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Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Important for Asset Managers?

By Helen Gurina

While asset managers go to great pains to perfect their Web sites, they're not always concerned with how their advisors and clients get there. Most industry professionals are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), yet this straight forward process is often not maintained, or omitted altogether. SEO may not be a silver bullet to solve all traffic needs on its own, but it is an important factor. Often companies' results are buried under Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, Morningstar, Bloomberg, Investopedia, Wikipedia, and a slew of industry blogs. In other words, you're not an advisor's first source of information and they may not even get to your fund profile page. Despite the low time and cost required for SEO, many asset managers do not rank highly in search results for their own funds, never mind product categories of interest.

Many advisors use a search engine extensively during their work day. If an advisor is looking up a new absolute return product or trying to remember the key talking points about your large cap growth fund, your Web site should be top of the first page of results. If you are promoting new thought leadership about LDIs, a high page rank can drive not only activity but sales. Though advanced SEO strategies can become complicated, the basics of SEO are simple. It is worth the relatively low investment into SEO to make sure your site is their primary source of information about your products. Just a few simple steps can improve your page rank:

• All titles are descriptive, with the company name and a message, not "Landing Page"
• All content is accessible by and preferably mapped for search engine crawlers
• You encourage links to your content and reciprocate with respected industry sites
• Your pages include meta data, load quickly, and have no broken links

There is no reason to forgo checking your SEO periodically, it is completely free and takes but a few seconds to see how you're doing. Simply type in your company name and a few products or articles of importance on your Web site, and see what happens - you may be surprised. Don't miss announcements about little tweaks that Google, Bing and others continuously make, as forgoing a simple adjustment can cost you ranking. The good news is Google continues to add factors to identify professional sites and weed out link farms, which gives asset managers a leg up in optimizing SEO (at least against non-industry sites), since their site infrastructure is properly executed.

Consider employing more advanced methods of driving SEO traffic, such as adjusting content to trends in advisors' search queries. Search not only remains an important factor for driving traffic but continues to evolve, embracing new technologies, devices and platforms. Is your site's social media prepared to generate search results driven by social connections? Today's advisors are an increasingly impatient audience as they come to expect the speed and efficiency of social media sites from every site they visit. Don't lose your audience, what's worse than customer criticism like the iconic Twitter Fail Whale, is a ringing silence across a Web site you invested in perfecting.