The Top Five SEO Fixes for Credit Union Websites

You have to walk before you can run, and the same applies to optimizing your credit union’s website for search engines. Although AI bots are adding a few new wrinkles, the basics of SEO are about the same as ever: focus on making your site useful for the real live human people you serve, and the rest will take care of itself.

Before you dive too far down the SEO rabbit hole, make sure the following five basic fixes are in place on your website.   

Get your headline hierarchies in order

Humans skim and bots scan, but they both need guideposts to better understand and organize your content. Headlines and subheads provide these markers, so it’s important to use them correctly. As a bonus, using headlines correctly also improves your page or post’s Accessibility.

  • Use the headline tags (H1 through H6) built into your Content Management System (CMS). In other words, never just manually emphasize plain text with bolding or different colors.
  • Each page should have only one H1 tag at the top.
  • Pages should be organized like an outline; each major division of the page should have an H2 tag, with H3 tags if needed for deeper levels of the outline.
  • Try not to skip headline levels (don’t go from the H1 tag at the top of the page straight to an H3).

Review and set your META descriptions on key pages

If you create a META description for a page or blog post, Google will usually use that when presenting search results instead of generating its own summary. (Most Content Management Systems have a way to do this.) It’s a great way to control how your content appears in Search.

Of course, the META description needs to actually describe the content on the page, or Google will ignore it and rank you lower. Don’t try to “game” the system, leave out the hype, and keep it short and to the point. 

You don’t necessarily need to do this on every page, but it’s not hard to do for your top ten or 20 most valuable pages, which covers 99.99% or more of pageviews on most credit union sites.

Un-cruft your content for the AI mix-n-match

When AI agents scan your site, they find everything, even ancient newsletters from ages past. However, the unique problem here is that AI tends to recombine and remix content from many sources to come up with a better match or answer. More than once, we’ve seen outdated content found on credit union websites “contaminate” AI-powered answers and search. 

It’s always been important to stay ahead of the cruft beast and proof your pages regularly, but the AI era means that you have to be even more diligent about this. Ancient newsletter PDFs are one of the more common sources of machine misunderstandings, but issues like duplicate and near-duplicate pages, forgotten pages, 404 errors, redirects, and just plain wrong, incomplete, and overlooked information can cause all kinds of oddities with AI agents and AI-powered search.

De-funkify your URLs

Your page URLs should be as simple as possible, relevant to the page content, and more or less readable English for search engines and people to understand them. URLs should not be case sensitive, should usually not contain numbers, should use no or minimal hierarchy, and should only use hyphens between words (not underscores or code characters). And make sure they’re not misspelled!

  • Good: awesomecu.org/checking/ or awesomecu.org/auto-loans/
  • Bad: awesomecu.org/checking-2-2-foo-bar/
  • Worse: awesomecu.org/prooducts/acccounts/deporsits/copy-1q-of_ChekcinGK-4-2.php

Of course, changing page URLs can be a very delicate operation, depending on your CMS, so check with your developers first on the best way to proceed. And on key pages, set up redirects to handle things correctly if someone has bookmarked the old URLs or they’re popping up in Google.

Real, specific, unique, local content from real humans still wins 

Credit unions, by their nature, are very human and very much tied to the specific communities they serve. And that’s the key to your SEO superpowers. Does the world need yet another generic blog article about IRAs? No, not really. Do the folks at the factory next door need specific tips on getting the most out of their year-end bonus? Absolutely. 

Focus on the real, local concerns. And don’t shy away from tough topics; be there for people when and where and how they need you. Make sure your website answers the most common questions — do you have a step-by-step guide for resetting your password? Is there a specific scam going around town? How exactly have you helped local small businesses succeed?

And there’s no law that your product pages have to be boring and generic. Feature local people and photos and stories everywhere. Leverage the quirky local sense of humor. Be the opposite of corporate.

Brian Wringer
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