn more benefits.

Increases credibility

Financial services are a highly competitive industry, and clients often choose to work with the businesses that they perceive as being the most reputable and trustworthy. By actively building links, you get featured on leading media outlets and niche-related blogs that show potential clients they can trust you with their finances.

Generates referral traffic

By getting featured on authority websites and having your links included in listicles that rank in the Top 15, you both grow the visibility of your brand and give potential clients a way to find your site. This results in referral traffic.

Improves keyword rankings

Link building improves keyword rankings by giving your site more authority since links are a part of the PageRank algorithm. Meaning backlinks act as votes that tell Google your site is a credible source of information for the keywords you’re targeting. Building links to pages other than your homepage improves the weight (aka significance) of your inner pages, which drives keyword rankings and organic traffic. Internal links can also be used to pass link equity to important pages.

Creates long-lasting relationships

You cannot land links from top-tier blogs unless you establish relationships with editors/bloggers or are introduced to them by peers. Once you have those relationships, you can come up with advanced content collaborations like original research and simply build more links, thanks to a growing partnership network.

Now let’s see what types of financial companies are essential to building links if they want to survive in the wild and ruthless SERPs.

Types of Financial Services that Might Require Backlinks

SEO is a key driver for lead generation for mentioned companies on the list below. Want it or not but backlinks will supercharge your growth in the SERPs, whereas ignoring them will result in failure (aka poor rankings).

Service #1: Fintech startups

Let’s take a look at how backlinks contribute to Atomic Finance’s growth — a payroll data connectivity solution for users who need to connect their payroll account to apps. Organic traffic distribution correlates with backlink growth.

The correlation of backlinks and organic traffic of Atomic Finance.

Service #2: Commercial and digital banks

Commercial and digital banks need backlinks to cut through the competition in organic search for niched services like business loans for startups, auto and boat loans, or corporate banking for agriculture companies.

Service #3: Cryptocurrency exchanges

Cryptocurrency exchanges are a booming business, and backlinks play an important role in attracting new users. The reason remains the same — the more links you have, the higher chances you’ll rank for the first page. The ranking algorithm works identically for all niches, and to back up our statement, below is a straightforward example of how links add up to overall organic traffic growth and keyword distribution throughout the top 100 for the Gemini crypto exchange platform.

The more links point to the domain, the higher visibility is in the SERP.

Service #4: Financial advisors

Backlinks help financial advisors increase their visibility and credibility in the industry by conquering the SERPs, but there’s a catch. Link building is effective only if a company invests in content marketing at the same time. This approach helps cover all related keywords to the services if producing relevant articles at least every week. So, planning to flood landing pages with links without content marketing in place is a losing battle since competitors who develop so-called «content hubs'' will gain more trust from Google.

Service #5: Financial news & media

Backlinks to financial news & media sites help increase the visibility of their content in search engines, reaching the target audience in bigger numbers and bringing in more traffic. More readers lead to higher ad revenues and other forms of monetization.

Let’s now discuss winning tactics to secure inbound links for financial services in-house.

5 Link Building Tactics for Financial Services

All tactics listed in this chapter are tried and tested by us at Digital Olympus and prominent financial companies. Let’s learn what’s in each.

Tactic #1: Building links from SaaS sites

At Digital Olympus, we see this tactic as number one to all B2B companies. When you earn links from corporate websites like SaaS, you double or even triple the link building impact.

SaaS companies invest heavily in search engine optimization, link building, and brand awareness. This influences their trustworthiness in Google’s eyes, so such sites constantly grow in domain authority. This means links acquired from SaaS companies via guest blogging pass more link equity to your site over time.

Start building links from niche-relevant SaaS with a DR of 20−30, and in 3−6 months, these links may turn out to be from DR50−70+ domains.

Here’s your go-to strategy:

1. Find companies that offer niche-relevant products/services to yours and check if they have a blog.
2. If they do, check if you can contribute a guest post.
3. Contact their content marketers or editors and pitch a guest post.

Pro Tip: Offer SaaS companies white-hat link exchanges to boost link placement conversions. That means you will mention them in your feature guest posts and vice-versa. Present this idea as a growth opportunity for both parties.

Tactic #2: Guest posts

This tactic is similar to the previous one but implies acquiring links to finance websites like media outlets, personal finance blogs, and blogs of B2B service providers. Some examples of websites that accept guest posts include Financial Times, Forbes Financial, Bloomberg Businessweek, and PayPal and Payoneer’s blogs.

To find relevant finance blogs, follow these steps:

1. Search for keywords related to your niche.
2. Check out the list of first-page results and select those that suit your services.
3. Check out their guidelines and requirements for submitting a guest post.
4. If there’s no such thing, analyze top-performing content manually or with Ahrefs filtering blog pages that rank for the most keywords/gather the most traffic, or amass plenty of social shares.

You can scrape the SERPs with paid and free tools like PitchBox, Scrape for SEO, SEOquake Toolbar, or by manually using search operators:

• {keyword} «write for us» (e.g., board games «write for us»)
• {Keyword} «guest post»
• {Keyword} «guest article»
• {Keyword} «guest post opportunities»
• {Keyword} «submit blog post»
• {Keyword} «contribute to our site»

Apart from that, you can get a wide range of relevant sites by googling long-tail keywords or full-fledged search queries like «how to transfer money online.» This way, you compile blogs that write in your niche in no time. To get only up-to-date results (i.e., blogs that constantly refresh their content), filter search engine result pages by date of posting using Tools. Choose the Past month or set a Custom range.

How to filter fresh content on Google

Pro Tip: Install the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar plugin for browsers to access metrics like domain authority (DR), organic traffic, and the number of keywords the target ranks for right in Google search. This saves time on website evaluation.

A snapshot of the SERP with the Ahrefs Toolbar turned on

Tactic #3: Linkable assets

Linkable assets are an effective way to build backlinks for financial services since they attract the enormous attention of peers and journalists when done right. Examples of linkable assets include:

• Interactive calculators
• Educational infographics
• In-depth tutorials and guides
• Research-based reports (original product data or survey-based)

These assets will help you get featured in other publications and build long-term relationships with editors since they provide unique value/knowledge/data. For instance, free online tools like calculators or templates will appear in lots of listicles organically.

Payoneer’s survey-based research has earned 82 backlinks from high-DR sites like Forbes, Finance Yahoo, and Hubstaff.

«We like to focus resources on producing linkable content and promoting it on the appropriate channels. By conducting an in-depth analysis of a cryptocurrency, we can provide investors with the critical information they need to make smart financial decisions.

Our content typically includes whitepaper summaries, background information on the project’s founders and team, its roadmap, and historical price data. This is extremely valuable for our audience, and we share it freely to generate links to our website." — Jonathan Merry, Co-Founder of CryptoMonday.

Pro Tip: If you decide on building free tools, start earning links to them by listicles link building. Scrape the SERPs for relevant listicles using queries like «financial modeling templates,» «ROI free calculators,» and so on. Since you don’t promote paid tools, it’s easier to persuade webmasters to update their pieces and include your tool.

Tactic #4: Unlinked mentions

Unlinked mentions are references to your brand on websites or blogs that don’t include a link. You can use tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs to find unlinked mentions of your brand and then contact the blog owners to request a link. This is an effective way to build links as it takes relatively little effort, and the results can be significant.

«At Bankly, we use reliable journalist outreach tools like HAB2BW to send finance-related pitches to obtain high-quality backlinks. However, we sometimes get unlinked brand mentions, as not all journalists are proactive in providing live links. This limits you from generating traffic and attracting the right prospects. With that, if a website gives you an unlinked brand mention, I’d recommend you follow up with the journalist via email.» — Allan Stolc, Founder and CEO of Bankly

1. Find brand mentions manually with advanced search operators

Paste the following string in the Google search bar to find out which sites mention your brand without linking to it.

intext:{brand name} - {own domain name}.com -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com -linkedin.com

Example:

intext:Lemlist -lemlist.com -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com -linkedin.com

How to find unlinked brand mentions manually using Google search operators.

2. Automate unlinked brand mentions search with Ahrefs

Save dozens of hours compared to the manual search and complete two tasks at once — finding and vetting domains.

1. Navigate to Ahrefs Content Explorer and paste your brand name.
2. Create filters: Published (e.g., Last 30 days), Language, Only live.
3. Click on «Highlight unlinked» and type your domain name.
4. Select link prospects with high domain authority (DR) and topical relevance.

How to find unlinked brand mentions with Ahrefs.

In particular, this method is actionable for companies with recognizable brands since they get lots of brand mentions organically.

Tactic #5: Broken link building

Broken link building is a technique where you look for websites that have broken outbound links and offer to replace them with your own. This is a great way to build links from high-quality sites because it involves finding pages that are already relevant to your niche.

The easiest way by far to find outbound broken links is to use Ahrefs’s Best by links report and apply a «404 not found» filter. This allows you to uncover hundreds of link building opportunities by analyzing competing and niche websites. Check this screenshot out. We’ve got a whopping 432 unique domains that refer to three broken pages. 432 opportunities for placing links!

CoSchedule’s backlink profile: 432 domains refer to broken pages.

Once you’ve identified the broken links, you can contact the website owners and offer your quality content as a replacement.

Pro Tip: Contact websites where broken links were dofollow since nofollow links don’t pass link juice.

«But wait. How to understand what content they referred to before so I can provide relevant pieces to link to?» you may ask. Utilize the Wayback machine to uncover the content of dead web pages and decide whether you’re willing to create a better piece to get website owners to replace dead links with yours.

Ahrefs' homepage in 2019. A snapshot from the Wayback machine.

These five tactics guarantee high-quality backlinks for the finance industry. You can also try building high-quality links to directories by producing press releases about integrations and other forms of partnerships, or giving a try to HARO by subscribing to journalist requests to the financial sector.

Wise and Plaid collaboration brought 34 backlinks.

Before you go (and ask us at Digital Olympus to land you superb backlinks built from SaaS sites), read through three essential aspects of successful link building campaigns.

What to Pay Attention to Before Acquiring Backlinks

Here, we’ve detailed the three vital steps to get started with link building. Treat it as a concise but actionable link building checklist.

Devise a link building strategy

To get the most out of your link building efforts, you need a plan so you know if you’re on the right track. Start by researching your competitors and determining what kind of backlinks they have acquired, what quantity, and what the rankings of their most linked-to pages are. This will give you an idea of which sites to target when building links and what tactics to use.

Find relevant and high-authority websites

Then, prepare a database of link prospects. Make sure all sites are:

• Niche-relevant
• With >DR20−30+
• Have decent organic traffic. You can start from 1,000 monthly organic traffic if you build links from corporate blogs (e.g., new SaaS products on the market)
• Organic traffic comes from the countries you target. Avoid building links to sites with the biggest portion of visitors from other countries than your market (i.e., don’t build links with Indian traffic when you market in America — or you’ll end up with Indian traffic).

On top of that, the top 20 referring pages of each link prospect have to be relevant to the site’s niche and not come from spammy, low-quality websites.

These simple rules ensure you build backlinks to credible sites.

Perfect your outreach efforts

Successful link building starts with personalized email outreach. This means sending out emails that are personalized and relevant to each site you’re contacting:

• The site owner’s name included
• Opening lines are tailored to the kind of content they publish on sites and social media
• You avoid generic, templated messages from the web
• Follow-ups are also tailored to recent events (published content on blogs or personal/companies pages on LinkedIn/Twitter
• Present value apart from a guest post (e.g., including an article in your newsletter, posting on social media, giving a link from another guest post, etc.)

Yes, personalization takes time, a mountain of it, but sending out templated emails costs you even more. A 1−5% reply rate is what you can expect from mass spammy outreach based on our experience. On top of that, you burn the other 95% of contacts jeopardizing your company’s reputation. Personalize messages to maximize link building results.

Now Over to You

Link building is an essential part of SEO for FinTech to increase organic traffic and improve search engine rankings. Opting for original data research can lead to surpassing results in both backlinks and brand awareness. Follow the steps outlined above to ensure that your link building efforts are efficient.

Looking for a reliable partner to hand link building over? Book a call with our Senior Link Building Strategist to discuss your project.

Not sure if you’re ready to delegate link building? Read on when it’s the right time to outsource backlinks, according to 7 SEO experts.