Strategic Digital Consulting for an Established Financial Publisher

InvestorPlace Media provides world-class advice to investors seeking leadership and direction. Its flagship website, InvestorPlace.com, began as an investment newsletter 35 years ago and now provides millions of investors with financial news and a curated collection of websites from leading voices within the investment industry.

After engaging 10up for engineering and site maintenance services for their collection of properties, the partnership grew to encompass a new site design for InvestorPlace.com and a platform migration for their premium services. Over the course of these projects, 10up proved itself to an invaluable strategic partner, in addition to a trusted technical resource.

Collaborating on a New Design

10up’s user experience (UX) designers worked closely with InvestorPlace’s internal visual designers to align a new aesthetic with the company’s long-term vision and business-centric user stories. Along the way, 10up engineers consulted to ensure designs could be built without compromising 10up’s engineering best practices.

Rather than waiting for the entire InvestorPlace site to be redesigned, each new template was launched upon completion. This enabled the collection and application of real-time data and feedback, which informed the design approach for upcoming templates and sections and helped validate continued investment in the site moving forward.

InvestorPlace Premium Platform Migration

InvestorPlace Premium is a collection of investment analyst sites offering gated content and custom tools. For years, the company had to contend with an antiquated, proprietary content management system (CMS) and custom applications. A reliable, modern platform was needed, but the risk associated with a platform migration was daunting.

After investigating and documenting the legacy platform, 10up replicated the required CMS functionality in WordPress, while minimizing adverse impacts to existing editorial workflows. At the same time, InvestorPlace’s CRM and related services were transitioned to a Salesforce-centric suite of SaaS providers.

Amid this work, a contractual dispute with their hosting provider took all InvestorPlace websites offline. The migration process, initially scheduled to span months, suddenly needed to be completed within days. 10up rallied to complete the migration approximately seven weeks early.

InvestorPlace Premium Before And After

SEO and Advertising Strategy

Motivated by a goal to improve search engine performance, InvestorPlace sought to reduce load times and restructure metadata site-wide, prompting 10up to identify additional opportunities for improvement. 10up Audience Growth Strategists provided several content layout and organization recommendations to improve keyword optimization for content throughout the site including:

• Adjustments to article headlines and URLs, in addition to better page metadata, increased organic traffic and page rankings, and improved content appearance, usability, and accessibility.
• Consolidation and reorganization of the sitemap.xml files lead search engines to more frequently crawl and index key article content to achieve top rankings in news results.
• Image compression and a reduction in the volume and scope of ads reduced high page load times caused by specific ad content and third-party scripts.

In the 90 days following the rollout of these site improvements, the average page load time for articles decreased by 22%. Load time for the homepage itself fell by 39%.

Improved reporting also revealed net organic search traffic increased by 103% and reported search traffic to AMP pages increased by 172%. This resulted in 110% growth in new site visitors, which indicated better visibility in search results and greater relevance that translated into a 43% increase in on-site transactions.

Other key indicators of user engagement also rose:

• New users increased by almost 8%
• Total user sessions increased by 15%
• Average pages per session rose by 23%
• Average session duration increased by more than 9%

With the improvements in load time, SEO, and user experience, visitors more frequently found the site from search engines, consumed additional articles, and remained on the site longer.

A Bottom Line Focus

From long-term client collaboration to a comprehensive suite of premium services and support, advancing clients’ business objectives through digital mediums is central to every 10up partnership.

Developing innovative solutions for global brands and media leaders like InvestorPlace gives 10up valuable insights into the unique challenges enterprises face when creating exceptional digital experiences. Reach out today to discuss how 10up can help your organization.