How can independent community banks, credit unions and savings and loans gain top rankings on search engines?
1. Advertise their web sites in their print and broadcast ads and in everything they mail.
2. Load their web sites with strong, timely and frequently updated content.
3. Blog about their customers, local events, communities and financial topics.
4. Sponsor local bloggers and message boards and exchange links with them.
5. Actively and prominently link with their local small business customers.
Here are some more thoughts:
Search engine optimization is more of an art than a science. While there are a lot of technical and marketing tactics that can improve a small bank’s ranking on Google, Yahoo and Ask.com, there also are things that independent banks that want to promote their home equity loans, savings and checking accounts and private banking services can do to improve their rankings on search engines.
1. Use localized pay per click advertising on Yahoo and Google.
2. Make your web site a prominent information resource by letting users review local products and services. This requires the use of software that lets site visitors review anything, including your services. Such software is available for message boards, but what about other kinds of sites?
3. Run or sponsor a message board where anyone and town can talk about and complain about anything. This would have to be set up to attract traffic while protecting the sponsor against customer bad will and libel suits. It would have to be moderated at least lightly.
3, Blog about local organizations. Review restaurants, plays, resorts, service organizations, health care providers. These reviews would have to be positive. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say. This would require a lot of work by a good writer who knows how to make friends and influence people and sell other web sites and businesses on the benefits of linking to your site—which is the reason for doing all the work. That is, you write about businesses that have web sites and are likely to exchange the home page links that will improve your rankings on search engines.
