Hiring a Financial Services SEO Agency: What to Ask and Red Flags

The right financial services SEO agency builds compliance sign-off into its process, reports on enquiries rather than estimated traffic, and writes with your team's own expertise instead of generic or AI-generated content. Before you sign, ask how they handle compliance review, what they'll report on, and what happens if you want to leave. The answers separate a finance specialist from a generalist with a finance label.

This guide is written for the firm doing the hiring, not the agency pitching. Six in ten of our SEO clients came to us after another agency, so we have seen what goes wrong: guaranteed rankings, rigid contracts and reports that show a chart instead of enquiries. Here is how to vet an agency, the questions we would ask in your position and the red flags to walk away from.

How do I know if an SEO agency understands financial services?

Listen to how they talk about your content workflow. That tells you more than any portfolio.

A good agency also shows you demand first. "Financial advisor near me" is searched 9,900 times a month in the UK and "independent financial adviser" 4,400 (Ubersuggest, October 2026). If an agency can't tell you how many people search for what you offer, it hasn't started from your market.

The "we'll handle everything" red flag

If the pitch sounds like "tell us what you want and we'll take care of the rest", that is your first warning sign. In financial services, it isn't just lazy. It's risky.

Your firm is responsible for everything on its website, whoever wrote it. The FCA's financial promotion rules and Consumer Duty apply to your blog posts, service pages and FAQs as much as to your brochures. Every line needs approval from your compliance team or network before it goes live.

A finance specialist tells you this before you ask, and shows you where sign-off fits in their process. A generalist says they can do it all independently, which suggests they don't understand what they'd be getting you into.

The accuracy problem

Financial figures change. Allowances and thresholds move every April, and regulation shifts. Publishing an outdated figure is not just an SEO weakness for a regulated firm: it's a compliance problem. A good agency raises this unprompted and tells you who is responsible for keeping published content current.

How AIM handles compliance sign-off

So you know what good looks like, here is the process we follow with advisers, wealth managers, accountants and fintech firms.

1. We learn how you're regulated and who signs off. Directly authorised, an appointed representative, in-house compliance or a network's central team. We know how network sign-off works and plan around it.
2. We architect the content and draft with sources marked, so reviewers can check every claim quickly.
3. We include the right disclosures, written with the FCA's financial promotion rules and Consumer Duty in mind, plus "not advice" notices on informational content.
4. Your firm signs off. Core pages are always approved by the firm itself. Blog content is created with your team, approved by you and given a final check by our compliance consultant, who has worked with FCA-regulated firms for 6 years.
5. Nothing is published unapproved. We keep a version history and backups of everything.

Any agency you hire should be able to describe something similar in detail. If they can't, they haven't done it before. You can read more about how we work on our financial services marketing page.

What questions should I ask before hiring a financial services SEO agency?

These are the questions we'd ask in your position.

The compliance litmus test

Ask: "Who checks your work against FCA rules before it reaches us?"

It doesn't have to be a full-time compliance officer. A qualified consultant or a designated reviewer is fine. What matters is that the function exists in their process and isn't left entirely to you. If they look blank or say "that's your team's job", they aren't set up for your sector.

A discovery call checklist

• How do you handle content that becomes outdated after publication, and who flags it?
• How do you keep educational content from straying into advice?
• Will you draft with sources marked for our compliance team?
• How will you use our advisers' knowledge, and how much of their time will you need?
• Will we get a month-by-month plan before work starts?
• What will you report on each month, and will it include enquiries from search?
• Can we cancel, and if we do, do we keep the content, the changes and the links?
• What should we expect to see in the first three months?

Good agencies answer these in specifics. For the record, here are ours: every SEO client gets a month-by-month strategy up front, then two reports a month, one on the work done and one on results. There's no lock-in: you can cancel at any time, and you keep everything, including the content, the changes, the links and the strategy.

And the first three months: a seven-day audit plans the campaign before the first paid month starts. The full effect usually shows in 6 to 12 months.

How do I find an SEO agency that specialises in finance?

Every agency claims to specialise in everything. "We work across many sectors including finance" isn't specialisation.

A genuine specialist talks about the regulatory landscape without being prompted. They understand that a "your money, your life" site needs visible credentials, real people and trust signals. They can explain the difference between referral traffic checking you out and new clients searching for an adviser near them. And they can tell you how they balance compliance with content that's still useful enough to rank.

Ask for financial services examples specifically, and ask what compliance process they followed. For example, our work for a secure messaging platform that sells to financial advisers involved compliance review on every piece, and took its search traffic from 40 to 1,700+ visits a month in 16 months (read the case study). Every sale there involves the buyer's compliance officer and there was little existing demand, so we built educational content on the rules that stop advisers messaging clients on WhatsApp, which led readers to a compliant alternative. Free trial sign-ups from search went from none to 30 to 60 a month, and LinkedIn outreach books five demos a week. If you're a fintech business, our fintech marketing page covers how that work differs from marketing to advisers directly.

How do I evaluate an agency's track record?

This is where many firms get burned.

Estimated traffic isn't real traffic

SEO tools estimate traffic from keyword rankings. Those estimates can be useful for comparing sites, but they aren't your actual visits, and they say nothing about whether anyone got in touch. An agency can show you a line climbing on a chart that has no connection to your business.

This usually happens when an agency publishes large volumes of thin, low-intent content. The tools record rankings and assign them a value. Your Search Console, analytics and enquiry log tell a different story.

What to ask for when reviewing case studies

• The source of every figure, and the dates it covers.
• What changed in enquiries, trials or bookings, not just traffic.
• Which pages and which work drove the result.
• What went wrong along the way, and how they fixed it.

An agency that can explain what went wrong as clearly as what went right is usually telling you the truth.

What are the red flags when hiring an SEO agency?

Guaranteed rankings

No honest agency guarantees a first-page ranking by a set date. What a good agency can commit to is a clear plan, steady work and honest reporting.

"SEO takes two years"

In our experience, the full effect usually shows in 6 to 12 months. Local searches move faster; new domains are slower. A long wait is often the reason for a long contract.

Long, rigid contracts

A contract you can't leave protects the agency, not you. A confident agency works on terms where you stay because it's working.

Off-the-shelf packages

"Eight blog posts and four links a month" is a product, not a strategy. Neither is an expensive technical project on schema and page speed when your pages already load well and your structured data works. Those barely move rankings. Your plan should start from your firm, your clients and your market.

Vanity metrics

Impressions, total keyword counts and estimated traffic are easy to put on a slide and say little about new clients. Insist on organic visits to your service pages, Search Console clicks by page type, and enquiries from organic search tracked in analytics or your CRM.

AI content farms

In financial services this deserves its own warning. AI-generated content published at scale is a regulatory risk, because content on your domain is your responsibility however it was written. It's also an SEO risk: mass-produced content tends to give a short spike, then falls away, and a large amount of poor content drags down how Google judges the whole site.

We've seen both sides of this. One prospect replaced its site's content with bulk AI-written copy and ended up with blocked pages, missing redirects and every page competing for the same keywords. Another business came to us after an agency had cloned the same AI-written page for every area it served and bought spammy links. In both cases the fix was the same: fewer, better pages, each with one clear job, and real authority built from the business's own expertise.

The partnership principle

Your own experience is what makes the content stand out. SEO is only as good as what you can say that others can't: your advisers' experience, your client scenarios, your view of your market. The agency brings the strategy, structure and technical work; your team brings the substance. That's why we interview your team for content and draw out the insight that makes it original.

If an agency doesn't ask for any of your time, ask where their content's expertise is going to come from.

The one question to ask before you sign

Forget impressions, buzzwords and charts. Ask: "How many new clients is this going to bring in, which pages are you pushing, and how exactly will you get us there?"

A credible agency answers in concrete terms: which service pages they're optimising, how they'll build local authority before chasing national terms, how they'll handle compliance review, and how you'll see enquiries in the reporting. Anything short of that is someone selling you a chart.

If you would like a view on what your firm's site needs, book a free SEO consultation: a 15 to 30 minute call, followed within three working days by a written analysis, with your compliance process built in from the start. For the strategy itself, read our guide to SEO for financial advisers, or see how we run SEO services for firms across the UK.

This guide is general information about choosing a marketing supplier. It is not legal or compliance advice.