The third financial regime we write to, and the strictest
We already publish how we write fintech pages to RBI's digital lending disclosure and insurance pages to IRDAI's advertisement register. SEBI is a different regime again, and in one specific way a harder one.
RBI's rules mostly tell you what a page must disclose. IRDAI's rules add an approval trail and a register. SEBI does both and then removes your most persuasive material entirely: the performance number. A lender can advertise a rate. An insurer can advertise a claim settlement ratio published in a regulator's annual report. A broker or adviser cannot lead with what a client made last year and treat it as a reason to sign up.
That single difference reshapes the whole content plan. If your competitors' most-visited pages are recommendation pages and yours can't be, you're not writing the same site with more caution. You're writing a different site.
It's worth saying plainly that stockbrokers, investment advisers and research analysts are three separate registrations with three separate rule sets, and a firm often holds more than one. Which page falls under which set is a question for your compliance officer, and the answer changes what the page can say.
What the rules do to page copy, line by line
Most of the damage happens in headings and meta descriptions, because that's where marketing instincts are strongest and review attention is weakest. Here's the substitution table we hand to writers on day one. It is not legal advice, and every row still goes past your approving officer.
- Put registration details on the page as text, not as a footer image — entity name, SEBI registration number, the exchanges and segments you're a member of, and the compliance officer's contact.
- Name your authors and give them credentials. Google's own guidance says trust is the most important of the E-E-A-T signals, and that it weights them harder on topics affecting financial stability. On a money query, an unsigned page competes against banks that sign theirs. Our E-E-A-T explainer covers the mechanics.
- Standardise the disclaimer, then stop relying on it. A disclaimer at the bottom does not rescue a headline at the top; it just proves you knew.
- Version-control the approval. Store the approval reference beside the page in the CMS. Edit an approved page eight months later and you have quietly published something nobody signed.
| Don't write | The problem | What ships instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Assured returns", "guaranteed 18% p.a.", "risk-free trading" | Market risk cannot be softened, and a guarantee is a promise the market has not agreed to | "Historical range, with the drawdown shown on the same screen" |
| "Our clients made 3x last year" | A performance claim you will be asked to substantiate, in the format the regulator asks for | "Here is the strategy, the assumptions, and what it costs to run" |
| "Best stocks to buy this week", "sure-shot multibagger" | Reads as a recommendation from an entity that may not be registered to make one | "How to read a quarterly result", "what a multibagger claim usually leaves out" |
| "SEBI approved advisory" | Registration is not approval or endorsement, and implying otherwise is its own offence | "SEBI-registered Investment Adviser, registration number INA00XXXXXX" |
| "As featured by <finfluencer>", affiliate posts promising calls | Association with unregistered persons making performance claims is exactly what the tightening was aimed at | Named, credentialed authors on your own domain, with their registration numbers |
| "Zero brokerage" as a standalone headline | There is no zero once STT, exchange charges, stamp duty, GST and DP charges land on the contract note | "Zero brokerage on delivery. Full charge list, with a worked example, below" |
Which means calculators and education become the ranking assets
Strip out tips, targets and performance and a lot of firms conclude there's nothing left to publish. There is — it's just less flattering and considerably more useful.
Tools are the strongest asset in this category, and it isn't close. A personal-finance writer will cite a calculator because it helps their reader. They will not cite your market commentary, because they wrote their own. The tools that work here are the ones tied to a number the investor genuinely can't compute on their own.
- Don't gate it. A charges calculator behind an OTP wall ranks for nothing and converts worse than the ungated version, because the number was the reason for the visit.
- Date every tool. Statutory charges change. A calculator quietly applying last year's stamp duty is worse than no calculator, because someone will plan around it.
- Write the education around the tool, not instead of it. What a contract note actually contains, how a corporate action affects your holding, why your P&L and your tax statement disagree — these are searched constantly and answered badly.
- A brokerage and charges calculator that shows every component. Brokerage, STT or CTT, exchange transaction charges, SEBI turnover fees, stamp duty, GST and DP charges, itemised for delivery, intraday and F&O. Almost nobody publishes the full stack clearly, and it is the single most searched thing about your pricing.
- A capital gains calculator that distinguishes short from long term, and says which holding period and which rates it's applying, with the assessment year stated on the page.
- Margin and position-sizing tools, with the formula and the assumptions written out in the HTML rather than hidden behind a script.
- Goal and SIP planners — the safest tool you can build, because the output is a contribution requirement, not a return promise. Show the assumed rate as an input the user changes, never as a claim you make.
- Server-render the explanation. A tool that exists only after a JavaScript bundle loads and a button is clicked is a blank page to a crawler. Formula, worked example and definitions belong in the markup.
The review workflow: who signs, what it adds, what it costs you
The number that decides whether this works isn't a keyword volume. It's how many approved pages you can ship in a month, and almost nobody measures it before signing a retainer.
Here's the arithmetic we put in front of a broking client before the contract, because it's the part that quietly halves the value of the fee. Our SEO retainer starts at ₹75,000 a month, and from ₹40,000 for a smaller site. At the ₹75,000 tier we plan a fortnightly publishing cadence. If your approval loop runs two weeks per batch and nobody drafts ahead, you get roughly half the output for the same money — not because anyone did less work, but because the queue ate it. So we design around it.
- Fix the approver before the calendar. One named person or committee, with a named deputy for the fortnight they're travelling. An unowned queue is an infinite queue.
- Brief to the approved language. Writers get the substitution table above, the registration details and the disclaimer text at brief stage, so review is checking rather than rewriting. That difference alone usually halves the cycle.
- Run three batches in parallel at different stages — drafting, in review, publishing — so a stalled batch doesn't idle the month.
- Split the calendar by risk. Pure education and tools take the fast lane. Anything touching products, charges or performance takes the slow one. Most sites can ship two-thirds of their content through the fast lane.
- Log the cycle time from week one. If approval averages nine days, we can plan. If nobody knows, every plan is a guess and the first quarter gets spent finding out.
Where the accounts actually come from
best stocks to buy and its thousand variants belong to content farms, aggregator blogs and the discount brokers' own media arms, and they've had years and links to build that. Contesting it is a decade-long war fought on the one query set you're least allowed to answer properly.
The demand that opens accounts sits elsewhere, and it's badly served.
- Brand defence is the highest-return work here. If an affiliate outranks you for
<your firm> charges, you're paying a commission on demand your own advertising created. - Support queries are acquisition queries. Somebody searching
how to transfer shares from <competitor>is telling you exactly what they intend to do. - Comparison pages need dated, sourced numbers. Put the competitor's published charge beside yours, cite the page you took it from, stamp the date and re-check quarterly. A comparison built on remembered numbers is a misleading advertisement with a table around it.
| Cluster | What it looks like | Why it's open |
|---|---|---|
| Account opening and operations | How to open a demat account, documents needed, how to transfer holdings between brokers, closing an account | Nobody earns a click on the closure query, so nobody writes it — and it's read by people choosing a new broker |
| Charges and comparison | Brokerage compared across firms, what a contract note charge means, hidden costs of a free account | Requires publishing your own numbers honestly, which most firms avoid |
| Tax and reporting | Capital gains statements, tax-loss harvesting, how to report F&O income, why the broker statement and Form 26AS differ | Seasonal, technical, and answered mostly by people who aren't your investor's broker |
| Product mechanics | How an SIP in equity differs from one in a fund, what a margin pledge does, how a buyback or bonus is handled | Requires operational knowledge only the intermediary has |
| Your own brand | <firm> charges, <firm> vs <firm>, <firm> review, <firm> app not working | Currently answered by forums, affiliates and review farms who monetise your name |
What this costs, and what we'll commit to
SEO from ₹75,000/mo, and from ₹40,000/mo for a smaller site. Ex-GST, month-to-month after the first quarter, 30 days' notice, and you keep every asset including the drafts that never cleared review. Add organic social and it's ₹99,000/mo. The full list is on pricing, published so you can sanity-check any quote, ours included.
Regulated financial content costs more than an unregulated category for one honest reason: you're paying for writers who draft to the approval standard the first time, so review is a check rather than a rewrite. That is the whole of the premium. An agency charging a compliance surcharge for drafts their approver sends back twice is charging you for its own rework.
The guarantee is not a ranking position, because nobody controls Google's index and a firm that spends its day explaining that past performance doesn't predict future returns should be the first to notice the same logic applied to search. We freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified organic leads on day one — completed account-opening starts, advisory enquiries or booked calls, whichever your desk actually works. Not sessions. If we haven't beaten that number in 90 days, we keep working free until we do.