Website & SEO

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

This chapter covers the typical website setup and search engine optimisation (SEO) basics.

Content

Most websites consist of content grouped into four main 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 their investor type and location. These selections can’t be verified, so lengthy disclaimers must typically be accepted before continuing.

While this can be an off-putting experience — which should be made as seamless as possible — it does allow the website to be personalised for each visitor based on their selections (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 — full access
• Non-professional (or retail) investor — limited access (e.g., careers and high-level firm information)

The professional investor option is commonly divided further into the two main client groups (institutional investors & intermediaries), even when there isn't much difference in content for each segment.

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, 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 available that automate much of the translation process, allowing for manual corrections and 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 Netflix or Amazon — where visitors arrive to browse for something to watch or buy — most visitors land directly on a specific page, find what they need, and leave. This means that personalisation based on browsing behaviour or CRM data, as well as content tagging, will likely have minimal impact.

Those who land on the homepage usually have a clear goal (which they want to accomplish quickly) so the website should have an intuitive navigation, well-organised content, and an effective search function.

To help visitors quickly find what they need — especially when they need to periodically revisit the same content (a common need in investment management) — consider adding:

• 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”

These features should ideally rely on browser cookies, so registration or login isn't required.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

A core responsibility of digital marketing teams is ensuring the website appears in search engine results pages (SERPs). Lots of money is wasted here, mostly spent on unnecessary software and consultants, yet almost all of the work can be done in-house, at minimal cost.

While many teams inherit existing websites, the following steps describe the full process.

Step 1: Plan the website and URL structure

Map out the website structure and define clear and descriptive URLs that reflect the content on each page.

Use hierarchical URLs so visitors and search engines understand how content is organised. Pages for each investment strategy, for example, would sit within the strategies section, as indicated in the URL:

Step 2: Source content and build pages

Build pages in the website CMS, making sure to:

• Format content clearly
• Use clean, well-structured HTML
• Set compelling title tags and meta descriptions
• Include relevant keywords in URLs, titles, and headers
• Add internal links where appropriate

Digital marketing teams typically conduct keyword research to identify phrases their target audience searches for. Including these keywords on relevant pages helps them to rank in SERPs.

But as the names of products and strategies offered by investment managers are mostly self-descriptive — e.g., “managed futures strategy" — they can form a natural starting keyword list. This limits the need for research.

A small number of intent modifiers can be added to terms in the initial list to explore ideas for educational content, such as:

• What are managed futures?
• How do managed futures work?
• How to access managed futures?

Content featuring popular 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).

Step 3: Submit a sitemap and start monitoring

Set up the following free tools:

• Google Search Console (most important)
• Bing Webmaster Tools

Submit a sitemap via the tools and create a robots.txt file (to specify which pages search engines may access). Then, once the website is receiving traffic, the tools can be used to monitor:

• Search terms that trigger impressions in search results
• Rankings and click-through rates
• Indexing issues and crawl errors

Rather than tracking dozens of keywords, focus on a small number of high-volume terms in key business areas (e.g. “sustainable investment”):

1. Perform a search with each term
2. Analyse the type of content ranking on page one
3. Create similar content with the firm’s own spin on the topic

Step 4: Optimize the user experience

Finally, work on improving usability and technical performance via:

• Clear navigation and search
• Mobile responsiveness
• HTTPS
• Fast page load times
• Consistent redirects (HTTP → HTTPS, www → non-www, etc.)

Occasionally, visitors will arrive from search engines on pages inappropriate for their investor type or location (e.g., a UK visitor landing on a US-domiciled mutual fund page).

Instead of showing a 404 page, display an overlay explaining why the page can't be shown and what alternative content is available. The hreflang attribute can also be used to help search engines show the correct regional page: