Published: 29 August, 2021

How to Market Your Funds Using SEO

In the digital age, getting found online is a vital part of any company’s marketing efforts – in any sector. And fund marketing is no exception, particularly as the new generation of digitally-savvy investors are increasingly using internet research to guide their investment decisions.

So, SEO matters – and you can use it to your advantage to drive potential investors to your website.

This white paper is intended to guide you through the foothills of SEO and how to use it your advantage.

But this is a massive field – and one that is changing all the time. So, what follows is not intended to be anything even close to a comprehensive guide.

Instead, we hope to underline some basic tenets and best practice around the subject of SEO, which can help guide your own journey through this tricky aspect of marketing.

Let’s start with what exactly SEO is…

What Exactly Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. (And if you didn’t know that, don’t worry – neither did 57% of marketers asked in a 2017 study.)

And, as the name suggests, SEO is the process of making your website (and any web-based content) optimised for search engines, so that Google can easily find, categorise and display it on results pages. (There are of course, other search engines as well as Google, but with that company accounting for nearly 80% of all searches worldwide, that’s the one we are concentrating on for the purposes of this white paper.)

SEO should not be confused with SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which is when you pay for your website to show in results through ads, most commonly via Google AdWords.

Instead, SEO is about organic search – so your site shows up in search results without having to pay. And the hope is that when people search for things relevant to your fund, they come across your firm’s content.

For instance, a potential investor visits Google, and starts searching for information on funds. Google then decides which results to show based on hundreds of factors. SEO helps provide signals to search engines to let them know that your website and content deserves to rank highly in relevant searches.

And if you are a newer company SEO is especially important, as people are probably not searching for you by name. So you need SEO to enable people to find you easily based on what you provide, since name recognition is not yet there.

The Bedrock Of Effective SEO

There are many aspects to SEO, and we go into some of them in the next section. But the most important thing to remember is that you must populate your site with one thing:

Content.

Or, more specifically, good content. That is the bedrock of effective SEO.

So, you must provide quality copy – as well as images, infographics, video, audio and anything else that informs that visitors to your site will find compelling. To do this, it should be authoritative and helpful, thus providing the exact information your visitors are looking for.

But you must create content for your human visitors first and search engine second, as it is people who you need to convince.

However, happily, good quality content also works well in purely SEO terms, because Google likes useful, helpful stuff. In fact, Google’s own guidance states that website content should be – useful and informative, more valuable than that found on similar sites, credible, high quality, and engaging.

In short, it loves good content and hates bad content.

It is still possible to score highly in SEO terms with bad content, through techniques such as keyword stuffing – where loads of keywords are inserted into copy with little thought to relevance or proper placing. But this is entirely counter-productive. If you are just churning out content that scores highly in terms of keywords, for example, and becomes very visible on that basis – but is utterly useless in terms of useful, actionable advice – they all you will achieve is annoying a lot of people.

Which is bad for your reputation and your profit margins. And people will soon look elsewhere. In fact, this sort of tactic is known as ‘black hat SEO’, which refers to questionable methods that only deliver short-term gain.

Achieving high ranking with bad content is only ever going to be a temporary victory. It won’t be long before search engines find you out and you drop down the rankings. You may also incur a Google penalty, which could hurt your ranking for years to come.

So, before you do anything else, you must ensure that all the content you produce for your website is helpful and of a good quality. There is no point whatsoever in having content that drives traffic but fails to help and engage with people.

The Other Stuff

Good content is your foundation with regards to SEO. Without it, you have absolutely nothing useful

But those foundations have to be built on. And that happens by optimising both your content and your website. This drastically improves your visibility.

And without visibility and exposure, your content is just floating around the web along with millions of other sites.

Few people will see it, share it, or do anything with it.

So, here are some of the core things you must do to optimise your content and help it to be found by prospective investors:

Keywords

Having keywords – phrases and terms that you want to target for search – in your copy is perhaps the most obvious facet of SEO.

When it comes to selecting keywords, you should look for the best combination of the following three factors: relevancy, a decent monthly search volume, and low competition. Google’s Keyword Planner can help you determine the best keywords to use.  Remember that general keywords, such as ‘investment’ or ‘fund’, are likely to be highly competitive, so it’s best to be more specific by including keywords that are more relevant to your firm, e.g. – ‘health technology investment’, or ‘UK smaller companies fund’.

You should also try and include both your primary and secondary keywords as close to the beginning of the article as possible, and then have them logically placed throughout, so they read as a natural part of the content.

And remember that, as mentioned above, ‘stuffing’ your site with keywords does not work – this will put off search engines and human readers alike and have a negative effect on your ranking.

Images

This is often forgotten, but search engines like images – as they read the filename and ALT description behind each one to get an idea what the site is about. So, make sure you include relevant keywords in each.

Links

Links are good on your site, so make sure you have lots of internal links to other parts of your site.  It’s also good for site visitors, as it makes navigation easier.

In addition, inbound links – which link to your site from others – are great for SEO, as each one is a thumbs-up to say that people like your site and that it’s being read, which in turn encourages Google to boost its listing position. But for this to work they have to be from authority sites that are relevant to your own.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the visible text the reader clicks on to go to another page. And it’s good to have anchor text – both for internal and inbound links – that contains relevant keywords. For example, ‘how to raise funds with digital marketing’ would be good anchor text to link to www.pfc.flywheelstaging.com.

Title and meta description

The title tag is the little site description you see in the browser heading and it is an important signal to search engines. So, try and include your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible, and keep it all under 67 characters.

Then write a longer description of your company in the meta description – the text that appears beneath your title on a search engine results pages – featuring keywords.

Format

Before you put your copy onto your site, you must make sure that you format it so that it’s broken down into small chunks. That way, you make it easy for the reader to take in, which means they stay on your page. People have short attention spans, so they won’t stick around if your core copy is laid out in just one huge paragraph.

If people are obviously reading the content, then search engines will recognise that fact and increase your ranking accordingly. But if people click away quickly, then your content is obviously not seen as valuable, which will harm your score.

Try to stick with paragraphs that are between one and four sentences in length. And you should insert sub-headers and/or visuals every 150-300 words to break up the content even further.

Bring In The Experts

SEO is a complicated subject, so – unless you have internal expertise – it may help you to bring in an SEO consultant.

That’s not to say you can’t do SEO yourself – you can. But, depending on your level of knowledge, there is only so far you’ll be able to take things.

And one major reason for this is that, although you can learn as much as you like about the current status of SEO and what works and what doesn’t, it is an ever-evolving field. As users’ behaviours and search engines’ capabilities develop over time, standards, rules and best practice come and go in the blink of an eye.

And then there are the updates – Google is notorious for dropping updates without warning, which change the behaviour of its algorithms and can see your website drop down the rankings like a stone overnight. SEO consultants make it their business to stay on top of these things and will react on your behalf when they happen.

But, you must be careful when choosing an SEO consultant. Make sure you ask questions, such as:

What SEO methods do they use?

What successes have they had in the past?

Do they offer any guarantees?

And, crucially, do they understand and have experience within the fund sector?

Conclusion

SEO isn’t something you are going to get right overnight. It’s going to take trial and error – and a lot of hard work – before your site is sat at the top of the rankings for your chosen keywords.

But when that happens it can be well worth it, as you are suddenly getting found by people who may one day invest in your fund.

It may never be a mainstay of your fund marketing efforts, but SEO can play an important part in attracting and connecting with a client base that is increasingly online.

If you want to find out how ProFundCom can help you use digital marketing to raise assets schedule a demo here

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