Case Study: Leading Financial Services Company and Investment Resource
“With more than 50 years of experience in the financial services industry, we were looking for a search engine marketing partner that would work to maintain our reputation while aggressively working to improve the visibility of our brand and help drive new business from a resource we hadn’t fully tapped into iProspect is the leader in search engine marketing services and we couldn’t ignore the superior results they’d achieved for other large brands. Their capabilities, skills and work ethic are unmatched. Our experience and campaign results prove that.”
- Online Marketing Manager
Situation
This client is a leading financial services company and investment resource that focuses on helping individuals and institutions meet their financial objectives. They offer several thousand mutual funds, and also offer discount brokerage services, retirement services, estate planning, wealth management, securities execution and clearance, life insurance and college savings plans.
The client’s website provides customer access to account information 24 hours a day, including online trading, investment research, and tools that facilitate informed investing decisions. The website is also a resource for customers and prospects to learn more about the company’s products and services as well as research investment options and access an online account set-up system.
The client’s goals for their search engine marketing campaign included growth in visibility within the major search properties on keywords that focused on their Mutual Funds services. They were also looking to add new, strategically optimized content to the Retirement section of their website so that this section would also gain visibility.
Challenges
Navigation to, and around, the company’s website was difficult for search engine spiders. The use of frames, which hinder spiders from accessing content, was the first challenge. In certain sections of the website, the left and top navigation menus were in two separate frames. In other sections, there was only a top navigation frame. Frames divide Web pages into multiple, scrollable regions and are sometimes used to present information to users in a flexible and useful fashion. However, search engine spiders are only able to crawl each frame independently and therefore, as URLs are submitted to search engines that contain frames, the spiders cannot access all of the content of that page.
Another issue that hindered the website’s visibility within search engines was the absence of a standard footer with links to the site map or other important internal pages. Additionally, the robots.txt file was blocking search engine spiders from crawling the Mutual Funds section of the website. And finally, the site was lacking unique and optimized meta data and did not have a directory presence.
Solution
iProspect recommended several changes to the client’s website, which initially included the removal of frames, however they could not make that change. Therefore, the second option was to implement a workaround called a “javascript reload” which effectively enabled the search engine spiders to access and index the content in all of the site’s frames.
Additionally, iProspect recommended the client remove the Mutual Funds directory from their robots.txt file so that spiders would no longer be blocked from crawling and indexing that important content. Furthermore, iProspect recommended that the client add a standard footer to all Web pages that included a link to the site map, add H1 tags around titles, and enhanced internal links. iProspect wrote static meta data and developed dynamic meta data templates for the Mutual Fund Library pages, which the client implemented. iProspect also employed an aggressive directory strategy, leveraging their many service and product offerings.
Upon receiving iProspect’s recommendations, the client also built out their site map to include many sub-category pages, as well as main category pages, allowing another avenue for spiders to crawl and index the site. And finally, the client implemented the meta data and now continues to optimize new pages before they are launched.
Results
Search referrals from the four top search properties, according to market share, has increased by 34% since baseline. Rankings within Google alone, the number one search property according to market share, have increased by 37%.
Overall search engine visibility has increased by 27%. Top-ten rankings alone have increased by 31%. This increase in visibility allows the website to be found more easily by qualified users.
Visibility on the keywords that focus on Retirement has increased by 34% since baseline. Top-ten rankings alone on these keywords have increased by 52%.
The client is ahead of all of its competitors in terms of visibility on Mutual Funds and Retirement-focused keyword phrases. In regards to Mutual Funds keyword targets, they outrank their closest competitor by 155%. The client also outranks its closest Retirement competitor by 325%.
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