Will Google Deem Your Mutual Fund, ETF Website Fast Enough For Mobile Users?

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If your work involves being visible on the Internet, then there’s no debating Google’s dominance over what you do. On the bright side: If Google is an overlord, at least it’s an overlord that communicates.

For example, Google recently confirmed the importance it will be placing on the speed of a Website accessed by a mobile device. According to Search Engine Land’s coverage of a recent conference, Google will be adding a ranking factor to mobile search results based on the site speed of your mobile Web pages. “Outlier sites that load really slowly will see a demotion of the search results,” although no specifics about minimum speed expectations have been made public yet.

Time To Make Site Speed A Priority

Site speed has been on the checklist for asset managers to monitor for at least a few years. But in 2013, given the impending Google search penalty and considering that target audiences (financial advisors and investors) are confirmed mobile device users, mobile site speed needs to jump up as a priority for digital teams.

The table below shows how the home pages (mostly) of the 20 largest mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms do in Google’s PageSpeed Insights test. PageSpeed Insights is the site that Google uses to communicate to developers about how to make sites faster.

I ran scores for all sites shown in the table on Sunday and then repeated the test on Monday. Different scores were produced for a few sites from Sunday to Monday but the differences were never more than a few points plus or minus. PageSpeed Insights' desktop scores are provided here as a basis for comparison.

According to Google, “PageSpeed Score indicates how much faster a page could be. A high score indicates little room for improvement, while a lower score indicates more room for improvement.” The test fetches a site's contents (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, etc.) live, using a webkit-based renderer. Results from this analysis or something similar will ostensibly influence Google's judgment of your site for mobile users.

Congratulations to BlackRock, whose iShares.com and BlackRock.com, top the list for scores. Overall, this group of asset managers has an average mobile site score of 50 points on a 100-point scale.

It’s unknown at what score Google would apply a search penalty.

Check out the PageSpeed Insights site yourself to see not just the scores but also the recommendations of what needs to be addressed for your site. Across the board, the greatest concentration of problems are found in the "Minimize the payload" category. Most sites have redirect issues, and almost all need to optimize the use of images.

For more information, see the PageSpeed Insights Frequently Asked Questions. Even more detail can be found in this Tech Republic post from January. 

20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012

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I’ll never cease to marvel at the power of the written word. As just one recent example, I’m barely into Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and Jobs’ life path has already been influenced by articles that appeared in two magazines (one in Esquire and the other in Popular Mechanics).

Content (to include more than just the written word in 2012) can be just so relevant, so provocative, so entertaining that it has an impact on us. We email a link to it, we tweet about it, we mention it in real life conversations, we conduct research based on it, we remember it.

The following is a list of 20 content highlights that I’ll take from 2012.
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Vanguard's SEO Advantage

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It’s been said that success comes from doing a lot of little things right.

Now I’ll concede that search engine optimization is not the primary reason that Vanguard sits atop the mutual fund food chain. But I recently noticed yet another online advantage that Vanguard has over most asset managers: Because it offers an extensive amount of content in front of the log-in to its financial advisor site, that content is well positioned to draw searchers to the site. (Having the resources to produce the content is another advantage, we should note.)

As you can see in the screenshot below from SpyFu.com (subscription required), advisors.vanguard.com ranked in the top 50 search results for almost 400 organic keywords last month. That—coupled with the more than 8,000 keywords driving traffic to Vanguard.com and 38 other Vanguard domains—is impressive. Other asset managers are doing well to rank 300 keywords for their Websites overall, again according to SpyFu.
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9 Random Stats Cherry-Picked Just For You

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The last few weeks have seen the release of some fascinating and free research and work. I cracked open the reports to pull out the following nine numbers that made an impression on me and might on you.

10.8

Financial advisors say they’re working with about one additional mutual fund provider in 2012—10.8 versus 9.9 in 2011—and that they’re concentrating fewer assets with their top three providers.

This is just one of many insights offered in “A Fresh Look at Advisor Loyalty” from Cogent Research. The report, which you can download, also analyzes aspects of the product and service experience that are most likely to drive advisor loyalty across three types of products: mutual funds, ETFs and annuities.

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Want To Raise Awareness? Try Publishing More Often

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One of the most significant changes to asset management marketing over the last four years has been the frequency with which Websites—and increasingly blogs—are updated. (For a blast back to the past, see this Rock The Boat Marketing post on Web content updates, published on September 18, 2008, after the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the announced federal bailout of AIG, etc.)

Previously, content had been valued for its "evergreen" quality. But as the markets melted down and buy-and-hold came under fire, the most general, time-tested statements about investing and investment products needed to be rethought and recast. Evergreen investment content? We may have been deluding ourselves.
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