Website & SEO

In this chapter

An investment manager’s website is their main online presence where its target audience can learn about the firm, review investment offerings, and sign up to receive communications.

In this chapter, we briefly outline the typical website setup for B2B investment managers and how to to ensure search engine optimisation (SEO) basics are in place.

Content

Most websites consist of content grouped into four sections:

  • Products — information about available products & strategies
  • Insights — regularly published blogs, videos and webinars
  • Firm information — history, investment philosophy & process, people, press releases, job postings, and contact details
  • Resources — tools, educational materials, and fund literature

Investor type & location

Before they can access any content, visitors are usually asked to select an investor type and/or location from a list of options. Because these selections can’t be verified, lengthy disclaimers are typically included and must be accepted before continuing.

While this can be a rather blunt and off-putting experience — and should therefore be made as seamless as possible — it does allow the website to be personalised for each visitor based on their selections with rules set in the website content management system (CMS). These selections are typically stored in a browser cookie, so visitors don’t need to reselect them each time they return.

For investor type, the simplest option is to offer two choices:

  • Professional investor
  • Non-professional (or retail) investor

In this case, professionals are given access to all content whereas non-professionals are limited to job applications and high-level firm information.

However, the professional investor option is commonly divided further into the two main client groups of B2B investment managers — institutional and intermediary — for a variety of reasons.

When an investment manager offers products in more than one country, visitors are often asked to select their location so that the website can display available pooled funds or relevant regional content.

Single vs multiple website domains

Firms offering investment products in multiple countries can either:

  • Host websites on local country domains where products are available (e.g. .com, .it, or co.uk), or
  • Use a single domain for all visitors and tailor content dynamically once the visitor’s location is known.

While there may be some SEO advantages to local domains, they can create complications for smaller marketing teams. Although most CMS platforms allow a page to be published across multiple domains simultaneously, distributing content via social media and email is often easier when using a single, globally shareable URL.

Languages

Some investment managers make their website available in multiple languages, which can be demanding for the marketing team.

Fortunately, tools are now available that can automate much of the translation process (such as Weglot). These tools allow for manual corrections and the creation of translation rules, so key terms and phrases don’t need to be edited repeatedly.

Typical visitor behaviour

Visits to B2B investment manager’s websites are usually short. Unlike platforms such as Netflix or Amazon — where visitors land on the homepage with the specific intention to browse for something to watch or buy — most visitors arrive directly on a specific page, find what they need, and leave. Those that do land on the homepage usually have a clear goal and want to accomplish it quickly.

For that reason, the priority should be to make sure that visitors can quickly find what they need (a clear website structure, intuitive navigation, well-organised content, and an effective search function should help). Adding personalisation based on browsing behaviour, subscriptions, or CRM data will likely have a limited impact due to how visitors use the website.

One way of helping visitors quickly find what they need — especially when they need to periodically revisit the same content (a common need in investment management) — is to add a couple of helpful features:

  • A dropdown showing a visitor’s most recently browsed pages (which may be from a previous visit)
  • The ability to save products or share classes as “favourites”

Ideally, these features should rely on browser cookies, so that registration or login aren’t required.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

A key task of digital marketing teams is optimising the website so it appears in search engine results pages (SERPs). Lots of money is wasted in doing so — mostly spent on unnecessary software and SEO consultants — yet almost all of the work can be done in-house, for free.

Most teams inherit existing websites and won’t be able to start from scratch, but the following steps cover the entire process, just in case.

Step 1: Plan the website and URL structure

The first step involves mapping out the website structure and defining clear and descriptive URLs that reflect the content on each page.

Ideally, the URLs should be hierarchical to make it clear to both visitors and search engines how the site is organised (versus flat URLs). Pages for each of the firm’s investment strategies, for example, would sit within the strategies section of the website, which is reflected in their URLs:

  • Home website.domain
    • Strategies website.domain/strategies
      • US Equity Strategy website.domain/strategies/us-equity
      • Global High Yield Bond Strategy website.domain/strategies/global-high-yield-bond

Step 2: Source content and build pages

With the structure and URLs decided, the next step is to source content for each static page (i.e., any pages that aren’t going to be published in the future, such as blog posts) and build them in the website CMS.

When doing so, the following points should be kept in mind:

  • Content should be formatted clearly
  • Use well-structured, clean HTML
  • Set compelling title tags and meta descriptions
  • Include relevant keywords in page elements (URL, page title, headers)
  • Add internal links where possible

To understand which keywords should be included, words and phrases the target audience might use for their searches that are related to the firm’s area of business are normally identified. Including these keywords on relevant pages should help them appear in search results.

However, because the names of products and strategies offered by an investment manager are usually descriptive in nature (e.g., “managed futures strategy”), they can form the basis of an initial keyword list, which (in my opinion) limits the need for keyword research.

A small number of keyword modifiers — indicating the various forms of search intent — can then be added to terms in the initial list to explore ideas for educational content (“what are managed futures?”, “how to access managed futures?”, etc.). Don’t forget, however, that words like “best” and “top” probably won’t be allowed by compliance.

Content using keywords outside the list can be published on the firm’s blog (e.g., a popular stock held in one of the firm’s portfolios).