In this blog, your investment management firm can find out the fundamentals you should know about when mastering ETF marketing: top strategies for Local SEO success.
Did you know that in 2022, roughly 16.1 million or 12 percent of American households owned ETFs? In that year alone, nearly 200 ETF providers also emerged in the United States.
There are several ways for investors to make money work for them through the ETF market. So, how can your asset management company lure target customers to avail of your ETF products instead of your competition’s offerings? What sort of effective ETF marketing strategy should you deploy to bring in more investors to grow your assets under management (AUM)?
Local search engine optimization (SEO) marketing may be one of the best answers.
Although PPC campaigns have been quite popular when it comes to marketing ETFs, Local SEO also has yielded fantastic results for home services as well as manufacturers. Thus, there’s great potential in using Local SEO campaigns to gain more investors for your ETF.
Keep reading to learn some of the top strategies in using Local SEO for marketing your asset management company’s ETF products.
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Target Market Analysis for Local SEO
Performing an analysis of your target market for Local SEO is a vital part of your optimization strategy. This is not just about reading demographic data. You need to understand the wants and needs of prospective customers who might dare to invest in your ETFs.
The big picture SEO strategy here is to tailor your website to the whims and the likeliest keywords and key phrases that your target investors will likely search on Google when looking for low-cost, low-stake investments in your shared locality.
We know how effective Local SEO is in promoting ETFs and other investment vehicles. In fact, we’ve already outlined in the past how there are several benefits that can be gained from using Local SEO in ETF marketing, which are:
- Customized messaging
- Convenience and proximity
- Trust and credibility building
- and so on
In a sense, SEO should have customized messaging because it’s not a set thing—it’s always dynamic and changing. Geographic keywords and your company’s physical vicinity help Google, Bing, Facebook, or Twitter conveniently funnel local prospects to your ETF website.
In light of these benefits, if you want to effectively deploy Local SEO for your ETF marketing, you need to analyze your target market first.
You can do this by conducting loads of research. Take your time to really get to know your target market. ETFs are more appealing to the masses compared to stocks or binary options because they have lower stakes; plus they cost less.
We recommend creating a consumer profile of the investors you wish to target. For instance, you may focus on beginner investors. ETFs are good beginner investments because they’re low cost, low stakes, and carry a basket of stocks or other securities, which means they can benefit from diversification.
In addition, you may focus on people with substantial disposable income. People don’t need to have a lot of generational wealth or win a major lottery win to start investing in ETFs. Anyone with enough disposable income—like the American middle class—can look into this relatively simple investment plan.
With these examples, to enable your ETF website to rank well locally using Local SEO, you’ll need to appeal to middle-class beginner investors who have disposable income by targeting the right keywords. You also can build credibility and trust in your asset management firm by engaging your target audience in the right and effective way, such as through backlinks, mobile optimization, improving user experience (UX), and so on.
We likewise advise conducting regular SEO audits whenever Google tweaks its algorithm to make sure your website not only stays compliant but applies the best practices in present time. You’ll need to keep an eye out for the newest ETF trends or any major shifts in your target investors’ demographics, general marketing trends, and more. This can be quite taxing, especially if your firm’s marketing team does not have enough resources. Luckily, there are experienced digital marketing firms like Zero Company that provide outstanding support when it comes to various digital marketing services you may need.
Optimizing Your ETF Website for Local SEO
To optimize your local ETF website business for SEO, you should tweak or adapt your website in accordance to the audience you’re targeting.
The more you’re able to disambiguate or specifically target your intended audience, the less likely your website will get lost in the ETF market shuffle.
Here are some strategies you can use in marketing your ETF to ensure that it appears in local search results, and with a good (i.e., high) search engine results page (SERP) ranking:
- Optimize Your Subtitles and Page Titles: From our experience, even fixing the simplest things can yield the greatest results. As they say, the devil is in the details. Usually, there’s nothing systematically wrong with a website’s optimization, but webmasters need to take a closer look at the details.
You need to add those relevant ETF or AUM keywords in your ads and throughout the rest of your content. There are several other SEO checklist items that you should always double-check or even triple-check before publishing a new page or blog.
After all these years and all the algorithm changes, the Google Panda algorithm still uses its robots to scan provided information for indexing. Therefore, make sure that your page titles and subtitles include specific keywords that you want to rank high for (among other things).
If you don’t have a webmaster, you can get in touch with us so we can help you in managing and optimizing your website along with the rest of your digital assets.
Your webmaster should optimize page titles and subtitles, and get quality backlinks from reputable local businesses.
- Get Backlinks from Other Local Business Sites: Local SEO involves getting backlinks from the right local websites. In essence, these trusted sites with good SEO are vouching for your asset management company by linking to your website. It’s ideal to get backlinks from sites of local businesses that are similar to yours and near yours.
They’re the search signals that assure Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines that you’re on the up and up. They can help your website get a higher SERP ranking.
To get those backlinks, you may simply contact those businesses and make that request. You may need to provide them with something in return, which doesn’t necessarily mean a cash payment. It’s up to you to negotiate and discuss. In fact, we don’t recommend buying backlinks for SEO. It’s a practice that violates Google’s guidelines and can hurt your SEO campaign.If you’d like to avoid the need for such, simply creating high-quality content may earn you backlinks from other websites that trust your brand and consider you credible enough to link to.
- Use Reviews and Social Proof: Local SEO rankings can live or die by the reviews they get. When prospective investors look up local businesses online, they usually make a beeline to the reviews about any given website or industry (ETF, in your case).
In fact, 76 percent of customers admit to reading reviews when looking up online local businesses. These review platforms can include TripAdvisor or Yelp.
Claim your company’s Google My Business profile and monitor and respond to your reviews. The more positive their ETF investment experiences are, the better your website can rank.
Does Your ETF Company Need a Reliable Local SEO Provider?
Local SEO is a complex machine with many moving parts to take into consideration. Although your asset management company can learn and apply these top Local SEO strategies, you may find it easier to work with SEO veterans to optimize your website locally without wasting your time on ineffective strategies.
Zero Company can help you make the most out of your advertising budget and ensure you’re getting targeted and convertible traffic to your ETF website or landing page. After all, we’ve been in this industry for more than 20 years. When it comes to SEO, we’ve seen it all and done it all.
Book a free consultation with us today to learn more about the effectiveness of Local SEO in helping investment management companies on their ETF marketing.
Leverage Social Media with Local SEO
Finally, although paid social is often discussed separately from Local SEO, it’s possible to combine Local SEO with your paid social campaign. This may be as simple as adding geotags to all of your ETF-related posts, which includes titles, post descriptions, hashtags, alt text, and local keywords.
Search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and so forth all require context on location to help display your post to the right locals every time. In turn, the search engines available on the social media sites themselves also use the same search signals to sort out posts.