Without wishing to sound haughty, most of our client assignments at fVenn tend to relate to upstream issues: distribution strategy, brand positioning, product proposition et al.

However, a number of recent undertakings have served to re-emphasise the fact that for many asset managers a lack of focus on certain key, albeit functional, aspects can have a significantly detrimental impact on more strategic imperatives.

Consider SEO (search engine optimisation) as a case in point. Yes, I know what you’re thinking … but bear with me!

In a recent article, we revealed that despite significant in-house teams devoted to the creation and dissemination of vast amounts of content – not to mention ever-expanding budgets (typically 25%-30% of overall marketing expenditure according to Forbes) – over 90% of this output is ignored by the audiences for whom it’s intended.

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Asset managers are spending up to 30% of marketing budgets on content … 90% of it is being ignored!

Now, a good deal of this content is poorly articulated, says little that’s genuinely thought-provoking and is rarely timely … but that’s not the primary reason it’s being ignored. It’s being ignored because it’s not even being seen.

Great content keeps people on your website, building trust, authority and favourability; great SEO drives the right people to your website in the first place. It’s a fundamentally symbiotic relationship. What we almost invariably see, however, is a lot of focus (and money spent) on the former and marked neglect re the latter.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that a fully optimised site can be delivered easily, speedily and inexpensively and, once achieved, our specialist digital team is consistently seeing organic traffic uplifts of 300-400% within six months … and at a tiny fraction of the cost that would be incurred to deliver the same uplift through paid search.

So what are the most common frailties we encounter when analysing why asset managers’ search rankings are depressed? This gets a tad technical but they can be conveniently broken down into three core categories (NB: we’ll use Google as a ‘shorthand’ for search engines generally):

Site set-up fundamentals

  • Shared authority domains – multiple domains can ‘share’ authority needlessly
  • HTTP security – certain pages being ‘http’ not ‘https’ – weak security is a significant ranking hindrance from a Google perspective
  • Page load speed – typically a result of poor image optimisation and bloated code, and again a major Google negative
  • ‘Orphan’ pages – pages that don’t link back to the main site won’t rank for SEO purposes and deliver a poor user experience
  • Ill-considered information architecture – typically aligning with internal business structures rather than likely user journeys
  • Duplicate content – (e.g. virtually identical versions of the same fund fact sheet designed for different audiences) – Google penalises this, and so be sure to use ‘canonical tagging’ to tell it which page to rank
  • Poor/non-existent use of relevant tools – Google Search Console, XML sitemap etc
  • Analytics – have you got the right tools in place and are they correctly set up?

On-page optimisation

  • Poor mobile/tablet optimisation – the vast majority of web searches are initiated on mobile devices … and it’s still growing
  • Unnecessary use of PDFs rather than ‘live’ pages – search engines can’t read PDFs and so they can’t rank them
  • Weak/absent meta tags – Google needs this vital information to influence how the site is presented in search results
  • Poor/non-existent use of structured data (eg Schema) – this describes key elements on your website in a language that Google understands, enabling it to present users with richer results
  • Keyword strategy – are your pages sufficiently populated with the relevant keywords that are likely to be driving the bulk of the available search volume?
  • Header tags – ensure these are written in such a way that they provide Google with important context around the keywords on the page

Off-page optimisation

  • Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) – have you claimed it and is it accurate?
  • Google Knowledge Panels – are these fully and correctly populated for your people, products and services?
  • Wikipedia – it’s a major driver of rankings so be sure your page is comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date
  • Broken links – not only do these deliver a poor user experience, but they impact negatively on rankings, and so ongoing link reclamation is important
  • Weak backlink profile – strong links to your site from authoritative third-party environments are the surest way to enhance your rankings … the sooner you embark upon building these, the sooner your traffic will accelerate.

OK, yes … it’s a long list and it might appear intimidatingly technical. However, as we’ve said, it’s surprisingly easy and inexpensive to remedy all the above issues, and the benefits in terms of your content marketing effectiveness and general online visibility are undeniably huge. Concerned about the SEO robustness of your own site? Get in touch and we’ll happily conduct a mini audit to expose the key flaws.