Mutual Funds

Corporations and individuals have many choices of where to invest their money and retirement funds. Insurance, foreign exchange trading, stocks and bonds, insurance, commodities and mutual funds all offer a mix of potential profit, risk and account management services. Web search engines are playing a critical role in how information is delivered to both consumers and corporate money managers alike.

Mutual Funds are one of the largest types of investment vehicles in terms of money being poured into them. Tens of millions of investors contribute to these huge pools of investment funds. Their popularity extends from the security and profitability of a superfund which enjoys scales of economy and minimized risk. These funds are so big, that they and the fund managers can actually can be a force in the securities marketplace.

Mutual Fund managers have the luxury of being able to invest this money in any other form of investment. If bonds are currently hot, the fund manager can move billions of dollars into the bond markets.

The whole idea behind mutual funds was that small investors could pool their money and have the income, security and growth potential that only large institutional investors could achieve. As many futurists have prophesied, the Internet and computers have made individuals more powerful and aware. Their holy grail is good information.

Mutual fund markets have evolved and many small investors can move their money freely from one fund to another without heavy commission or transaction fees. This mobility and the competitiveness in the marketplace has empowered the small investor and investment managers to move money from poor performing funds to better performing funds. The Web is boon to investors yet bane for the fund managers who may see millions of dollars withdrawn from their funds when investors see a report on a higher yielding fund.

Individual investors and money managers are both making money move faster and faster constantly seeking the best refuge of profit and security anywhere in the world. The Web and the top ranking sites on search engines are increasingly determining what investors see and hear about the markets. Search engines really do empower investors with up to the minute views of the marketplace.

Financial Services Consumers

With or without search engines, investment and financial services consumers are much better informed than the investors of past. They are highly fluent with financial information and transactions and many prefer to manage their own accounts, even though a professional manager would be a better choice for protecting the value of their RSPs or personal wealth. Even those with professional money managers still try to stay up to date with new investment opportunities and the performance of their current investment portfolio. Whether wise or not, investors are curious about what's happening in the markets.

Search Engines - Omnipresence

The financial markets and available services are very complex today. The smart investor will go online to search for information that will help them make decisions that could create or cost thousands of dollars. Many will search their broker's news and company databases, or a major investment portal, while others will do a simple search via Google or Yahoo finance. Many portals such as CNNmoney actually use Google as their internal search service and Google's adsense program places millions of advertisements on Web pages across the Web. Search engines have tremendous reach into the online marketplace and now have to be considered in any online marketing plan.

People search for many reasons of course. Some want up to the minute reports on market events and prices while others want basic information about products and companies that provide them and other still want expert commentary and insight into what's happening. Every search they do is a potential point of contact for your company.

A Frenzy for Knowledge

When something happens in the markets, consumers rush to search engines to learn more about it. That's why news sites are so popular. These events could affect the quality of their present and future lives. Of course, many of these consumers already have financial service providers, so each time that consumer uses a search engine, there is an opportunity for a progressive company to get its name and message and persuade an investor to switch their portfolio. With proper incentives they just may do it.

It's not the only way a prospective customer can be reached, but it's a very good one. The impression is being made at a time when the customer's mind is wide open. Every change in the market is problem of some sort to someone and a problem needs a solution.

If the problem involves a mutual fund, the searcher will invariably type in a keyword phrase that includes the words mutual fund. A company that ranks high on that phrase or many other phrases such as mutual fund companies, or mutual fund management or mutual funds best performers, is going to have timely exposure to a new customer prospect.

Morningstar.com is a site that ranks well not only on searches for mutual funds, but also for best mutual funds and stocks. That gives it the potential for a million search engine referals per year. It is one to study although it is not professionally optimized.

Morningstar.com has a very high PageRank. There are 26,000 links pointed at the domain, many from important Web sites such as Yahoo finance, Forbes, Information Week, and even more from Morningstar's many subdomains holding their country specific Web sites.

Like black holes in space, these big companies gobble up eyes on the Web. Sites such as Morningstar.com et. al, Cnn.money.com, Yahoo.com, and others dominate search engine listings by the sheer size of their Web empires, but none are optimized particularly well. There is no guarantee that their content is most suitable for a particular inquiry. It's a popularity contest and they won.

There are opportunities for smaller competitors to focus their online strengths and capture a share of consumers. To do it, your Web site needs focused content. Yes, content is necessary, but just throwing up content with no keyword based focus is not going to achieve good results.

A good SEO specialist will be able to help you organize and present your content to search engines. They'll also help you initiate the development of the optimal mix of content topics that will move your company up the search engine rankings.

There's no one formula that will work best. It's how it is strategically planned and implemented that bring the best results.

Real Site SEO Review - Brill.com

Let's take a look at a site that has managed a great presence despite having a PageRank of 6. Brill.com dubs itself The Web's Leading Independent Mutual Fund Site. This site has hundreds of pages and nearly every page has the same title tag which reads "Brill's Mutual Funds Interactive(R)." Also at the top of almost every page on the Brill.com site, a newsletter sign up box reads: Mutual Fund Alert.

Their site's Yahoo.com directory listing reads: Brill's Mutual Funds Interactive(R) and it's the same in the Google directory. These two inbound links are very influential for the reputation they build for the brill.com site. The google directory category they're listed in is: Business > Investing > ... > Stocks and Mutual Funds. Again, the words mutual funds are ever present on their site and on pages that link to brill.com. This isn't a professional optimization, but rather good luck and likely hard work offline. There may be other companies that worked harder to deserve such a prominent ranking but Brill.com is the independent winner. It happens to be one that could be improved to produce even more traffic.

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Financial Services SEO study