If you’ve ever wondered who’s winning the search war across the UK’s investment landscape, the answer now couldn’t be clearer. The No. 1 investment platform, Hargreaves Lansdown, generates as much organic search traffic from the UK to its website as the top 30 global asset managers combined.
That’s great news for HL but, in our view, reflects rather poorly on the asset management community, for a number of reasons. Let’s explain why.
Asset managers are deploying very substantial resources – both headcount and budgets – to the creation and dissemination of content. It’s typically 25%-30% of overall marketing budgets according to Forbes. Why so heavy an emphasis? The objective – and this is borne out consistently when we talk to CMOs at leading firms – is to win two key marketing battles: brand awareness or visibility generally, and thought-leadership specifically. They’re both creditable aims, needless to say, but developing great content is only half the battle; ensuring you get the right eyeballs, and in sufficient volume, engaging with that output – ‘content optimisation’ in the search vernacular – is the other, more critical half.
The most reliable measure of how well content is optimised to perform in the marketplace is the volume of organic – otherwise known as natural or unpaid – search traffic that’s being driven to a website. The analysis we’ve recently undertaken across the world’s 50 largest asset management firms reveals that, in the most part, content is very poorly optimised for search, such that huge sums are being poured down the drain by brands seemingly intent on creating content for content’s sake, and delivering a dismal return on investment (ROI).
Our analysis examined the monthly organic search traffic generated by the top global asset managers (source: Willis Towers Watson, Thinking Ahead Institute, October 2023) across three regions: global, US and UK.
The first thing we see, as we mentioned earlier, is that a single investment platform – Hargreaves Lansdown – generates circa 250,000 UK organic visits to its website each month, roughly the same as the UK organic visits to the leading 30 global asset managers’ sites in total.
Second, we looked to see if there was any discernible correlation between assets under management (AUM) and organic search traffic. Logically, larger firms will enjoy greater familiarity and so should receive more search clicks as a result of a higher click-through rate (CTR) … but if they’re not adept at SEO, they won’t be getting the search impressions (ie appearances in the search listings) in the first place, and a low volume of impressions would necessarily equate to a low volume of clicks.
Interestingly, we found no valid correlation between size of firm and volume of organic traffic. The explanation for low search impressions is either that a firm isn’t producing much content (fairly unlikely) or that the content is poorly optimised for search (much more likely, based on our experience). As we’ve said, given the size of most content teams and the budgets being expended on creating and disseminating all this content, it’s disconcerting that so much of it – a lot of which is very good – is just not attracting a commercially viable number of eyeballs.
What else do the data tell us?
- Larger firms, despite having more substantial resources (both financial and manpower), are typically no better at generating organic traffic than their smaller counterparts – noteworthy exceptions would be J P Morgan, Legal & General (LGIM) and Invesco.
- Indeed, a number of smaller firms outside the global top 50 are punching above their weight: abrdn being a good example.
- Despite the UK’s importance as a market, very few firms excel at driving UK search traffic – this is true of most US groups, with a few exceptions such as J P Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab.
- A number of firms focus almost exclusively on their domestic market and, as a result, tend to leverage a lack of competition in order to outperform in that locality, a good example being Natixis (France).
A response we get from some asset managers when presented with these findings is that, because they believe the vast majority of search volume to be consumer rather than distributor generated, they don’t feel the need to compete in that space. The reality is somewhat different however. Keyword analysis across the breadth of the search landscape confirms that, given the length and complexity of a significant proportion of investment-related search terms (circa 45%), it’s very unlikely that they could be originating from a non-professional audience. That’s a lot of potentially very lucrative search volume to be ignoring!
Bear in mind also that organic search is akin to a marketing ‘superfood’ in terms of its potential to deliver impressive ROI:
- it’s proven to be more cost-effective than paid search over the medium to long term – you’re paying for the optimisation of course, but it’s a lot more cost-effective than paying for the click, particularly for competitive keywords in a high cost-per-click category like investment management
- organic search is stable, whilst paid search is transient – paid search traffic disappears as soon as you turn off the taps on your spend whereas, if intelligently optimised, content will continue to deliver enduring, long-term organic traffic flows
- organic search results are widely seen as more trustworthy than paid results, particularly amongst more sophisticated and/or professional users – as a result, they not only attract higher click-through rates than paid results but are also more successful in terms of building brand credibility and authority.
It’s analogous to real estate: paid search is akin to renting a property, whilst organic search is akin to owning it. It occurs to us that, with so many firms performing poorly on content optimisation, whilst spending a king’s ransom on content development, there’s a significant opportunity for a focused firm to enhance their optimisation dramatically in order to steal a big march on the competition across a host of key brand metrics: awareness, familiarity, credibility, authority and advocacy … and all at a significantly better ROI than relying on paid search in isolation. To see the full results of the analysis, e-mail us at: info@fvenn.com.
