Website & SEO

In this chapter, we run through ideal website setup and ensure search engine optimisation (SEO) basics are in place.

Investor type & location

A website visitor’s first online encounter with a B2B investment manager is usually being forced to select an investor type and/or location before being able access any content on the website. This comes from financial regulations that aim to prevent retail investors from accessing content deemed too complicated or investment products being shown in regions where they aren’t available.

Because a visitor’s selections can’t be verified, lengthy disclaimers are usually added that must be accepted before content can be viewed.

While it can sometimes be a rather blunt and off-putting experience — and should therefore be made as seamless as possible — it enables the marketing team to define up-front what content is shown to key audience segments (even in cases where it isn’t a regulatory requirement, such as showing relevant sales contacts).

The website navigation, pages, and even blocks of content can be personalised for website visitors based on their selections by setting rules in the website content management system (CMS).

A visitor’s selections are often stored as a JavaScript variables and a cookie set on their browser so they don’t have to reselect them each time they visit.

Investor type

For investor type, the simplest option for B2B investment managers is to distinguish between professional and non-professional (or retail) investors. This enables members of the general public to apply for jobs and access high-level information about the firm, while allowing professional investors to see additional content — strategies, products, thought leadership — and subscribe to topics of interest.

Some firms split the professional investor choice further into the two main client groups (institutional and intermediary) when needed. For example, an investment manager may wish to display content it produces specifically for advisors to share with their retail clients to the intermediary segment of its audience.

Investor location

If a firm offers products in more than one country, website visitors are usually asked to set their location so that available pooled funds — and in some cases specific content — can be displayed.

Single vs multiple website domains

If a firm offers products across multiple countries and regions, they may choose to host multiple websites on local country domains where products are available (for example, .com, .it, or co.uk).

When a new visitor arrives on any of the firm’s websites, they are immediately prompted to provide their investor type and location, and are then redirected to the relevant domain based on their selected location.

Another option is to use a single domain. Visitors are still prompted to provide their location, but remain on the same domain once it’s been selected.

While there are probably SEO benefits that come with having local websites, it can create some complications for smaller digital marketing teams. While a CMS usually allows a page to be published across multiple domains at the same time, when it comes to distributing content via social media and email, it can be helpful to only have to share a single URL across a global audience.

In some cases, investor type is included in URLs, which means pages have different URLs even when the content is exactly the same:

Institutional:

Intermediary:

There may be some reason for doing this (which escapes me) but it does add complexity in the same way as having multiple website domains. Therefore, I would avoid this practice if possible, and keep the URL the same for all investor types. Content can still be customised by using the JavaScript variables and setting rules in the website CMS.

Permissions

Visitors will occasionally arrive on a page directly from a search engine, but once their investor type and location have been selected, it then turns out the content can’t be shown to them (for example, a website visitor in the UK landing on a US mutual fund page).

In these cases — which can be frustrating for the visitor — a message can be overlaid explaining the reason(s) why they can’t be shown the content, and offering other links of interest, similar to a 404 error page.

If the firm uses a single domain, this issue can be reduced by adding a self-referential HTML attribute called hreflang to any pages which target a specific country:

Languages

Some investment managers make their website available in multiple languages, which can create a lot of extra work for the marketing team.

In today’s globalised world, however, it’s more important than ever to communicate to each member of the firm’s audience in their preferred language.

Luckily, advances in technology are making the task much easier. Tools are available that can automate translation entirely (such as Weglot) which allow manual corrections or translation rules to be added for specific terms, so they don’t need to be constantly corrected.

Usually, URLs for multilingual websites remain in the “base” language of the website (usually English, if it’s a global firm), but a two-letter ISO language code is added to the URL when another language is selected:

English:

Spanish:

The language code within the URL lets search engines know that pages are available in multiple languages (which should be used in combination with hreflang tags) and also allow URLs to be shared easily in a specific language (such as sharing a blog post via email) to subscribers who wish to receive communications in their preferred language.