A Step-by-Step Framework for Auditing Your Bank's Search Performance

This guide is written for bank marketing directors, digital managers, and compliance officers who need a clear diagnostic process—not a vendor pitch. It applies equally to community banks, regional banks, credit unions, and larger institutions with multi-branch footprints.

You do not need to be an SEO specialist to run this audit. You do need access to a few standard tools: Google Search Console (free), Google Analytics or an equivalent, and ideally a crawl tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Several sections can be assessed manually without software.

This framework is also useful as a briefing document if you are evaluating whether to hire an outside SEO partner. Running the audit yourself first means you can ask sharper questions, evaluate proposals more critically, and avoid paying for "discovery" work you've already completed.

A note on scope: This guide covers SEO diagnostics—organic search performance, local visibility, technical health, and content quality. It does not cover paid search, social media, or email marketing. Where compliance intersects with SEO (disclosures, accessibility, advertising rules), this guide flags the overlap, but this is educational content, not legal or compliance advice. Verify current requirements with your compliance officer and legal counsel.

Technical issues are the foundation. A bank's website can have excellent content and strong local signals, but if Google cannot crawl and index pages correctly, none of it matters. Start here.

Crawlability and Indexation

Open Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. Look for pages with errors (server errors, redirect loops, 404s) and pages excluded from the index. A large number of excluded pages is not always a problem—PDFs of rate sheets, session-based URLs, and print pages are often correctly excluded—but pages like your mortgage landing page or checking account page should always be indexed.

Run a crawl of the site. Flag any pages returning non-200 status codes that are linked from navigation. Redirect chains longer than two hops slow crawl budget and dilute link equity.

Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

Use PageSpeed Insights or Search Console's Core Web Vitals report. Branch pages and product pages (mortgage, auto loans, savings accounts) are the priority. In our experience working with financial institution websites, image compression and third-party script load times are the two most common culprits for slow scores. Heavy compliance banners and live chat widgets frequently add significant render-blocking overhead.

HTTPS and Security Signals

Every page of a bank's website must be served over HTTPS—including legacy branch microsites and landing pages built on separate subdomains. Mixed-content warnings on pages that handle contact forms or rate inquiries send negative trust signals to both users and Google.

Mobile Usability

Check the Mobile Usability report in Search Console. Clickable elements too close together and content wider than the screen are the most common flags on bank websites, often caused by embedded rate tables or PDF-linked documents that were never reformatted for mobile.

Document every issue found with its URL, status, and a severity rating before moving to the next step.

For most banks, local search is where the largest opportunity gap exists. Customers searching for "checking account near me" or "mortgage lender in [city]" are high-intent prospects. Visibility failures here directly affect deposit growth and lending volume.

Google Business Profile Accuracy

Search for your bank's name and each branch location in Google Maps. Check that every branch has a claimed, verified GBP listing. Common problems include: unclaimed listings created by Google automatically, duplicate listings from old addresses, incorrect hours (especially holiday hours), and missing phone numbers. Each of these suppresses your appearance in local pack results.

Verify that the primary category is set correctly. "Bank" is the standard primary category; add secondary categories like "Mortgage Lender" or "ATM" where appropriate for specific branches.

NAP Consistency

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. Run your bank's name through a citation audit tool or manually check major data aggregators (Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yellow Pages). Inconsistencies—suite numbers written differently, old phone numbers, abbreviated versus spelled-out street names—dilute local ranking signals. This is especially common after branch relocations or mergers.

Service-Area and Location Pages

Does your website have a dedicated, indexable page for each branch location? These pages should include the branch address, hours, services offered at that location (not all branches offer the same products), a Google Maps embed, and locally relevant content. Generic branch pages with only contact details rank poorly because they offer no differentiation signal.

Check whether location pages are internally linked from the main navigation or footer. Orphaned location pages—technically existing but receiving no internal links—are frequently invisible to both users and Google crawlers.

Review Volume and Recency

Review the star rating and recency of reviews across all branch GBP listings. Industry benchmarks suggest that businesses with fewer than 10 reviews on a GBP listing perform meaningfully below those with 20 or more, particularly in competitive markets. Flag any branches with ratings below 4.0—not just for SEO, but because review sentiment affects click-through rates on local pack results.

Content and compliance are audited together in banking SEO because the same page gaps that hurt search rankings often create regulatory exposure. This step requires input from both your marketing team and compliance officer.

Product Page Coverage and Keyword Alignment

List every financial product your bank offers: checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, money market accounts, personal loans, auto loans, mortgages, HELOCs, business checking, SBA loans, and so on. Then check whether each has a dedicated, indexable landing page optimized for how real customers search for that product.

Use Google Search Console's Performance report to see which queries are already bringing traffic to each product page. Gaps between what you offer and what has a corresponding page are direct revenue opportunities.

Rate and Disclosure Pages

Pages that display APR, APY, interest rates, or loan terms are subject to TILA/Regulation Z disclosure requirements. This is educational context, not legal advice—verify current disclosure requirements with your compliance and legal team. From an SEO perspective, rate pages that lack complete disclosures are often thin in content, which limits ranking ability. Adding compliant disclosure language frequently adds the substantive content these pages need to rank competitively.

ADA and Accessibility Gaps

Run your site through an accessibility checker (WAVE or Axe are common free tools). Missing alt text on images, PDFs that are not screen-reader accessible, and videos without captions are both WCAG 2.2 compliance concerns and content quality signals. ADA Title III requirements for financial institution websites should be confirmed with your legal counsel—this is educational context only. Google's crawlers cannot read [inaccessible PDFs](/resources/banks/bank-website-ada-accessibility-seo), which means rate sheets and product brochures stored as PDFs are invisible to search unless they have accompanying HTML content.

Thin or Duplicate Content

Crawl your site and filter for pages under 300 words. In banking websites, these are commonly: branch pages with only address and hours, product pages copied from a template with only the product name changed, and blog posts that were published to fill a content calendar rather than answer a real question. Thin pages dilute crawl budget and suppress domain authority if they exist in large volume.

Backlinks remain a significant ranking factor, and financial institution websites tend to have predictable authority profiles that are worth auditing carefully.

What a Typical Bank Backlink Profile Looks Like

Community and regional banks often have strong local authority—links from local chambers of commerce, municipal websites, local news outlets, and community organizations—but weak topical authority in financial services more broadly. This means they can rank well for hyper-local searches but struggle to compete for category-level searches like "best mortgage rates in [state]" where larger national lenders dominate.

Use a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to pull your referring domain count and domain rating. Compare against two or three direct competitors serving the same geography. This comparison is more meaningful than any absolute benchmark.

Toxic Link Patterns

Flag any links from domains that appear spammy, irrelevant, or from link networks. In financial services, purchased links or low-quality directory spam can trigger manual actions from Google. If your bank has gone through a merger or acquisition, audit the legacy domain's link profile before redirecting it—pointing a toxic profile at your primary domain can suppress rankings.

Missed Authority Opportunities

Banks frequently have unclaimed authority opportunities: press mentions without a link back, community sponsorships without a website acknowledgment, partnerships with local businesses that link to the national brand rather than the local branch. A link reclamation pass—finding existing mentions of your bank's name online that do not include a link—can generate referring domains without new content creation.

Document total referring domains, estimated domain authority, top linked-to pages, and any toxic domains for disavowal consideration. This section of the audit typically requires the most time but also reveals the clearest gap between your bank and competitors in competitive search markets.

After completing all four audit areas, you will have a list of issues. The challenge is deciding what to fix first, given that most bank marketing teams have limited internal bandwidth.

A Simple Two-Axis Scoring Method

Score each finding on two dimensions:

• Impact: How much will fixing this improve search visibility or traffic? (Score 1-3: low, medium, high)
• Effort: How much time and resource does the fix require? (Score 1-3: low, medium, high)

High-impact, low-effort fixes go first. These are your quick wins. Common examples in bank SEO audits: claiming unclaimed GBP listings, correcting NAP inconsistencies, adding alt text to product page images, fixing broken internal links to high-priority pages.

High-impact, high-effort fixes go into a planned roadmap. Examples: rebuilding branch location pages with substantive content, restructuring the site architecture to eliminate orphaned product pages, launching a compliant content program targeting lending search queries.

Low-impact fixes—regardless of effort—should be deprioritized or batched. Many technical issues that crawl tools flag in red are not actually suppressing rankings for financial institution websites.

When to Handle This In-House vs. When to Hire

Several audit steps are genuinely within reach for an internal team with access to free tools: GBP accuracy, NAP consistency, basic technical checks via Search Console, and content gap identification. The areas that typically require outside expertise are: technical crawl interpretation (distinguishing real issues from tool noise), backlink profile analysis and disavowal decisions, and structural site architecture changes that require developer and CMS coordination.

If your audit reveals issues across all four areas simultaneously—which is common for banks that have not audited SEO formally before—the risk of trying to fix everything in-house is that nothing gets fully resolved. Partial fixes in technical SEO can sometimes create new problems. If that's where you land, request a professional bank SEO audit to get a prioritized remediation plan built around your specific platform and compliance requirements.