SEO for Equity market research companies.

Most of the Equity market research companies in India have awesome content written by great experts in the field. The content unfortunately is not optimized properly to reach the target audience. The efforts of these experts can be better optimized to reach more audience.

From what I have analyzed, most of these companies rely heavily on paid subscriptions. Most of their conversions happen via promotional emails.

My advice to these companies would be, Do not push your core business through emails. Push your content first. Have a content first strategy when it comes to email marketing.

Reduce your promotional emails. Instead send them app based notifications.

Promotional email rarely works. If you analyse this in your history and see the conversion ratio will be very low, then reduce/stop promotional emails.

Most of the research focussed companies rely mainly on promotional emails.

Do not post a generic answer to your customer complaints on your mobile apps. For any complaints from customers, all these companies, Particularly Indian companies post a generic answer. The answer that needs to be posted is “Yes, we solved it”, “No, we will solve it in x number of days”. If you are running a market research companies, Your will surely have a big content experts posting wonderful content. If possible, request them to train the social media team. Mainly the team that answers the customers. The expertise of your editors will surely help.

Focus on having proper URL architecture. Most of the research companies ignore the number of searches happening in their website. This is a crucial data that needs to be tracked. Your content can be built around such searches. Invite the users to save the searches. This gives you a channel to get the email ID of your customers.

Engagement is the key when it comes to research companies. The more the users engage on your site, the more chances of them subscribing to your content. Since all these companies rely on paid subscriptions, its always better to find opportunities to increase user engagement.

Open up a venue to the users to follow the editors. This is one kind of engagement for the users.

All the wonderful content posted by the editors can be converted into video and audio podcasts. This will increase user engagement and also can be shared on social media by the users. This might trigger social signal.

Content clarity is the key. Many users on research platforms complain about lack of clarity. Be clear. Differentiate between your products and content. My advice would be to give 60% exposure to product and 40% exposure to Content. This allows more visibility for your products which is the main business and content which drives business through traffic and user engagement.

Most of the research companies offer podcast. But they are in private mode. Instead, offer a gist (audio trailer) and then invite the user to become a paid subscriber to hear the full version. To be clear: From the full audio, create a trailer with short and important audio content and upload on sound cloud. So that the users can hear it and make a purchase decision. This trial should also be followed by text version of the audio trailer.This will help both SEO and also give satisfaction to the users. Also have a videoshoot of podcasts and post it on youtube.

Offer a full trial version which is usual.

All the old archives which are not useful anymore in the current trading market, Make them free. Upload them on youtube and all other platforms. Convert the audio to text version and upload it on your website for SEO purpose.

Introduce Mood of the Market:

Market mood shift towards which group industry will be highly beneficial to the customers. If you have the data, this can be done for the past 20 years. Using AI, we can also predict how the mood shift in the coming days will be.

Explore Gamification:

An example would be: Enable point system which can be redeemed by the user for paying his subscription. A point system based on the user’s activity on your site/app will encourage the user to use your site/app regularly. This will boost your user engagement. User engagement is the key for brand building, payment/subscription and profit.

How to implement point system:

For every activity that a user does, offer him some coins. For example:,

  1. I like an article, I get .50 points
  2. I share an article on social media , I get 1 point
  3. I open the app, I get 1 point
  4. I post a comment, I get 1 point
  5. I become a paid subscriber, I get 10% of the subscription value as points.
  6. I become the winner (If gamification enabled) on predicting the top 5 gainers of the day, I get 25 points
  7. I share an infographic image on pinterest, facebook, I get 10 points
  8. I follow an expert, I get 5 points
  9. Implementing a point system is one way to increase your user’s engagement.

Differentiate your business into 4 types:

  1. Product
  2. Content
  3. User
  4. Customer Care

Your loss or profit revolves around the 4 areas. You have a very good content, but the content might not optimized properly for the users (Not the search engines. Forget about search engines. When you optimize for the users, You will automatically rank well on search engines )

In short:

  1. Product should get more exposure
  2. Content should be better optimized for the users.
  3. User engagement is not good other than promotional emails.
  4. Customer care is not up to the mark. We ourselves will get angry if we see a generalized response for a particular query. Think about how your customer will react if they see a generalized response for a specific query.
  5. Once you do the above, then comes the question “What next”
  6. Implement innovations like , Gamification, point system etc to expand your reach.

Conclusion:

  1. Your content might good. But SEO should be even better. SEO includes page loading time, enabling structured snippets, star rating and many on site optimizations.
  2. SEO does not mean just title tags. (Just read for some info: https://sarathy.in/2019/05/17/seo-superman/)
  3. User engagement and performance (Speed) is very important.
  4. Most of the article from such companies are very good and elaborate, but does not give infographics, and the topics that it covers (in tags), and also a point by point conclusion in the end along with a video talking about this point by point conclusion. Try doing this for more SEO benefits.
  5. For engagements try my suggestion of implementing point system, Gamification etc.
  6. Try audio trailers for section that just gives audio and asks users to login.

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