In the financial world, expansion is known to be the ultimate badge of honour because it denotes two things — growth and new market reach.
In other words, expansion is the blaring light that signals that a particular financial sector or business has achieved growth remarkable enough to push it into entering new market spaces. In today’s digital era, one of the economic sectors leading this charge is the Fintech industry.
With the spike in online banking, digital wallets and mobile payments, the Fintech industry has become an international sensation.
The sector has experienced substantial revenue growth in its market segments over the years, which has made it quite the ‘Universal buzz’.
In fact, since the 20th century, the fintech space has kept ticking success boxes.
In 2022, McKinsey & Company estimated it accounted for 5% of the world’s banking sector’s net worth, which is a whopping 150 to 205 billion dollars. That is an incredible ‘humble beginning’ if you ask me.
Despite these tremendous achievements, entering newer markets always poses a difficult task, especially when the expansion is hanging on the edge of several international borders. In a bid to break into these new market areas, Fintech organisations are faced with the daunting challenge of connecting with customers of diverse languages and regions.
This is where Localising Content SEO comes in handy. It has become the ‘smart’ strategy that fintech industries can utilise to win organic traffic and dominate the global market.
Let’s clear up your confusion about this strategy.
What does localising content SEO mean?
It is your adaptation of online content to meet the unique preferences of the local market. Some other definitions would add that it is the act of creating and utilising website content, especially to attract local customers.
Picture it this way: Bank A, a British bank, wants to sell its digital services in a Chinese market. Localising content SEO here means that Bank A has to adapt its online content, language, and cultural references to Chinese preferences if it wants to witness an overflow in sales.
How can fintech companies utilise localised content SEO to drive organic traffic on a global scale?
Localising your Fintech SEO demands that you succumb to a nuanced approach because entering different market spaces across the world comes with complexities, such as other languages, local currencies, dates and formats. Therefore, to ensure that the fintech industries achieve this, here is an array of strategies that can be used to penetrate various markets all over the globe:
1. Running Local Keyword Research
In the online world, keywords are very essential for content SEO. They are the bridge that connects users’ search to the contents of your organisation’s website and helps search engines give a rank to your pages for relevant queries.
This, in turn, boosts the visibility of your organisation and increases traffic.
Bringing this down to gaining recognition and engagements in new markets, organisations should ensure that thorough research is carried out on the local keywords used in the specific region they are targeting before diving head-first into offering their services.
This includes identifying the financial terminologies or region-specific terms used in that zone, like the slang name they use for money or local dialect names used for certain financial products.
You can achieve this by using helpful tools such as Google Keywords Planner, Ahrefs and SEMrush to discover and explore local search trends that could be helpful to your organisation.
2. On-Page Optimisation:
This strategy is what I call the ‘production stage.’ It’s the stage where everything needed to draw the attention of the locals is infused on the content page.
It’s all the measures you employ within the content page to improve its position in the search ranking and reach a wider audience.
This means that the page in question must comprise information relatable to the market space you want it to reach.
On-page optimisation comes with several sub-components, including images, content/body information, external and internal links, header tags, etc.
However, there are a number of them you must watch out for while localising content SEO, and they are:
Title tags: These are the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) elements that specify the title of your web page.
It’s so important because it helps search engines and consumers understand the purpose of your webpage.
Therefore, it is important that in creating these title tags, words that resonate with your target market or local keywords are used.
Meta descriptions: Many times, once the search engine result page is on display, there is a snippet of text underneath the page title. Those texts are known as meta descriptions in SEO terms.
They are used to inform and interest the user enough to engage on that page. Similarly, while drafting out these descriptions, local keyword usage should be a priority.
Internal links: If your fintech organisation offers a wide variety of services, then this is very important. Internal links are hyperlinks that are used to navigate to different pages within the same website, almost like a redirection link to a certain type of service.
Another arm of this component that can be utilised is location-specific landing pages.
This is when a page on your website directs users to another page within the same domain. It can be employed to direct viewers to the local addresses near them, featuring contact information and hours of operation.
This will give the locals of those regions easy access to the services you provide nearest to them.
Google Business Profile (GBP) Maximisation
This strategy is scarcely used because not many companies believe that it can bring massive traffic to their pages. In reality, it is a significant strategy used in building traffic on your page.
This is because a good percentage of the world’s population uses Google browsers to make their findings; it is also one of the most popular browsers in existence.
Therefore, utilising the Google Business Profile gives companies an added advantage in new marketplaces if leveraged.
Organisations can harness this option by including the relevant categories they have and the services they offer while utilising local keywords related to the target market or regions.
Localising content SEO offers any company, not just Fintech companies, a wellspring of benefits, including increasing their online visibility and building trust and credibility with the local audience.
It is one of the major tactics that guarantees improvement in organic traffic in diverse markets only if it is harnessed by industries globally.
*Kelechi Anyikude is a seasoned digital technology expert with a background in digital and growth marketing. Kelechi specializes in crafting targeted marketing strategies that leverage the power of SEO, social media, and content marketing. He is passionate about staying ahead of industry trends and regularly contributes insights to marketing publications and speaks at conferences worldwide.
