Google Financial Services Regulations for AdWords PPC

Google has recently announced that it will be updating the Google Ads Financial Products and Services policy in September 2021. The full policy will be published on the 30th of August 2021 with enforcement starting to take place seven days later on September the 7th 

Its focus will be introducing new verification requirements for Financial Services advertisements targeting the UK. This translates to stricter regulations on AdWords and in turn, mean the Pay Per Click strategy of your business needs reviewing.   

The measures put in place by Google should overall be beneficial for businesses and users alike, as only FCA regulated providers will be able to advertise. The quality of adverts and companies shown to users will massively improve, with less likelihood of people becoming the victim of financial scams. 

What You Should Know  

Advertisers that have not completed the verification process by the time of enforcement will no longer be able to show financial services ads of any kind. These do include any UK users who appear to be seeking financial services.  

Read More About The Upcoming Changes Here. 

How Does the Verification Process Work? 

The verification process involves companies wishing to advertise their services to demonstrate that they are authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority or qualify for one of the exemptions. 

Advertisers can initiate the verification process themselves here, or in some cases, Google may instruct you to do so for your Ads to continue to show.   

The verification form requires your Google Ads account ID, business details, domains affected, and warranty that approves financial promotions that the third party runs.  

The two-step process must be completed within the allocated time frame to prevent their accounts from being paused. You can learn more about UK Financial Services Verification Here 

Will It Suspend My AdWords Account? 

It is key to review this policy update if your company uses Google PPC to advertise financial services of any kind. Your external marketing agency will be able to help determine and alert you as to whether your ads fall within the scope of the policy.  

If they do, you must complete the verification process as mentioned above or remove the ads that violate the policy.  

Violations of the policy mean that a warning will be issued by Google. If action is not taken in 7 days, you risk your account being suspended.  

Please contact Chameleon today if you are worried about the upcoming changes, we are here to help. Book a meeting with us to discuss how the impacts your PPC strategy moving forwards.  

How to rank at position 1 in SERPS in 2020

Why is SEO important?

how important is seo

Working in SEO we have to answer questions like ‘why is SEO important?’ every time we get onto the topic of job roles.

We usually brush over the topic, making dramatic, over the top claims such as ‘without SEO no one would be found on Google’, but the truth is SEO is essential for all companies. From the local plumber with a five-page website to the biggest management consultancy firm with over a thousand URLs, every business, big or small, can benefit.

Google Organic Search is the most important source of traffic

When most people search for something on the internet, they tend to head straight to Google. According to Statista, as of June 2019, Google held 87.64% market share in search engines in the UK. Bing, the next most used search engine, only had 8.2% market share.

If you’re targeting new customers, growing your rankings organically is crucial. Although establishing a loyal client base is very important, SEO will bring in new clients. Your website will be easier for new customers to find if you are ranking for keywords instead of just your brand name.  As potential shoppers will search for keywords rather than specific companies. SEO is vital if you’re looking to grow your business and expand your clientele.

SEO agencies have the software to boost your rankings

Whilst targeting Google might be obvious, using a professional agency might be less so. Although there are many blogs and tutorials on SEO online, the tips and tricks can only go so far and how up-to-date or accurate is the information. Not only do digital marketing experts have the training and specialised knowledge, but they also have access to specific software that will allow them to research the keywords most relevant to your business. An SEO specialist will then target the keywords most relevant to your products or services and bring in the right traffic.

The Google algorithm is always changing

One of the most frustrating things about working in SEO is the constant shift in the Google algorithm. Every day, Google changes the way it ranks websites and crawls them for relevant content. For instance, once upon a time, mentioning the keyword as many times as possible on a page, was standard practice for SEO consultants. Recently, however, Google has changed its algorithm to limit ‘keyword stuffing’ – referencing the keyword as much as you could.

Doing SEO for a website is a full-time job. If the Google algorithm changes without your knowledge, your rankings will start to drop.  An SEO consultant will know the latest changes to the algorithm and edit your website accordingly, keeping your website on page one of Google.

Page one is the only place you’ll be clicked

Finally, SEO is particularly important because if you are not on page one of Google or in the top ten, you will not get the required organic traffic at all to grow your business. As most people are lazy and want instant information, they are unlikely to scroll further than page one. As there are so many companies competing for page one, if you don’t focus on maximising your SEO, your website will not receive much organic traffic.

There are many benefits of paying for SEO services, as you’ve read above. Being on page one of Google for your chosen keywords is one of the most effective ways of broadening a client base and bringing in more traffic to your site, something relevant for all businesses, big or small.

Concours Vehicles

Classic car storage and Supercar storage is a big business in the UK. The company Concours Vehicles was set up online at the beginning of June to open up a service to others.

concours vehicles domain name

This is a great example of what Chameleon can achieve and to provide some time frames around results.

The website was purchased NEW on the June 6th 2019 and this means it has no past, zero power or trust and Google has never come across the domain before. This is positive because it has a clean bill of health.

The website was built in WordPress our favoured platform with a holding page containing the core keywords and setup for Google to find. Behind the scenes the website was being built, new fresh handwritten content and images were loaded to the site and then we forced Google to come and get all the new page content.

The first thing needed is to rank for the brand name which should be easy:-

Concours Vehicle Solutions

Some SEO Companies often do not understand the very basics and the early stages are vital to achieving a quick growth for a new website. We setup the website perfectly for Google to understand and the result is instant and the graph above shows this clearly what can be achieved.

The next thing is to achieve other keywords and interestingly the company name being a word used all of the Internet related to cars, the word Concours and top of Google for “concours vehicle” is the Wikipedia page related to this subject. Concours d’Elegance is a term of French origin that means a “competition of elegance” and refers to an event where prestigious vehicles are displayed and judged. There are many websites talking about Concours Vehicles and cars based all over the world which means this is competitive.

 

google concours

This Google search shows that there are 89,700,000 website results in Google’s database and the SEO consultant has to make Google like this website more than all the others.

The content at this early stage is vital providing Google with the details it needs to understand what the website is about will result in success:-

Concours Vehicle

concours vehicles keyword 2

The graphs above show the quickly achieved results, note that position 200 is page 20 of Google and position 1 is top of Google.

Then the service related keywords need to follow and as an example “supercar storage”:-

supercar storage

supercar storage 2

You can see from the graphs the quick growth onto page one shows that a Chameleon SEO Consultant can quickly achieve growth for a brand new domain name without doing anything outside Google’s guidelines, simply doing what Google wants to find. This is natural organic SERP growth as the result of understanding the Google Algorithm.

Best Cost-Effective SME Internet Solutions

Providing Essential Web Solutions to Global SMEs

Chameleon has not only won the award for the “Best Cost-Effective SME Internet Solutions” in 2018, we have also appeared in the SME News Q4 2018 publications “Providing Essential Web Solutions to Global SMEs”.

SME News Q4 2018

You can read the article here: SME News Q4 2018:- SME Q4 2018

Best Cost-Effective SME Internet Solutions Award in 2018