Square 4 Partners

The client

Square 4 Partners is a financial-services regulatory compliance consultancy. Its people come from inside the regulator, and it handles the serious end of compliance: Consumer Duty, CASS, skilled person reviews, outcomes monitoring, and its own RegTech product for monitoring customer outcomes. Its clients are wealth managers, lenders, banks and insurers, the kind of firms that cannot afford to get compliance wrong.

The challenge

Marketing a regulated firm calls for real care. Financial promotions rules, Consumer Duty, FCA advertising requirements: a single loose line can become a compliance problem. It is specialist work, and many capable agencies are understandably cautious about taking on a regulated client.

Square 4 needed to be found by regulated firms searching for compliance help, and to run paid advertising alongside it, without ever stepping over the line the FCA draws.

What Glide did

• Compliance-aware SEO. We built and optimised content around the genuine regulatory topics Square 4's buyers search: skilled person reviews, Consumer Duty, CASS, FCA authorisation, section 166. Real answers to real regulatory questions, not marketing fluff.
• Paid search, done properly. We ran Google Ads alongside the SEO and handled the Google’s verification for financial advertisers that trips up firms trying to advertise financial services.
• Clear monthly reporting. A Looker Studio dashboard every month, so the results are always in plain sight.

The results (since Glide's tracking began)

• Average Google position roughly halved, from about 28 to about 14, and has held on the page 1 to 2 border for nine months.
• Page 1 of Google for genuine, non-branded FCA-compliance terms, including "treating customers fairly" (position 3), "FCA skilled person review" (position 5), "FCA s165" (position 4) and "Consumer Duty board report" (around position 8). These are the exact terms a regulated firm types when it needs help.
• 843,000 Google impressions and 18,200 organic clicks over 16 months.
• Google Ads running alongside, adding around 7,000 paid visits, with Google’s verification for financial advertisers handled.

The takeaway

Regulated marketing is a specialist job, and taking it on responsibly takes real care. Glide grew a regulated firm's search visibility on the terms that matter most to its buyers, and did it inside the rules. That is the whole point of working with a specialist.