Finance firms have been warned that they face fading into irrelevance in search engine rankings as aggregators dominate cyberspace.

Companies will be worried about increasingly “fighting in a saturated market”, according to a new report.

Research by equimedia found that financial brands have been becoming less visible to consumers on Google.

Some 40% of the top five rankings for financial services are aggregators, meaning that brands are unlikely to be seen in the top half of the first page on Google.

Jonathan Moore, head of SEO at equimedia said: “Financial brands have been left fighting in a saturated market, and it will no doubt be a definite worry for those who do not have joined up SEO and paid search, or brand building, strategies. SEO for financial services brands isn’t dead, but marketers must look at their search strategies to find other ways to maximize their websites’ natural visibility.”

The digital media agency analysed over 3,000 financial services terms which are searched for online for its report entitled ‘Is SEO dead for the Financial Service Sector?’.

The report’s findings were broken down into eight categories which were: credit cards, current accounts, insurances, investments, ISAs, loans, mortgages and savings.

Aggregators - comparison websites that consumers use to analyse the prices of other companies in a particular market - finished top in most sections.

“The rising cost of ‘Googleflation’ in the financial services paid search market is, thanks to the entry of the aggregator and consumer advice pack, pushing up competition for the primary natural search spots.

“This has been compounded further by Google’s latest changes to the SERP, where more adverts now appear above organic search results on the home page.”

Moneysupermarket and Moneysavingexpert were the most popular examples of these, as they finished top in seven of the eight categories.

Consumer advice services such as This Is Money and the Money Advice Service, were also dominant, making up 18% of the results in the top 10.