More than most specialist writers, a good financial copywriter is worth their weight in gold because they have to make especially complex ideas easy to understand. And they have to do this whilst still writing persuasively and (depending on the project) incorporating good SEO practice to make sure the webpage or article ranks well on Google.

For this reason, if you’re a bank, building society, financial advisor or fintech provider, you’ll want to invest in someone who understands the finance industry in depth. Their services come at a premium.

Financial copywriters usually have years’ experience working in the financial sector and therefore know the commercial landscape and the technical terms. Or they might have focused on finance copywriting as a niche and spent those years building up a bank of knowledge. They’ll understand the needs and pressure points of clients.

And finance is an especially fast-evolving landscape. But even when confronted with new topics and concepts, they’ll be able to build on this expertise with further research, already knowing the field.

However, in the same way that a writer of historical crime fiction (like Dan Brown) might mask bad writing skills with detailed research (and he gets some of this wrong too…), some finance copywriters try to make up for their lack in good copywriting skills with decent background knowledge.

And, even worse, many self-proclaimed ‘financial copywriters’ are far less experienced than they profess. They simply use the tag of writing in the financial copywriting “niche” as a marketing tool without the experience to back it up.

So, I’ve put together this guide on, first, what level of experience you could/should expect from a high quality financial copywriter and, second, the different ways they should turn this knowledge into excellent SEO writing.

What level of financial knowledge should you expect from your copywriter?

It goes without saying that one of the most effective ways you can assess a particular copywriter’s level of knowledge is to read examples of their work and gauge the accuracy and level of complexity in them.

Any copywriter worth your time will be happy and proud to show you previous examples of their work. You’ll know that their ‘finance’ tag is just a marketing gimmick if the articles are all very high level and avoid going into detail on specific queries and definitions. 

As an extra layer of assessment, ask yourself the following questions:

Do they have any prior finance industry experience? Have they worked for a long stretch in a bank, investment company, mortgage provider, fintech service doing research in some capacity? For an understanding of a field, obviously you can’t beat actually working in the industry.

Do they harness background reading to bolster their knowledge? What sources (books, trade journals, websites) do they draw their information from?

Do they have any past clients in the same industry? If you’re a mortgage provider, have they written for other mortgage providers? This would be ideal, though don’t be discouraged if they lack direct experience if they’ve worked in a similar field (eg insurance / law) as much writing is transferable if a writer is good enough. 

At the same time, competency in writing is more important than prior knowledge because a good copywriter will also display the research skills needed to craft good content. For the reasons we’ll explore below, if you find someone whose writing you like and who shows an ability to write complex concepts in simple terms, don’t ignore them as a potential option. 

How do they use this knowledge to write good finance copy?

Understanding the objectives of the piece 

Every article, landing page, email funnel, or search engine ad should be created for a specific purpose. That purpose will involve some action on the part of the reader. To drive that action, you need to understand the needs of the reader. What are they looking for? What problem can you solve for them?

A good copywriter will never let this objective out of their sight when writing the copy. This in turn leads to a number of other qualities, which I explore below. 

With financial copywriting these fundamental needs (or problems) are often quite simple. It’s the solutions generated by the finance sector that can be quite complex. For example, financial instruments such as pensions, tracker indexes, ETF funds or technology such as roboadvisors / AI managers etc might exist to provide the customer peace of mind, or long-term security, or enable ambitious goals, or finance a life changing desire. Bridging the gap between these simpler needs and the complex solutions (types of trust, mortgage agreements, pension funds, tax minimisation schemes, etc) is what you’re paying for in a good copywriter. 

Including the right volume of information in a piece of writing

You can have too much of a good thing. Some writers have too much knowledge of a field for their own good.

Some writers make the mistake of padding out their articles with unnecessary information, as a way to bolster their word count. They are relying on the search engine algorithms’ preference for longer content, while forgetting the crucial fact that an article is only as effective as its ability to call the reader to action. Getting a reader onto your website is not enough; the article or webpage has to drive the next action (requesting a quote, setting up a call, signing up to your newsletter, building some trust).

So a good financial content writer knows this; they understand what to leave out and what to expand upon.

Getting the balance between simplifying and patronising 

It’s not enough to take a complex financial concept and make it simple to understand. You need to understand exactly who the piece of writing is aimed at and translate the concept into their level of complexity.

So much of the internet is unnecessarily simplified. This is usually because the people writing the content know little about the field and so have no substance to draw upon. But sometimes it’s due to a writer’s overreliance on ‘keeping it simple’, forgetting what the objective of the piece is. 

For example, if your target audience is an executive level employee at a large bank, they’ll have different prior knowledge (and therefore need different information from the piece) as compared to a fintech software developer.

Using good SEO practices to drive more traffic to your site

We talk about this in a lot more detail in relation to SEO copywriting (and more specifically re copywriters for small businesses) but for now bear in mind the following:

Identifying keywords to target existing demand

SEO writing is all about targeting existing demand. Your finance copywriter is no different; they should have good data analysis skills and be able to use them to identify the most fruitful keywords to build content around. 

What does ‘fruitful’ mean in this context? It means a balance between high volume (a lot of people search for that keyword every month), competitiveness (you’re not competing with the biggest organisations and most established websites for the few spots at the top of Google for that keyword), and purchase intent (the search term suggests the searcher has some level of intent to purchase or sign up for your service/product).

Using good organisation to include keywords in all the right places

Once they have the keywords, your copywriter should find natural and logical ways to include them in headings, paragraph content, links, website address, etc. This is a science and takes practice.

Too often you read content online that is clearly intended to “game” the system by stuffing too many keywords into a page and putting them in unnatural sounding places. Not only does keyword stuffing put off the Google algorithms, it also puts off your reader and fails to meet their objective (remember from above!).

And if you want help with your website copy, Google ads or SEO articles, you can get in touch with us for a quote. We’ll be totally open about our suitability for a project and, depending on the level of financial complexity, we’ll be able to point you in the right direction!