Backlinks for Fintech: Strategies That Actually Work

What are Backlinks for Fintech?

Backlinks for fintech are links from other fintech brands that point to your website. This means that websites in the fintech space refer to your content as their source of information. In turn, you gain trust signals, which could positively influence your search engine rankings.

Backlinks sit at the core of any fintech SEO strategy; in a high-trust YMYL category, they function as the primary credibility signal search engines use to evaluate your domain. Google applies stricter quality checks to financial websites since inaccurate information can affect people’s money and decisions.

In starting your link-building campaign, there are fundamental terms you must know:

• Backlink: The actual hyperlink from another website that sends their readers to your page.
• Referring domain: The specific website, preferably from the fintech industry, that gives you the backlink. Even if one website links to you five times, you only gain one referring domain.
• Domain Rating (DR): A score from 1 to 100 that shows how trustworthy a website is. Getting relevant links from a website with a higher DR is more valuable for your SEO efforts.

Based on our definition of domain authority or rating, you could imply that not all backlinks can boost your SEO performance. That’s true. For a quick snapshot, let’s put a good link side by side with a bad link.

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Why Fintech Link Building is Harder, and More Valuable, than Other Industries

In most industries, getting backlinks provides a competitive advantage. In fintech, it is a baseline requirement. This has something to do with Google’s YMYL and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines.

Since fintech is a YMYL category, Google uses the E-E-A-T framework in scrutinizing each page’s search presence. Here’s how E-E-A-T works in the context of fintech content marketing:

For fintech websites to achieve SEO success, they must offer helpful, reliable, people-first content. Such content creation sets off a chain reaction that could result in higher search rankings. Here’s an example:

Create verified, helpful financial content that simplifies complex financial concepts ➡ Other fintech-related publications link to your content as a reference ➡ Google sees these valuable backlinks and trusts your website as well ➡ Increase your chances of ranking high for competitive keywords

This chain reaction is exactly how established, high-DR financial websites like NerWallet, Bankrate, and Investopedia have sustained their organic search performance. They invested in building topical authority, earning editorial backlinks from major news outlets.

There’s also an Ahrefs study on referring domains and rankings that found a strong relationship between backlink authority and higher organic visibility.

Prioritize quality over quantity when building backlinks. For example, getting one editorial link from Reuters beats out acquiring 10 links from unrelated blogs or random directories.

The Most Effective Financial Services Link Building Tactics

Credibility is the priority in financial services link building. Here are the tactics that consistently earn high-authority placements for fintech companies in regulated markets.

Digital PR and Data-Driven Content

Digital PR is one of the strongest backlink strategies for fintech companies because you’re getting links from websites that people trust the most. This happens when credible fintech-related journalists, media outlets, and bloggers link to your content.

But what kind of content attracts the attention of finance publishers? Here are sample titles to get you started:

• Fintech industry surveys: “How Often Consumers Use Buy Now, Pay Later Services in 2026”
• Fraud and scam reports: “The Most Common Digital Payment Scams Reported in 2026”
• Local spending maps: “The Credit Score Map: Which States Are Falling Behind on Debt Payments?”
• Rankings and regional reports: “Best Cities for Fintech Startups in 2026”
• Expert commentary and insights: “How New Financial Regulations Could Affect Digital Payments”

Typically, the fintech press prefers original data instead of recycled or aggregated information. If your fintech marketing teams and experts can conduct their own research, it could go a long way in building your digital presence.

Fintech-specific publication outreach

Creating content and waiting for fintech publications to notice your good work might take a long time. One thing you can do is directly reach out to fintech-focused journalists and editors.

Along with the valuable backlinks you could potentially get, these publications already have a loyal target audience. You could acquire qualified leads, especially when targeting long-tail keywords.

But not all finance sites carry the same weight. Grouping your target websites into tiers helps you manage your resources, especially your budget.

Now, the next thing you want to do is prepare your pitch. Fintech editors would want to know how your report or article will help their readers. You could refer to this step-by-step guide in pitching content to fintech publications:

1. Find the right publication and writer: Search platforms like Finextra or Fintech Nexus for articles that match your products. Then, look up the journalists who wrote those articles, and see if you can connect to them via their work email or professional social account.
2. Spot a content gap: Scan their last 10 articles and note if they favor a data-led report or a news-driven one. Identify data gaps they haven’t addressed, or spot outdated statistics.
3. Write a short but personalized email: Start by naming the specific article you read so the writer knows you truly read their work. Then, build a hook around one specific idea, probably a news hook, a new data point, or a recent case study.
4. Send the email pitch at the right time. Obviously, you’d want to avoid sending it during weekends to respect the journalist’s days off. Also, avoid Mondays and Fridays, as they are usually the busiest days. You can go from Tuesday to Thursday mornings to get the best open rates.
5. Follow up carefully and politely. Wait five to seven business days before following up, and keep it within two sentences. If there’s no response after the follow-up email, it might be best to move on to the next publication in your list.

Thought Leadership and Guest Contributions

When it comes to money matters, your potential customers and publication partners look at the people behind your fintech brand. Imagine reading a bylined article from Coinbase’s CFO. Fintech enthusiasts would waste no time consuming that content.

That’s why safe link building, or white-hat link-building, involves thought leadership pieces. Major fintech-related sites rarely accept anonymous articles, but they love content written by real company executives and leaders.

But you can’t just put bylines without proof of their expertise and association. Here’s what makes an executive profile credible to fintech editors:

• A real LinkedIn profile with verifiable credentials, including job title, company, regulatory background, and industry tenure.
• At least 3 previously published articles about a specific fintech element, including compliance, payment infrastructure, or fraud prevention.

Speaking of LinkedIn, you can also use this social platform, and several others, for additional trust signals. Take, for example, this excellent fintech marketing strategy on content distribution:

• Step 1: Publish on your own fintech site first. Make sure that you add a canonical tag to your web pages to tell AI search engines that your website is the original publisher.
• Step 2: Wait for a couple of days until Google crawls your page. Paste your article’s link into Google Search Console to check if it’s fully indexed.
• Step 3: Post a short LinkedIn update linking to the article. Only put the link in the first comment, not in the post itself. This could help you get better reach from LinkedIn’s algorithm.
• Step 4: Repurpose the core insight as an infographic. You could post this creative infographic on your company’s LinkedIn account.
• Step 5: Share the report in industry communities, including fintech newsletters, startup communities, and finance forums. This increases the chance of mentions, shares, and natural backlinks.

Partnerships, Integration, and Co-Marketing

Partnerships with tools and service providers are a stable way for fintech and financial services to earn high-quality backlinks. Since these links come from real business relationships, Google tends to trust them more.

To protect their users and stand out in this competitive market, fintech brands typically work with:

• Payment gateways
• Banking infrastructure providers
• Accounting software tools
• Identity verification services

Together, you can promote each other’s services through shared case studies and co-marketing campaigns. This results in a valuable link that points to your fintech website, which could help improve brand authority and keyword performance.

Moreover, being recognized and awarded by official corporate associations and fintech groups sends strong trust signals. Because these groups are highly regulated, a backlink from their domain is crucial in building a strong SEO strategy.

Examples of fintech industry associations to target:

• American Fintech Council (AFC)
• Innovate Finance
• Financial Technology Association (FTA)
• The Digital Chamber
• The Payments Association
• Financial Data and Technology Association (FDATA)
• Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF)

Examples of fintech industry awards to target:

• The Forbes Fintech 50
• Banking Tech Awards
• The Future Digital Awards
• The US FinTech Awards
• PayTech Awards
• Finovate Best of Show
• Webby Awards

Resource and Glossary Page Link Building

Resource page link building involves finding fintech-related websites with curated lists of helpful links for their readers. If you create a valuable fintech tool, guide, or report, you can reach out to these glossaries and resource pages to add your link to their list.

This is a great way to get links through fintech keywords that present current search intent. Take a look at these linkable fintech-related assets built on high-value keywords:

Of course, you don’t have to target purely fintech resource pages. Getting links from these related fields could also boost your search visibility:

• Accounting and bookkeeping
• Legal and compliance
• HR and payroll
• Small business and startup blog posts
• University and financial literacy pages
• Real estate

Search and generative engine optimization heavily lean toward contextual relevance. As such, your target keywords in these backlinks should reflect user queries in the fintech space and adjacent niches.

Link-Building Tactics to Avoid in Fintech

Running a safe off-site SEO campaign means knowing which fintech link-building shortcuts to avoid. These spammy tactics do more harm than good, especially when you look at the bigger picture.

• Getting links from PBNs and link farms: Private Blog Networks and link farms are networks of low-quality pages that generate low-quality backlinks. These tactics go against Google’s spam policies, which carry a higher penalty for YMYL niches like fintech.
• Posting guest posts on generic websites with low editorial standards: Guest post mills sell link placements in bulk, and they often come cheaply, with low editorial standards. In fact, they accept from any industry and will publish anything for a fee. In fintech, this directly defeats the purpose of targeting E-E-A-T signals for search results.
• Relying on paid placements without editorial value: Paying for link placements is a common practice in digital marketing, but there should be real editorial standards behind these placements. It’s almost a similar concept to traditional SEO, where you use Google Ads to target specific keywords in your niche.
• Over-optimizing anchor texts: Speaking of keyword strategy, you might want to use different keywords in your anchor texts. Using the same keyword-rich anchor text might signal to Google that you’re manipulating keyword opportunities and rankings.
• Ignoring technical SEO: Imagine getting a valuable backlink from a high-DR fintech publication, but it points to a broken link. Always check your core web vitals based on Google’s standards, structured data, and on-page SEO to make sure every page receiving links is technically healthy.

How to Measure the Impact of Your Fintech Link-Building Efforts

Building high-quality backlinks for fintech is an investment, and as with any investment, you need to track where you’re at and where you’re headed. Because search engines evaluate financial websites with extra caution, you need to track specific data points to ensure your strategy is working.

When it comes to fintech link building, you want to focus on monitoring these key metrics:

• Domain Rating (DR) growth: As you secure links from respected finance platforms, your DR will steadily climb.
• Referring domains: This tracks the total number of unique websites that link to you.
• Organic traffic movement: A successful link-building campaign will push your pages higher, resulting in higher organic traffic.
• Referral traffic: A higher number of referral traffic proves that your placements are on pages that real people actually read.
• Search volume coverage: When your DR improves, it might open up new ranking opportunities, even for high-volume keywords.

There are tools, free and paid, that you can use to track your fintech link-building campaign. Here’s a step-by-step example of how a fintech brand can simultaneously use multiple tools in tracking its link-building success:

• Step 1: Use Semrush’s Keyword Gap Tool to plan your content strategy. You can spot gaps in your competitors’ keywords or check for keywords that your site completely misses.
• Step 2: Use Google Search Console to check your own data. See if your site already gets small impressions on keywords you’re targeting. Most importantly, check your core web vitals to verify that your site loads fast and has zero technical errors.
• Step 3: Use Ahrefs’s Backlinks Report to see every fintech publication and blog linking to your competitors. If you haven’t targeted them yet, you can export the list of websites and add them to your email outreach.

One important thing to remember is that link building takes time, especially in a YMYL category like fintech. Realistically, it takes 1-3 months to build assets and do initial outreach, 4-6 months for other websites to place your links, and 7-12 months before you see improvements in your DR.

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How to Build a Sustainable Fintech Link Building Strategy

A sustainable fintech link-building campaign requires a steady, repeatable plan that builds trust over time. A healthy balance between internal content creation and professional outreach could help you get there.

Since link building is relatively more difficult than other digital marketing campaigns, most successful fintech brands work with a reputable fintech SEO agency. There are search marketing experts like Fortis Media that provide compliant, fintech-focused link-building services.

We focus on creating data assets that you can use to write original content and pitch to fintech publications. Here’s a sample plan that we use to align your content calendar with your link acquisition goals:

You might be thinking, when’s the best time to bring in outside help, and when is it wise to just rely on in-house expertise? The answer depends on your current team size, budget, and how competitive your target keywords are. Take a look:

• In-house focus: For early-stage fintech startups with limited budget. It’s best to focus on founder-led thought leadership.
• Hybrid in-house and external agency support: In-house staff handles content creation, while agency experts manage outreach relationships.
• Agency-led: For compliance expertise, specialist outreach, and dedicated link building in a competitive YMYL niche like fintech.