Service · Fintech SEO
One team running SEO and paid as a single motion — built for financial products where the landing page has to survive legal review and the ad account can be switched off by a policy change you did not see coming.
Book the Acquisition Audit — $2,500 See how we work
Fixed fee · two weeks · credited in full to your first month
Who this is for
Regulated categories are where search gets structurally harder and where most agencies are guessing. Naming the boundary is how you know whether we are the right call.
Why this is a different job
Google classifies financial topics as "Your Money or Your Life" — content that could damage someone's ability to support themselves. Its quality guidelines are unusually concrete about what that demands: clear responsibility for who runs the site and who wrote the page, and comprehensive contact information, which the guidelines single out as extremely important for sites that handle money.
They also draw a line most SEO advice misses. First-hand experience content — a review of a service someone actually used — can legitimately come from a non-credentialed author. Instructional and advisory content on the same topic cannot. That decides who on your team is allowed to write what.
In regulated finance, an account can go from serving to suspended without a warning period. On Google, offering a service you do not hold the right licences for is not handled as a disapproval — it sits in the misrepresentation policy, which suspends immediately.
Verification is the other trap, and it is widely misunderstood. Which programme applies depends entirely on where you advertise, not on what you sell. We set out exactly what applies where further down this page, because no other agency site does.
The highest-intent queries in most financial categories are rate, comparison and "best" terms. The page that would win them needs claims your compliance team has to substantiate, or a competitor comparison nobody will approve.
Pretending this is not true produces a content plan that dies in review. The useful version identifies which terms are winnable inside your constraints, and says plainly which ones are not worth the fight.
The part nobody publishes
Every fintech SEO agency says it understands regulation. Almost none describe the mechanics you have to live with. Here is how the work actually runs.
Compliance review is not a delay to absorb — it is a constraint to plan around. An asset that goes to legal one at a time takes as long as the reviewer's queue. The same assets batched into a single review window take one pass.
So we plan content in review batches, not publication dates, and we budget explicitly for a second pass. A calendar that assumes first-time approval is a calendar that slips every month.
Most rejected financial content is rejected for a claim, not for prose. So the claim gets settled first: what number are we using, where does it come from, is the source current, and does it need a representative example alongside it.
Doing that before drafting is the single biggest determinant of whether a piece clears review on the first attempt.
Required disclaimers arrive after the brief is written, compete with the content for the space above the fold, and — when they are injected late — cause the layout shift that Core Web Vitals penalises.
The fix is to design the slot before legal fills it: a reserved, styled position that holds its space on load, so the disclosure never displaces the page or damages the score.
Digital PR in regulated categories runs into two constraints at once: paid placements carry disclosure obligations, and Google's site reputation abuse policy explicitly names third-party financial content published on a host site for its ranking signals — payday loan reviews are its own worked example.
That rules out a large part of what the link-building industry sells. What remains — earned coverage, original data, genuine expert contribution — is slower and holds up.
This is the question we get asked most, and the answer that circulates is usually wrong. What applies depends on the markets you advertise into.
| PLATFORM | PROGRAMME | WHERE IT APPLIES | WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | Financial services verification | UK and a growing list of EU/EEA markets — not the United States | Runs through a third-party partner, per targeted location, with no published turnaround. A US-only advertiser does not encounter it at all; a US company expanding into the UK walks straight into it. The UK gate is FCA authorisation: your firm reference number, your business details and every domain you advertise have to match the register entry exactly, and a mismatch fails verification even when the authorisation is real. |
| Google Ads | Advertiser verification | Everywhere, including the US | Identity and business checks. Being in a regulated industry is one of the triggers. Non-completion pauses the account. |
| Google Ads | Category certifications | Product-dependent | Separate approvals for crypto, debt services and complex speculative products. The application route moved into the account itself during 2026. |
| Meta | Special ad category | US-targeted financial ads, and parts of the UK and Europe | Self-identification that restricts your targeting options. Separately, financial data must not be requested inside the ad unit — a clause a lot of lead-form creative fails. |
| FCA authorisation | UK audiences only | The only explicit licensing gate in LinkedIn's advertising policy. Note also that affiliate advertising is prohibited outright and income targeting is not permitted. | |
| Microsoft | UK financial services verification | UK only | Your details must match the FCA register exactly or verification fails. Microsoft publishes a 3–5 business day turnaround, which makes it the only predictable one. |
Platform policy in this category changed repeatedly through 2025 and 2026. We re-check every rule against the platform's own documentation before it goes in a client deliverable, and we date the check.
The work
Deliverables, not adjectives.
Crawl and indexation, architecture, internal linking, Core Web Vitals. In fintech this extends to the things that break specifically here — disclosure blocks causing layout shift, gated product pages that crawlers never reach, and regional variants that duplicate each other.
Where the demand actually sits by intent stage, who owns each SERP and why, and which terms are winnable inside your claims constraints. The output names the terms we are not going after, and says why.
Briefed with the claim and its source settled first, written by people who can write about money, and shaped so the disclosure has somewhere to go. Batched into review windows rather than trickled at your compliance team.
Author attribution and verifiable bios, clear site ownership, contact information at the depth expected of a site that handles money, and a stated review process. Cheap to build, and it is what the quality guidelines actually describe.
Being cited in AI answers rewards the same things: clear sourcing, unambiguous authorship, and content that answers a question completely. We track where you surface and what gets cited instead of you.
Restricted-category setup, verification, creative and landing pages that survive review, and budget moved toward the terms organic cannot reach yet. Same team, same pipeline number — not a second agency with a second report.
Measurement
If a workstream is not producing after 90 days, we cut it and re-scope. You do not keep paying for it.
Proof
We are a young agency and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Here is exactly what is ours, what is prior professional experience, and what does not exist yet.
Our own campaigns, run since January 2025. In a category where a rejection can cascade into a restriction, not triggering one across an entire programme is the most relevant thing we can tell you — and platform policy is identical whichever market you run it in.
Click-through rate across traffic campaigns totalling 3,000+ landing page views, and again on a second campaign — our own validation-before-scale work.
Qualified leads from a single lead campaign through native Meta lead forms, with consulting clients onboarded directly from it.
Organic sessions, with a 35% lift in qualified engagement and 150+ high-intent keywords, at a US financial-sector investor platform — prior professional experience, not Momentum client work.
CXL Paid Media and CXL B2B Demand Generation, both 2025. Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce. UC Davis SEO Specialization. Every prior engagement referenced on this site was with a US company.
A fintech SEO case study under the Momentum banner. We have been repositioned into this work since August 2026, and our first engagements are in progress. We would rather say that than dress up prior-role results as agency case studies — in fintech, a credibility failure is not recoverable.
Pricing
Almost nobody in this category publishes a price. We do, because it filters your inbound before anyone spends time on a call, and because hiding it has never once been in the buyer's interest.
$2,500
Two weeks, fixed fee, credited in full to your first month if you continue. A technical and content SEO audit, a paid account and compliance-risk review, a keyword and demand map, a tracking and attribution gap analysis, and a sequenced 90-day plan you can execute with anyone.
$3,500–$12,000 /month
Three ARR-gated tiers, three-month initial term, then month to month. No annual lock-in. If a workstream is not producing after 90 days we cut it and re-scope. The audit is deliberately useful on its own — plenty of people should take it and execute it themselves.
Questions
Ours starts at $2,500 for the Acquisition Audit and $3,500 a month for a retainer, rising to $12,000 for the largest tier. Across the wider market, specialist agencies that publish anything tend to sit between $4,000 and $10,000 a month, and the two largest publish floors of $10,000 and above. Anyone quoting a few hundred dollars a month for a regulated category is not doing the compliance work.
Technical and trust fixes can move impressions within weeks. New pages targeting genuinely contestable terms typically take three to six months to settle. Anything requiring authority against entrenched competitors takes longer than that. In fintech you should add time for review cycles — we plan for a second pass on most assets, and a content calendar that assumes first-time approval will slip every month.
The mechanics of crawling and ranking are the same. What changes is that your content is classified YMYL, so the expectations around authorship, contact information and site responsibility are materially higher; your highest-intent queries carry claims your compliance team has to substantiate; a large part of conventional link building is unavailable to you; and your paid channel depends on verification and category rules that differ by market.
Yes, and it is usually the safer of the two channels, because organic content moves through your own review process before it publishes rather than through a platform's automated one afterwards. The risks that do exist are specific and avoidable: unattributed advisory content, unsubstantiated claims, and third-party content published on your domain for its ranking signals, which Google's site reputation abuse policy names directly.
We settle the claim and its source before drafting, batch assets into review windows instead of sending them one at a time, budget for a second pass, and design the page so the disclosure has a reserved place to sit. We will also write to your reviewers' preferences once we learn them — most of the friction in this relationship is avoidable and comes from the agency, not the reviewer.
It depends where you advertise. Google's financial services verification applies in the UK and a growing list of EU and EEA markets, and does not currently apply in the United States. Advertiser verification is separate and applies everywhere, including the US. Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft each run their own arrangements, and only Microsoft publishes a turnaround. The table above sets out what applies where.
Named people, with bios that stand up to being checked. Google's guidance distinguishes between first-hand experience content, which a non-credentialed author can legitimately write, and advisory or instructional content on money, which needs genuine expertise. We staff to that distinction rather than putting one generalist byline on everything — and overstated credentials are treated worse than modest ones.
No. You get a named person on the account, and that person does the work. We are small, which is exactly why we gate by ARR and by category — we would rather turn work away than run it through a freelancer bench.
Two weeks, $2,500, credited to your first month. You will get a document you can act on with us, in-house, or with somebody else entirely.