Fintech SEO is search work for technology-led financial products: payment and money transfer apps, business accounts, currency cards, budgeting and savings apps, open banking tools and the infrastructure behind them. I help UK fintech teams get the right pages found by people comparing providers, and I structure and write those pages so they can pass a compliance review without losing what made them useful. If you are a bank, insurer, broker or wealth manager rather than a product company, my page on SEO for banks, insurers and regulated financial firms is the better fit.
How people look for fintech products in the UK
Most fintech searches with buying intent are comparisons. Someone choosing a business current account or a way to pay suppliers abroad rarely starts with a brand name. They type “best business bank account for sole traders”, “cheapest way to send money to India” or “alternatives to” a provider they already use. These comparison keywords carry real buying intent, and they are also the hardest to win.
The first page for them is usually held by comparison sites, personal finance publishers and the largest providers. A newer product rarely beats those on the broad term early on. What it can realistically compete for is the narrower search those sites cover thinly: a specific use case (“multi-currency account for online sellers”), a specific integration (“business account that connects to Xero”), a specific country, or a specific problem (“how to pay a freelancer in the Philippines”).
The second pattern starts once someone has heard of you. They search your name with “review”, “safe”, “fees”, “legit” or “FCA regulated”. Those searches often decide whether a sign-up happens, and on many fintech sites the answer comes from a forum thread or a review platform because the company has no page that addresses the question plainly.
Part of the journey also happens away from your website, in the App Store and Google Play, in AI answers and through referral links. The website still matters, because it is where Google, journalists, comparison writers and AI tools go to confirm what you are and whether you are regulated.
What is different about SEO for a fintech
Some of your pages may be financial promotions
Under section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, a communication that invites or induces someone to engage in investment activity is a financial promotion. It has to be made or approved by an authorised firm, and a firm approving another company’s promotions now needs the regulator’s permission to do so. Investment, credit and cryptoasset products usually sit squarely inside this regime. Payment and e-money products are mainly governed by other rules, but the Financial Conduct Authority still expects their communications to be clear, fair and not misleading, and the Consumer Duty shapes how retail customers are treated.
For SEO this matters because a blog post, a comparison table or a rates page can be a promotion just as much as an advert can. A guide that ranks well and is then pulled by compliance is wasted work. I am not a compliance adviser and I do not approve promotions. What I do is agree the sign-off route before writing, flag every claim that needs evidence, keep a record of what changed on each page, and build review time into the content plan so it does not stall.
Crypto has its own regime
Since October 2023, cryptoasset promotions to UK consumers have been inside the financial promotion regime, with prescribed risk warnings and a cooling-off period for first-time investors. If your product touches crypto, I treat every search-facing page as a promotion until your compliance lead says otherwise, and I ask how your promotions are made lawful before writing anything aimed at UK consumers.
Google holds money content to a higher standard
Google’s quality rater guidelines group financial topics under “Your Money or Your Life”, where a poor page could cause real harm. In practice that means E-E-A-T signals carry more weight: named authors with relevant expertise, a reviewer where the topic needs one, visible update dates, your registration details, how customer money is protected and how to complain. Mass-produced guides with no visible owner are a poor bet in this sector.
Rates and fees go out of date
Exchange rates, fees, interest rates and limits change. A page that shows last quarter’s fee is a trust problem and possibly a compliance one. I prefer rates pulled from your live data and rendered in the page HTML with a timestamp, so Google sees the same figure a customer does, rather than numbers typed into copy and forgotten.
Money transfer and payments
Money transfer shows how fintech search works more clearly than any other product. People search by destination and by need: “send money to Nigeria”, “GBP to PKR rate today”, “transfer money to a Polish bank account”. Each destination wants its own page, and a provider covering fifty countries can end up with thousands of near-identical URLs once currency pairs and payout methods are multiplied out.
That is programmatic SEO, and it only works when each page earns its place. A useful destination page carries the live rate and fee, delivery times, the payout options in that country (bank deposit, mobile wallet, cash pickup), what the recipient needs, and answers to the questions people ask about sending money there. Pages that only swap the country name tend to be treated as duplicates and left out of the index. I would rather you launch the destinations that carry most of your volume, built properly, than hundreds of thin ones.
Business payments and payments infrastructure are a different audience. The buyer is a finance director, a founder or a developer, and the search is often technical: an API, a payout method, an integration, a regulatory question about safeguarding. Developer documentation and integration pages can be some of the most valuable search assets you have. If your product is sold as software on a subscription, much of the approach on my SEO for SaaS products page applies as well.
How I run fintech SEO
- Compliance route first. We agree who approves content, how long it takes, which page types count as promotions and which claims are off limits.
- Technical review. I crawl the marketing site, help centre and any subdomains, and check what Google actually renders and indexes. Fintech sites are often built on JavaScript frameworks, so technical SEO fixes for crawling, rendering and indexing usually come before any new writing.
- Keyword mapping. I group searches by product, use case and destination, give each intent one page, and mark where the comparison sites are beatable and where they are not.
- Trust pages. Regulatory status, how funds are safeguarded or protected, fees, security and complaints, written plainly enough to answer the “is it safe” searches.
- Content plan with sign-off built in. Briefs for each page, with the claims that need evidence marked, and a realistic calendar that includes review time.
- Measurement. I report on organic sign-ups and applications, not just visits, using Search Console and the consented analytics data UK privacy rules allow.
Mistakes that hold fintech sites back
- A marketing site built as a single-page app, so Google receives an almost empty page until scripts run. How JavaScript affects SEO explains why that slows or blocks indexing.
- A help centre on a third-party subdomain that is set to noindex or never linked from the main site, so the plain answers about fees and limits never rank.
- No page answering “is it safe” or “is it regulated”, with the firm reference number hidden in footer small print.
- Saying the product is “FCA approved”. The FCA authorises or registers firms; it does not approve products, and the phrase can mislead.
- Destination or location pages multiplied from one template with nothing unique on them.
- Fees and rates typed into copy and left to go stale.
- Bringing compliance in after launch, so pages are rewritten or removed just as they start to rank.
Next step
Send me your site and tell me which product and which customers matter most this year. I will look at how Google sees it, what is holding the key pages back and where compliance will shape the work, and tell you what I would fix first. Request a free SEO audit of your fintech site to start.