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Some investment management companies are already active in Search Engine Optimization (‘SEO’) and Search Engine Marketing (‘SEM’). In order to be successful in both of these marketing efforts, you need to know who your competitors are. Google knows and you can too!

Background:

As any search marketing agency will tell you, keyword research is crucial to any SEO or SEM efforts. Investment managers have to carefully choose the keywords they want to organically rank for and those they wish to purchase via sponsored ads. What you don’t want to be doing is choosing a keyword that has a ton of competition as the likelihood of success diminishes. Therefore, it is important to know who you will be competing against when it comes to getting your search marketing efforts to succeed above all the others.

So how can you easily identify your search engine competitors?

Instead of randomly trying different keyword pairs to see who comes up, an easy way is to use the “related” search refinement on Google.

Using the “related” refinement, you can choose pages from your existing site and based on the Google algorithms, it will identify who your competitors are for similar content and keywords. This is a great tool to have and one which a lot of investment managers may not know about.

Some examples of “related” search results:

Looking at just the homepage website for Blackrock, Google has appropriately identified Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley all as competitors.

Taking the analysis a step further, it would be even more useful to analyze a more detailed Blackrock page.

As an example, Blackrock has a large multi-asset strategy offering. Analyzing the Blackrock multi-asset overview page on Google, we get a more mixed result list and quite a few non-traditional competitors, including www.hedgefundintelligence.com, the Irish Stock Exchange www.ise.ie › Investment Funds, ABCNews abcnews.go.com and the New York Times dealbook blog dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com.

The power of using the “related” search refinement is that it will uncover not just other investment managers you will be competing against for organic search results but also unexpected and non-traditional competitors.

Be sure to use all the tools at your disposal when undertaking an SEO or SEM marketing campaign.