The investment niche is rather vast. Valued in trillions of dollars and growing at a high annual growth rate, this market can be incredibly challenging to enter and thrive in for small companies, not to mention the power, influence, and huge assets concentrated in the hands of big niche players that are hard to compete with. And it’s hard to undervalue the importance of trust in this sector. Trust that takes years to build and may not be instantly available to startups.
Given the tough competition and its high cost, the best chance for investment startups to gain a foothold in this market is by focusing on organic growth rather than complex and expensive marketing campaigns. And that’s where content marketing and top SEO software are your friends.
Wise and coherent content marketing is a pathway to educating your prospects, building trust, appearing high in search results, and distinguishing yourself from the pack. And SEO software for startups is what helps you watch your competitors and identify growth opportunities, eliminating the guesswork. This article will help you refine your SEO content strategy to get noticed in a crowded market.
Why Investment Startups Need Content Marketing
A good content strategy is the cornerstone of awareness and growth in our digital world. It’s meant to perform a number of big roles simultaneously:
- Educating people on what you do
- Simplifying complex topics
- Building trust with your audience
- Establishing yourself as an authoritative expert in the field
All these things are crucial for a startup’s viability. After all, when you are new to the market, it can be hard to make a statement and be heard. Moreover, competing with big and reputable companies for the market’s spotlight is also hard, especially in the offline world. Digital copy, however, can give you the same opportunities to get noticed and capture prospects’ attention.
Lastly, startup SEO is also one of the most cost-effective ways to generate leads. By getting your copy in front of the target audience, you attract organic traffic that has the potential to convert into sales. This is much cheaper and more ROI-effective than paid advertising. And it’s a big point for investment startups watching every dollar.
SEO-Focused Content Plan
So, how to get started with SEO for finance? Growing your startup via content should begin with building an effective strategy that targets trust and organic traffic. First off, carry out a keyword research:
- Map out broad themes relevant to your business. Depending on the type of products and services your startup offers, related topics can involve anything from corporate and international finance to risk management, retirement savings, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain. At this point, you need to define what topics your TA might be researching when looking for a company like yours.
- Leverage SEO software to reinforce your keyword research with data. Paste the topics you brainstormed earlier into your software to assess their performance metrics. SEO tools will tell you about the search volume, difficulty, and competition of different queries. For faster growth, you should choose terms with low difficulty and competition (they are easier to rank for) and with high search volumes (for a broader reach).
- Perform competitor analysis early to know how to navigate a crowded market more efficiently. All you need is to find your top-performing competitors and use the same SEO tools for content marketing to analyze their websites. This procedure will help you do two things – see which primary and secondary search terms your main competitors rank for and detect keyword gaps. The latter is especially important. Queries that are missing in your competitors’ strategies but have good metrics are low-hanging fruit that can bring you fast growth.
- Research informational and long-tail keywords separately. Queries that are 3+ words long are less vague and typically have smaller search volumes. Nevertheless, thanks to their specificity, these are the phrases people look for when they move closer to being converted and making a purchase. That is, including them in your SEO content strategy can help drive sales. For example, relevant long-tail keywords for investment startups may look like “how to start investing in stocks as a beginner,” “best investment options for retirement,” and even purchase-focused queries like “best company to invest in stocks in the US.”
After you find all your target keywords, you need to move on to SEO content planning. First of all, organize queries into groups based on their topic and user intent. For example, you can separate informational queries that will be primarily used to inform prospects through educational blog posts and other authority content from strong-intent queries that will be used on landing pages.
When ready, start implementing your startup SEO by optimizing your old articles and pages. You want to naturally integrate relevant keywords into headings, subheadings, meta titles and descriptions, image alt text, internal link anchors, etc. Just don’t overdo it. Remember that keyword stuffing is a mediocre optimization tactic that can cause penalties. It’s best to select one to two primary keywords and several secondary keywords per page/piece of content and take it from there.
Strategic Approach of Building Backlinks in a Regulated Industry
Link building plays another pivotal role in startup SEO. Primarily, it’s because backlinks from websites with a solid reputation give you a broader reach and also tell prospects – this company is authoritative and worth trusting. It’s that crucial push you need to start generating revenue.
So, how do you fit link building into your SEO content strategy? While it can feel a bit tricky for investment startups, there are a few tactics you should try:
- A focus on top-notch linkable assets. Creating authoritative and high-quality content and assets is a way to receive backlinks organically. The concept is simple. You use your expertise to deliver something unique—a case study, industry insights, guide, calculator—anything that aligns with your niche, provides value, and shows your unique experience. Then, other websites and bloggers might feature you in their articles.
- Networking and active pitching of your copy. While creating quality articles is a passive link-building strategy, there is also a proactive approach. Some tactics that you can use include:
- Writing quality blog posts for trusted sites.
- Finding competitor articles featured elsewhere, writing something better, and offering to replace the link.
- Hunting for broken links of your competitors through competitor analysis and offering replacements.
- PR practices. Finally, investment startups can create links and mentions through PR. In particular, you can create news stories (e.g., product launch, first successes, etc.) and send them to different media or become an expert source for journalists. Both tactics can help you get links while significantly boosting awareness and credibility.
Whichever tactics you try, one of the best SEO tips for link-building is to identify the best link partners. Better, get fewer mentions in total. But make sure they come from truly worthy, relevant, and reputable sites. This is essential for growing your own trustworthiness.
Lastly, when your link-building efforts are in place, you also have to establish an ongoing and regular performance monitoring procedure. You need to use SEO tools for content marketing to keep an eye on your backlink profile and detect areas for improvement in your strategy. The top SEO metrics to track backlinks include:
- The number of referring domains.
- The number of backlinks.
- Type, positioning, and other important characteristics of the link.
- Referral traffic.
- Page and domain authority.
Conclusion
Content marketing sets you apart from the competition, helps create awareness, drives organic traffic, and establishes you as an authoritative business. A combination of these benefits can give your startup the foundation it needs to survive the competition and thrive. Not to mention that a good copy can eventually convert more leads for you, bringing you a steady profit channel.
Yet, simply creating articles (even good ones) isn’t quite enough for sustainable growth. The basic aspects of search engine optimization, such as keyword research and optimization, and link building, are essential for getting your startup noticed on the web. Leverage the tips and strategies we shared with you here to build a content strategy that brings the results you are aiming for!
