Many asset managers utilise third-parties to assess organic search across platforms, whose metrics should be verified against first-party data.
TL;DR: validate SEO rankings before making content changes.
According to search analytics firm Nozzle, Google has been returning manipulated results pages to automated rank-tracking tools since September 13. Across the 27 million results that were analysed, about 8.4% of pages were affected.
The pages look normal, yet keep only about a fifth of the sites that would appear usually. That means that a tracked page-one ranking vanishes for the report six times out of ten, roughly. Social platforms and forums show up most often in the altered results.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
For the purposes of monthly reporting to the head of distribution or the board, many asset managers will measure organic search through a third-party tool.
As this research suggests, if a chunk of those readings are now unreliable, marketers and IR might resort to rewriting fund pages, factsheet landing pages, articles or overhauling content plans completely based on a chart turning red.
This creates time-draining problems out of very little, and the cost of overreacting is higher in the fund management sector when every piece of investor-facing material needs compliance review. Needless rewrites consume the team’s sign-off capacity that should be spent on live campaigns!
And given funds’ long sales cycles – where investors research investment firms over months – trends matter more than week-by-week swings.
Here are some ways that fund marketers should move forward with their SEO strategies in light of this data:
- Treat Search Console as a baseline reference: Google’s own impressions, clicks, and average position data can be used to validate any ranking movements before needing to act on it.
- Add a verification step for reporting: By flagging any large drops since mid-September as ‘unconfirmed’, they can be checked against first-party data before inclusion in management reports.
- Measure outcomes rather than positions: Prioritise organic sessions to fund and strategy pages, PDF downloads and sign-ups rather than keyword rankings.
- Contact your SEO vendor: Request what your third-party’s detection methods are, and whether affected readings are being filtered or re-run.
- Save compliance team capacity: do not queue content rewrite sign-offs based on tracker data alone.
No single third-party data should drive decisions on its own, especially as search behaviour is shared across such platforms as Google, AI assistants and LinkedIn. As manual as cross-referencing ranking metrics seems, it can actually save more time in the long run!
Source
Coywolf, “Google is feeding rank trackers poisoned SERPs with swapped results, Nozzle finds” (via TLDR Marketing)
