COPY Vanguard’s 6M+ Organic Traffic Strategy

Welcome to another digital marketing deep dive where we take a look at a business that's smashing it with their digital so you can take the lessons and learnings and apply them to your industry. Today we're going to break down the search strategy of one of the US largest investment management firms, Vanguard. And Vanguard is killing it with search and AI visibility. Let's take a look. Now, we're just looking at the US traffic here on Semrush organic. We've got around 6.2 2 million monthly visitors, 48,000 keywords in the top three positions, 45,000 links coming from AI overviews. We've got a AI visibility score of 85, which is crazy, and 74 12,000 AI mentions. Now, yes, Vanguard is a huge brand, but even so, how many times in these breakdowns have we seen huge brands where their digital marketing hasn't lived up to the size of the brand? Vanguard is doing exceptionally well in both areas. So today, we're going to break down three things for you. Why Vanguard is dominating traditional and AI search, and it's not just cuz they're Vanguard, the hidden strategy behind their educational content, and the lessons that marketers from any industry can apply immediately based on what they're doing. But first, all of this comes because Vanguard is doing something exceptionally well that we all know we should be doing, but so few businesses actually do, and that's positioning their offering around their customer. Let's take a look. Here's their homepage. You deserve investing advice from a true partner. Investing for everything it's worth. Whether you're saving for smaller moments or the big ones, we're here for you. Who's that about? Well, it's sort of about Vanguard, but mainly it's about you. Which goal can you check off your list? Prep for retirement about you. Live in the moment, about you. Plan your estate, about you. Save for school, about you. You get the gist, right? Vanguard has positioned their entire website around the benefits and the goals that people want to achieve from their products. They are not talking about their products. Now, sure, if you want to learn about Vanguard ETFs, you can do down here, but that is not the priority on their website. Even when Vanguard does talk about themselves, they're talking about you. We stick to four principles designed to set investors, you up for success. Even when Vanguard is presenting social proof, they're talking about you. You're in good company. There's tons of helpful educational content. We're going to come back to that in a minute, but you get the gist here. This is marketing 101, right? Focus on the customer. And we all know that we should do this. But honestly, if we go on our own websites, are we talking about the customer or are we talking about our products and services? Check out Schwab, a competitor to Vanguard. Look at this. Your Schwab relationship elevated. Well, it's kind of about you, but it's mostly about them, right? The Schwab relationship. Welcome back. Explore our most popular accounts. And then here we've got the different products. They're talking about their things that they sell. We've got some latest market news and insights, but it's really quite specific and it's not really tailored to the average visitor on the website. Then this section, we think you might like. Even that's about we think you might like it. Not stuff you might like. We think you might like it. And look, two of the three of these things are, "Hey, look, we've got this thing for you to buy." Schwab Bank offers flexible mortgage options, the Charles Schwab cards from American Express. When they present social proof, they don't talk about, "You're in good company." They say, "We're a great company. Schwab is the first brokerage to win all this stuff." Now, my point isn't that this is bad. My point is that this is normal. This is how so many marketers present their business. They work out what are the things that we want to sell and let's present them on our shop front. They imagine a table with all of their products nicely laid out with customers walking in and picking from the different products. That's normal. It's how most of us operate. But what Vanguard is doing is instead of lining up all the products on a table, they've got a number of different doors for people to go to based on what they want, what their goals are, what they want for their life. And then when someone walks through that door, they're given a tour of the products that Vanguard sells, but all from the perspective of here's how it helps you get to your goals. Now, yes, none of this is about driving traffic or increasing rankings. But actually, it turns out that taking this approach can work really well for AI search because when people are talking to AI tools, they are often talking about their problem or their goal. So, let's take a look at an example of how this is winning for them. If you search Google for how to start saving for college for my child, Vanguard's article here is being featured. It's also referenced later on in the article as well. Now, this is a relatively top offunnel search, meaning it's searched for by somebody who doesn't yet know the name of the product that they should be looking for, but that's okay. Vanguard wants those people because it can then take them on that journey and educate them throughout the process till they're ready to buy from Vanguard. Let's take a look at this article, which is the one that's ranking and being cited. This is a great piece that obeys all of the principles that we're talking about. Saving for college, when and how to start. It's doing some stuff that AI tools absolutely love, which we're going to come back to in a minute. Like look at this section. This is perfect for AI. We're going to come back to that in a minute. But let's go back to this idea of Vanguard positioning everything around the user. Well, why saving early matters? We've got a chart that demonstrates it here. Then look at all the subheadings in this article. They're all the questions that somebody might have. So, they're all coming from the perspective of the prospective buyer. What is a college savings account? What are my college saving account options? Understanding the 529 college savings plan. All of this is coming from the searcher. And by the way, these questions are the sorts of things that people are typing into claude chat GPT Gemini AI mode. So, by the fact that Vanguard's got content on these topics, it's increasing its chances of being cited in those responses. The alternative approach would just be to say, "We don't really mind about the top ofunnel stuff. We're just going to let AI tools answer that. We just want to rank for the resulting searches that come from that." Okay? So, we want to rank for 529 account, college savings account, open a college savings account now, things like that. But what Vanguard wants to do is cover this topic throughout the whole funnel to make sure it's got as much chance of getting someone onto their website, signing up for their stuff early without having to shoot it out once someone gets right down to the bottom of the funnel. They're ready to make that purchase because that's when you're spending big bucks on PPC or having to compete for the most competitive high commercial intent keywords. Okay, so let's dig in further on Vanguard's SEO and content strategies. What sort of content strategy is generating 6.2 million organic visits from the US alone each month? Well, I'm going to show you now. Let's take a look at one of these articles and see how it's structured because they all follow the same sort of path. So, can you have both a traditional and Roth IRA? This is for someone who's a bit further down the buyer journey. They kind of know what they're looking for and they're starting to do a bit more research about specific products. We've got the sticky about section that follows you down the page, which is quite nice. This key takeaway section is great for users with short attention spans. And also AI tools love it as well because they can just rip these bullet points and rewrite them and put them in their AI answers. So we got definition content which is basically designed to help people answer their top questions. We've got these CTAs. I'm going to talk about those in a second. We've got some more definition stuff here. Then we've got the top questions that people would have about these topics. And you'll notice there are lots of internal links throughout these articles. We're going to talk about those in just a second as well. Before we do that though, I want to talk about these CTAs. We get a lot of requests from brands that are driving a lot of traffic to the content section of their website, but that traffic isn't turning into revenue. We had one just this week. They actually came to us because they were seeing a drop in organic traffic to the content section of their website. And their request to us was, "Hey, ninjas, can you help us figure out what's going on here?" Well, when we looked at it, yes, there was a drop in website. And absolutely, we can help them fix that. But the much bigger problem was that the traffic that was coming to the content section of their website wasn't generating any revenue. And when I say wasn't generating any revenue, I mean like zero revenue. And this was a large site driving a lot of revenue across the whole of the site, but the content section was contributing nothing. And they're not alone. There are loads of businesses out there with content that's ranking and being cited, but when someone lands on it, nothing happens. Now, we've helped a lot of businesses with this problem, and it's a really straightforward solution. When you boil it down, it's doing exactly this. Making sure that you've got calls to action dotted throughout your content that are relevant to what that person is looking at. So, Roth IRA, learn more about which IRA is right for you. Let's take a look at these. We've got learn the difference between traditional and Roth IAS. We've got one there, we've got one there. Now, learn about which IRA is right for you. So we can click on that and we get more information about this topic but that's on a product focused page. So this is designed to move us from learning information to start moving us nudging us towards a purchase decision. And we see these throughout save with a Vanguard IRA open an account. So we've got these CTAs being echoed through the site. It's a very similar thing to what we did with the ordinary where they were having a lot of visitors come to the content sections of their website to learn about products, learn about scientific terms. We added product links inside those content sections. So when someone was learning about a particular ingredient nioinomide, well you can click to go and buy the nycinomide product. It sounds so logical but so few businesses do it and they end up with vast amounts of traffic that's driving little to no revenue. So just wanted to point that out. Okay, let's go back to these internal links because you might notice in the Vanguard content pieces there loads of internal links through to different things and that's because they've covered each of these topics in a kind of topic cluster 360° approach. Let's take retirement as a topic category. Well, inside retirement, we have lots of different subtopics. One of those topics is IAS. Now, rather than produce just one article about IAS, what they've done is they've covered IAS from lots of different angles. This means that whether you're looking for information about a spousal IRA or whether you can't contribute directly to a Roth IRA or a backdoor Roth IRA conversion, whatever subtopic you have about IAS, Vanguard has produced some content on it. This approach works immensely well for users because it means they can really rabbit hole on your content. they can get stuck in, click through, before they know it, they've learned everything that they know about this topic from your website. But it also works really well for AI search because it means that whatever subquery somebody has about your topic, you've got a content piece answering it. Well, let's go back to this article, saving for college. So, this is in the education and college savings topic. So, education and college savings is the whole topic that they want to cover. And this article is one subtopic of that which is when and how to start saving for college. If we go one level up and look at the other content around this topic of education and college savings. Look, we've got different information about these 529 plans. We've got uh more information about saving for education. So for people who are further up the funnel, we've got a whole bunch of interactive tools, right? All of this means that whatever question you've got, it's covered on this website. Fantastic for users, fantastic for AI search. But that's not all. Going back to this retirement category we're looking at. They've got tools and calculators on the website, including this fantastic retirement income calculator. You've heard us talk about calculators and software tools before. They are an amazing asset to help educate people on your website so that they can move themselves along the journey and get closer to buying without having to talk to anyone on your team. So really useful tool, but also they can be an absolute link magnet. Let's take a look at this one. Retirement income calculator. It's really nice. well formatted tool that makes it really straightforward to find out your info. There's not a huge amount of information on this page. If I was going to be slightly critical, I'd say let's get some case studies in here. When you put your details in here and you get your results, let's give people some relevant case studies. But to be fair, it's a pretty good results page, so we're going to let them off. But look at the performance of this page. So this is just this page performance in search. We've got a page authority score of 70. So that's equivalent to 70 page rank. Fantastic. Why is it so good? Because we've got 462 different websites linking to this. And this looks like a page that's only been live for maybe 3 and 1/2, 4 years. We've got 74,000 visits a month to this website. That was over a 100,000 visits a month. Not to the whole website, just to this page. And we've got,00 back links pointing at this site. And those back links are decent. Let's have a look at some of them. We've got uh links from CNBC, I will teach you to be rich, Yahoo Finance, Morning Star, Investopedia. This is like the who's who in the investment high authority website space. Why are they linking to this calculator? Because it's really good. So, how do you tie all of this together? Well, you choose the topics that you want to cover on your website and you cover them in super depth with lots of related content about that topic. So, we're covering it from all angles. You hear us talking about this topic cluster approach where you've got some pillar content in the middle like the ultimate guide to retirement savings and then you've got all these related articles coming off it talking about that topic but from different perspectives. Then you link in the calculators as well and it means that you can produce pieces like this where you're linking through to all of your related articles. It covers the entire topic for someone and the user experience is fantastic. They don't need to go anywhere else to find the information that they need. They use this approach across all of the different topics that they want coverage for. Now, am I going to tell you that every single brand that takes this approach is going to get 6.2 million visits to their website every month? Absolutely not. Obviously, Vanguard is a big brand. It's got some good branded search. Look at this. About 64% of their traffic is branded. So, they've clearly built a big brand with lots of trust. But, how many times have we seen in these deep dives that a brand that should be crushing it and dominating actually isn't in search because they're not doing this stuff? So if you're starting from a lower base, the point isn't that you need to cover every topic and every particular customer type in your space in that much detail. You pick one. You pick one particular customer segment you know you can serve really well and you go deep in that content area. You can start to dominate for that customer segment and then move on and then move on and then move on. And by the way, if you're watching this thinking, we really need some help with our visibility in search and AI search. Well, good news. is the team at Exposure Ninja can do exactly that. We work with all sorts of brands around the world from businesses doing 5 million a year to businesses doing 50 billion a year. We help them improve their visibility in search and improve the number of conversions and sales they're getting through their websites. And there's two ways that we can help you. Firstly, if you've got an RFP or you've got a specific thing that you want some help with, you can contact us through our website. Just head over to exposioninja.com and click the contact button and let us know what you need. But if you're not quite ready for that, you can request a free digital marketing review from the team. Just tell us a bit about your marketing, what you've tried, what your goals are, and we'll then take a look at your digital marketing. We'll do a mini version of this deep dive on your brand, and we'll show you the results. We'll say, "Here's what you can be focusing on if you want to generate more leads and sales from your website. Here's what we prioritize, and here's what to do over the next 6 to 12 months if you want to significantly increase your revenue generated online." This service is free, but not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for this at exposurinja.com/re. That's exposioninja.com/re. Okay, let's take a look at Vanguard's AI search visibility then, cuz Semrush is telling me it's 85 out of 100 great. And it turns out, yes, it is. Not only is it great, it's actually growing. And the reason for this is simple. AI tools like three things. They like trusted entities that are talked about in lots of areas online, which Vanguard has. They like very nicely structured educational content, which Vanguard has, as we've seen, and they like clear explanations. Now, take a look at this. We're in the Seamrush AI visibility section, and have a look at the cited pages. So, these are the pages that AI tools are citing from Vanguard's website. And what do you notice? Almost all of these pages that are being cited in the most common prompts areformational pages. They are these detailed guides that we've been looking at. Look at this one. This page is being cited and mentioned in 1,800 AI prompts. So, let's take a look at the page because it's doing a lot of stuff that these AI tools absolutely love. We've got a very clear heading. We've got a summary at the top. We've got structured tables. We've got questions asked in the customer's voice. So, when somebody searches for this in their prompt, the AI tool can go and find this piece of content and draw out this very structured bulletointed answer. And of course, this is an article that goes deep. It's not surface level information. It gives you everything that you would need about this topic. Now, that's just one page, but look, AI tools are citing 4 and a half thousand pages on the Vanguard website. And the vast majority of this is educational content. So yes, whilst we love AI hacks and we love tricks to get ranked in AI search and sometimes that's the best thing to do, Vanguard has built out this vast library of incredible content and they've written it in a way that makes these AI tools want to site it customer first. The lessons and the takeaways from this aren't that you need as much trust as Vanguard to do this stuff. There are really seven lessons that marketers from any business can apply to start building this sort of visibility. Number one, building your content around your customers goals, not just your products and services. Number two, structuring your website around these journeys. Think of those doors that people go through. Once they go through one door, all of the rest of the content that they see isn't just about you. It's about them and how they can get closer to their goal based on which door they went through. Lesson three is that this educational content builds credibility. By educating your customer, you earn their trust. Lesson four is that these AI tools reward this kind of trust building. These trusted entities that are mentioned lots of places online and have really good quality content structured in this way. Lesson five, those tools and calculators. They can be amazing strategic search assets. They can pick you up links, they can pick you up rankings, they can pick you up traffic. Lesson six is that topical depth beats topical breadth. Rather than covering every somewhat related question that somebody might have who ever walks anywhere near your business, think about the topics that you want to go really deep on and then provide loads of depth about those topics. That's how you win and that's how you build these rabbit holes of content that AIs and users absolutely love. And lesson seven is that done the right way, brand trust amplifies this type of SEO performance. But you've got to have the content and you've got to have the SEO foundation in order to be amplified. Being a big brand isn't enough. Vanguard is an example of a brand that is doing both. Next up, you might be interested in this video, which is all about United Healthc Care's $40 million a month digital marketing strategy. We break down everything. It's amazing. Until next time, see you soon.