A review of pensions SEO in the UK
This article is a review of pensions SEO in the UK in late 2022.
Because most people who work in search engine optimisation have little to no understanding of pensions, I have written a separate article on how pensions work in the UK, and, unless you know this, please read that first.
I mean it, don’t jump the line.
Doing SEO for an eCommerce site is different to an estate agent, which are both different to doing SEO for a pension provider. It’s why John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst and public spokesperson for Google, answers so many questions with “It depends”.
Seemingly obvious ideas for new content are often blocked from going live, not because it’s not the right thing to do, but because of industry regulation, platform restrictions, internal politics, wilful ignorance and budget misallocation.
I call it The Everest Effect.
Many people have gazed upon the Himalayan mountain and thought “Hey, someone should climb that!” only to get halfway up and seeing what is now known as Rainbow Valley, a nickname given due to the different colours of climbing gear worn by the dead bodies.
In the same vein, many will gaze upon the site of a pension provider they work for either directly or through an agency with what appears to be obvious ideas. Just because it’s not been done doesn’t mean it’s not been tried.
See you over at Green Boots.
How do people learn about pensions?
If people want to know more about pensions, they often reach to Google as one source of information.
Asking their employers can be unfruitful, as some are wary of giving information, or because they don’t have enough of an understanding beyond contribution numbers to help. This can particularly be the case for smaller employers, where HR and payroll staff balance many tasks.
Giving information that’s too specific, like telling someone to increase contributions or switching funds could be seen as giving financial advice.
Most people don’t know the difference between guidance and advice for financial services. The following explanation from Money & Pensions Service should help clarify this:
If someone acts on advice and they have a bad outcome, they have a legal recourse towards the entity giving that advice. Therefore, some employers will steer clear of being perceived to give advice.
This is similar to visiting their pension provider’s website. Common occupational pension providers like Scottish Widows and Royal London have dated websites that confuse visitors with their sheer size and unclear navigation. They too, do not want to be seen as giving advice, and therefore the content on their sites are usually highly regulated so as to not expose the business to risk. Terms like “advice”, “low”, “best”, “cheap” are purely nouns or adjectives to some. To a business regulated by the FCA, they are legally binding.
Therefore, if someone can’t get information they need from their employer or pension provider, is only natural that the public turn towards the device they keep on them at all times – their phone – and try to learn more about pensions.
Excluding searches that include provider names, Google estimates that around 2m searches are made each month related to pensions, with 40% of those being on desktop. This percentage of desktop users is higher than for other financial products like credit cards, which denotes both a more complicated product – more information to take in – and an older user base.
This search volume, known as generic searches, is also much higher than for credit cards, but if we include brands, total search volume for credit cards is higher.
This denotes a higher familiarity with credit card providers than pension providers by the public. It also denotes that people understand credit cards more and don’t need to learn how they work to the same extent.
The terms provided in the screenshots above also show the top 10 most important search terms people use.
The total search demand for pensions can roughly be split into these broad categories:
| Search Demand | Avg. monthly searches |
|---|---|
| General Knowledge | 887,080 |
| Pension Options | 219,880 |
| Pension Calculator | 222,960 |
| Pension Help and Advice | 57,370 |
| Pension Products | 229,920 |
| Pension Transfer | 31,800 |
| Pension Tax | 88,550 |
| State Pension | 556,890 |
| Pension Credit | 106,900 |
A bit more about each category, then:
General Knowledge
These are broad questions about pensions, which denote the searcher is at the beginning of their understanding about the subject. Topics include workplace pensions, when they can retire, how contributions work and how much they’ll get in retirement.
Searches here are far away from taking an action like combining pensions, but it’s very short-sighted to not include this type of content in a pension provider’s website. Expertly and calmly explaining pension basics will arguably do more for brand awareness, authority and trust than TV or billboard adverts shown to a passive audience.
When would you be more likely to engage with pension content? When you actively typed queries into Google or when a TV advert breaks up your favourite show, which you’ll likely mute while you go make a cup of tea? Or how about when you rush past a billboard on your commute to work? Is that the best time to get you to sit down and read something boring?
Don’t get me wrong, TV and offline do have their place, especially with an older demographic, but public-facing online content is more important by far, and often ignored as a marketing channel by pension providers. The content on their sites is perfunctory, tightly-regulated and often reviewed as seldom as annually.
There’s a reason why PensionBee is snapping up older pensions left behind by workers who have left a workplace scheme, and organic search is the backbone of their success. They didn’t even have a TV advert until 2022, by which point they already had £2.24bn in assets under management. When people ask a question using Google, they answer.
Pension Options
This group is a bit more specific, looking at things like deferring or taking a pension early, taking money out or topping up it up and learning when people can access their pension. People in this group are likely a bit further along in their understanding and are thinking about what they can do with their pension.
It’s presumptuous, but these searches could be triggered by some sort of life event that has made them reconsider where they’re headed financially. Taking their pension early or wanting to take money out could indicate financial struggles, though it could also mean they are looking to spend money on big ticket items, like a mortgage, home improvement and so on. It could also indicate health problems. Looking to defer their pension indicates they do not think they can retire at the State Pension Age.
Pension Calculator
People like using calculators for financial products, and this is no different. The most popular calculators are ones that show people how much money they will have by the time they retire, but others are worth paying attention to, as well.
Calculators related to annuities, pension contributions, drawdowns and tax-free lump sums are also popular. The key here is to have actually usable calculators, which may mean tight regulation about the modelling, as businesses typically have low appetites for risk.
My favourite calculator is the one created by Nutmeg, but PensionBee’s is nice, too.
Pension Help and Advice
As before, some people do not understand the difference between guidance and advice, so while they may be searching for advice, they may just be looking for guidance. This would be a good place for independent financial advisers (IFAs) to focus, should they want to focus on SEO, though most offer their services at the local, rather than national level.
Being a category where searches can greatly impact the long-term financial future of the searcher, impartial websites like Unbiased feature heavily here.
Pension Products and Access
This group covers searches for products – personal, stakeholder and private pensions – and ways to access the pension – annuities, drawdown and so on.
It would seem logical to create content around annuities for most pension providers. Once a pension has reached maturity, the account holder can then freely move elsewhere to take their annuity. This is often done with the help of an IFA.
Therefore, it would make perfect sense to have content on the public facing site that can complement any discussions a pension holder has with their IFA. Focusing on this could also create awareness with people who have pensions closing in on maturity from other providers.
Hargreaves Lansdown has good coverage here, acting as a sort of MoneySupermarket for annuities quotes, and a lot of bigger providers are simply missing out by not having related content on their sites. The thing to note about an annuity is that, once it is in payment, a customer is completely locked-in. There’s no switching anymore. Thus, really doing a good job here could have serious long-term impact.
Pension Transfer
These are terms related to combining, consolidating, moving or transferring your pension to a new provider. These get the most attention due to the action-oriented nature.
But focusing on just this is missing the point. Yes, these people are looking to take an action, but if you just focus on this, you’re focusing on only 31k searches a month instead of the total of 2m.
Not to mention, if the people making these searches have seen your site when they have done other research to familiarise themselves with pensions, they are more likely to convert here.
With the longer-term impact of making a poor decision here being high, Google rightfully ranks government websites in the top organic results for the most popular queries in this group.
Pension Tax
The tax implications of pensions is a bit of a mystery – do you need to pay tax on the state and private pension? And what about tax relief for contributions?
State Pension
The State Pension is a huge part of what people look for information on in Google. While no provider could ever expect to topple sites like gov.uk for State Pension related terms, it’s still a good idea to have some information on it for occupational scheme members as it is important for them to know.
Pension Credit
This is a benefit offered to those struggling financially in retirement and is truly depressing stuff. As with the state pension, government websites like gov.uk will handily be the number 1 result here, but it’s still something that’s worth featuring on public sites.
Who is visible in Google?
Looking at the top 1,000 terms people use in Google related to pensions, overall rankings are thus:
Rankings for each website are recorded and grouped together into:
- Top 3 (of page 1) where 52% of all people click
- Top 10 (all of page 1), where 70% of all people click
- Top 20 (pages 1 and 2), where close to 82% of all clicks happen
- Top 100 (pages 1-10). This is more used to see if there’s any content at all for the tracked term(s) on the site.
These clickthrough rates are based on aggregated, anonymised data by AWR:
Each site is then given a visibility score, which shows the percentage likelihood that someone will see the site across all terms ranked. In other words, there’s a 42.4% chance that you will see gov.uk when you research pensions online, based on the top 1,000 most popular terms.
Semrush visualises relative positions thus:
Let’s dig a bit deeper into the results.
Impartial is good
If you start googling information about pensions, the first results you will see are very likely to be government websites, such as Pension Wise and gov.uk. This is a conscious choice by Google to show unbiased information for questions that they deem to be YMYL – Your Money or Your Life. In other words, queries that impact your longer term physical or financial health. You can learn more about this in Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines, under section 2.3.
Ofcom’s Adults Media Use and Attitudes Report 2022 tells us that 36% of internet users do not question the validity of search engine results, while a further 31% believe some of the results are biased. Only 33% are of the mind that most results are biased. This means that a lot of people implicitly trust Google to present them with truthful information and it is a great thing that Google have added extra scrutiny for YMYL results.
Government websites often do a brilliant job of explaining pensions in a simple, succinct way that isn’t patronising. Past those, other unbiased sites such as… err, Unbiased, Age UK and Citizen’s Advice Bureau have high rankings. These sites provide people with information on things like pensions with no commercial intent.
This means that being the top pension provider in search means taking a backseat to unbiased and impartial sources of information. This is as should be.
People may be wary of clicking on a rival pension provider to their own, thinking that the information presented isn’t applicable to them. For things like servicing, this is true, but for topics such as how to access the pension once they retire, it is not. Therefore, the click share of impartial sites will be relatively higher for generic searches than other financial products, like credit cards. This is also why you will frequently see rival credit card providers bid on each others’ branded queries with Google Ads.
Legal & General
Legal & General is currently the top pension provider in organic search. It appears that they updated their retirement section in 2020 and are now seeing the dividends of this. See kids, SEO takes time!
This is what their older content looked like pre-change:
This is what their retirement section looks like today:
https://www.legalandgeneral.com/retirement/
Notice how the new navigation now directly links to landing pages that cover the big topics people look for online related to pensions. Legal & General is a strong SEO performer, with high rankings for life insurance and investment terms.
Aviva
Aviva is the second-most visible big occupational pension provider online. They too, offer general insurance products, and the ability to get quotes on these online. Their “Quote me happy” campaign seemed to haunt me wherever I went for a while.
With strong rankings for calculator and annuity terms, they are still actually less visible for tracked terms than PensionBee, which we will touch on in a bit.
SEO and PPC are both channels utilised effectively by Aviva, with a very healthy 66% of organic search traffic to their retirement section from generic searches (e.g. “pension calculator”) instead of branded (“aviva pension login”). This is an indication that their SEO efforts are paying dividends and is impressive, given that Aviva is such a well-known brand that do through the line advertising extensively.
Scottish Widows, Standard Life, Royal London and Aegon
These organisations are large, cumbersome and employ a large amount of legacy staff – those who do just enough not to get fired and whose main ambition is to keep taking a salary until their own retirement with as little hassle as possible.
Bridle at that statement all you like, it is part and parcel of being a large organisation. Price’s Law, named after British physicist Derek J. de Solla Price, states that 50% of any given result is generated by the square root of the number of people who contribute to it. In other words, as an organisation grows, competence grows linearly, but incompetence grows exponentially. This is observed in many fields, including occupational pension providers.
In practice, they do not care about SEO, even if they may have a handful of staff nominally tasked with it. These poor souls are often overpowered and unable to make substantial changes. Circling back to the start of this article, there’s reasons why a lot of basics for SEO haven’t been done on these sites. And it’s not because they’ve not been spotted by anyone.
If we look at the split of generic vs. branded searches to these sites, they overwhelmingly rely on branded traffic.
That’s not a bad thing in and of itself. All traffic is good traffic and people searching for the brand is a good thing.
There are brands who do really well in organic search, like Gymshark, that get 79% branded traffic, but still rank on page 1 for generic, high volume terms like “gym leggings” in major markets around the world. The difference is, they get 4.4m clicks from organic search a month. That ratio is due to a really strong brand. So strong they opened, rather than closed a retail shop on Regent Street in London in 2022.
That’s not what’s happening here. These sites get around 200-270k organic search visits a month.
What these ratios tell us that without existing customers or those who have had a previous offline interaction with the brand, search traffic to these sites would fall off a cliff.
Let’s look at these sites compared to L&G and Aviva:
L&G and Aviva not only get significantly more traffic overall, but because they have understood the value of investing in SEO, they get get a larger proportion of new visitors to their site from generic queries.
While it may seem obvious to an outsider to care about Google and other search engines, the majority of people in power at these organisations want to deal with customers through IFAs, independent financial advisers and most important of all – employers. This is how it has been for a long while and continuing with the status quo is one thing they do well.
Most of their customers are in occupational pension schemes, so it makes perfect financial sense to keep scheme administrators happy as a priority.
If an employee can’t find an answer to a query by googling, meh. Sure, there’s content on the public sites that’s for customers, but it’s more done out of a regulatory need and goes through some sort of annual review to ensure it doesn’t expose the business to risk. Iterative changes to make the content better, more easily understood or help a visitor complete a task are in practice very low on the business’ list of priorities. It’s all about keeping the schemes happy through direct contact with scheme managers.
Some of the best content produced is also completely hidden from search engines. Yup, that’s right. Both Scottish Widows and Royal London hide their PDFs, which is where their best content is, from search engines. Why this is, is probably a mixture of ignorance and internal politics, but it’s truly strange to see content that’s likely cost a lot to create tucked away when it can be accessed from the site without a paywall or login anyway. What’s next? An unlisted customer support number, perhaps.
Why don’t these providers have better websites?
The reason why they don’t have better websites or care about SEO is because – they ultimately don’t need to. Or at least, for now.
These providers mainly make money from big schemes like Vodafone, who employ around 100k staff. Once the employer has selected a provider, its staff are essentially locked in.
If an individual employee has a terrible time registering for online servicing, updating beneficiaries or using their app, so what? Who cares? They’re locked in.
If the employee wants to switch to a different provider on their own, they’d have to open a personal pension elsewhere. This would mean missing out on the employer contribution, so that’s out of the question. Locked in.
If these points don’t make sense to you, it means you skipped my point at the beginning of this article of reading the companion article on how pensions work. Naughty, naughty. Go back and read that. I mean it.
If they want their employer to switch provider for its employees, they’d have to get together with enough other colleagues that are dissatisfied and lobby their employer to do so, which is an uphill battle few have the resilience for.
A pension pot is not like a current account balance, which people check often, with monthly statements from their bank to keep track of spending. Pension balances are checked a few times a year at most. Annual pension statements are sent by providers in the post, often in terminally large packs that overwhelm with superfluous information. These packs are often tucked in a drawer and barely opened.
Another important fact is that people tend to be very actively interested in their private pensions for a small window of time, typically between the ages of 45 and 55. Before this, most people are too far away from retirement to really care. After, a lot of people seem to be of the mind that it’s too late to make major changes, if they’re looking to retire at the State Pension age of 68.
Let me take a minute and tell you that it is never too late. To paraphrase a Chinese proverb, when is the best time to start a pension? When you turned 22. What is the second-best time? Right now.
Therefore, most people are too apathetic towards their pension for the majority of their working life to do much beyond making payments and give the balance a cursory glance. Keen interest in pensions can be triggered by a life event, such as the death of a loved one, but that will only be temporary.
Pension providers like this have senior staff that dig into corporate platitudes like “customers are at the heart of everything we do”, but that is purely a politician’s answer, empty words with no follow-through.
The reality is that inertia, apathy and regulations are, both on the part of the providers and the customers. There will be a relatively small subset of staff who don’t feel this way, but they are usually outnumbered and overpowered. Most tasked with innovation and customer retention do not last very long.
Not to mention, most employers like Vodafone will be locked into deals with pension providers that last several years, probably longer than a dissatisfied employee will be staying with them. So, if an employee kicks up a fuss, they’ll likely be gone before the tender process for a renewal of pension provider takes place.
All about the schemes
SEO is mostly exciting for occupational pension providers if they can attribute new business from it. And some do offer a personal pension that people can open online, usually by transferring in older pensions.
An overly simplified search acquisition model might look something like this (using PensionBee as an example):
In other words, create awareness of your brand when people want to know the basics of pensions, make them consider combining pensions by explaining the benefits, then convince them you are the right business to do this with.
Expecting someone to move through these stages quickly may be a reasonable approach for retail banking products, like current accounts, credit cards and loans, but is very unrealistic for pensions. People have a better understanding of retail banking products they interact with frequently and are more comfortable having multiples of the same product with different providers.
This is especially true post-Open Banking, where APIs from different providers lets you see balances from different providers inside one app. You can keep a legacy banking current account for stability, then open one with a neobank to experience innovation and flexibility. Simply transfer funds when one is running low.
Different pension providers also have different minimums for what they can accept if you try to open a new account via a transfer. This is typically somewhere between £5k and £10k and they sometimes a maximum limit, beyond which it has to be done via an IFA. This will likely stop some visiting these providers’ sites from being eligible to transfer online, even if they wanted to.
This is not like switching a current account or electricity provider. It typically requires a bit of legwork chasing up old pensions and may be perceived to be too risky by a potential new customer to do without financial advice. Finishing a transfer may feel like you are signing away your future. Therefore, converting lots of searchers into new customers in a short, easily measurable timeframe isn’t realistic.
This leads to a multi-step, fractured journey that will make attribution modelling tricky and is likely why the homepage is an important entry point for transfers in for all these providers. The people who have done so didn’t wake up one day and decide to transfer all their pensions to a new provider. They in all likelihood had many touch points with the business and search was likely one.
And thus, some occupational pension providers don’t really care about search rankings at all. It is simply easier and more effective to try to get existing workplace customers to transfer in old dormant pensions.
In a world of fizzy drinks, become Irn-Bru
Pensions are a very uninteresting product and most providers aren’t all that distinctive. It seems obvious to try to stand out and from the pack when people research pensions and providers online.
It may not be possible to attribute transfers in quickly from searches, but the same can be said for TV and offline adverts that these providers put out. These are often very expensive and are never held to the same level of scrutiny. Comparatively, creating great content is cheap and kind of what the website should be used for in the first place. Hopefully you’re sitting down as I lay that revelation on you.
For example, look at this billboard ad I saw from Standard Life in my local shopping centre.
No vanity URL, no QR code and no phrase to search for, besides the website homepage. How is anyone really able to attribute visits, transfers in or new occupational schemes from this or other billboards in the area?
People going to their homepage or searching for the brand using the search engine of their choice will show up as direct traffic or branded traffic for the brand alone, e.g. “standard life”. Zero clear visibility on how many people responded to the ad specifically. Even a simple prompt like: search “standard life pension transfer” would be a better.
The UK government seems to understand this concept.
The transfer journey does include a field to ask where you learned about it, but that’s only telling you how many people entered the site and started the journey. Even that has a self-reporting bias. It says nothing of people who visited the site and didn’t enter the journey, either because they found it difficult to find or simply wanted to learn more and weren’t ready.
And what about targeting? This ad was shown in a digital billboard in an upscale shopping centre. Most people walking past are either going to buy something, eat at the food court or go to the cinema. I doubt many have had a gnawing feeling that they wanted to consolidate their pensions if someone would just tell them how on a screen that alternates between the latest offers from Starbucks and EE – both of which actually have shops inside the mall itself.
And let’s look at the trend for people searching for Standard Life locally, shall we?
Doesn’t look like the advert has done very much so far.
What about the households ads on the buses?
There’s a clear increase in searches off the back of this campaign.
The device is split strongly in favour of mobiles, indicating that people searched the prompt in relatively short succession to seeing the ad. So, you can actually track offline ads with a little bit of forethought.
Are the staff who put the billboard together simply ignorant? Or do they not want colleagues to have good data to question the use of funds for the billboard, thus keeping them in a job, but with no accountability for how good they are at it? It would be pure conjecture, but both are possibilities. The point I’m trying to establish is that billboards and TV are often given concessions that organic search is not.
And what, pray tell, would someone who saw this ad find out if they did a bit of research on Standard Life and how they treat their customers on Google?
Whoops. Trustpilot is by no means the only place people look to review financial services providers, but it is one of the biggest ones and is probably worth addressing before putting together a campaign of this nature. Their own research has shown that a company’s website and online reviews are integral for financial products, including pensions.
This research may be biased in order to get businesses to sign up to a business plan, but even if it is, the social proof of Trustpilot cannot be denied. With 8.2m organic search visitors a month in the UK (source: Semrush), they have substantial sway in shaping consumer opinions of brands of all industries.
I saw this billboard ad earlier in 2022 for local fizzy drink Irn-Bru.
Here’s an engaging ad with what, at first glance, appears to be graffiti (in an area with a lot of it) and a QR code to a YouTube video that underpins this campaign with hashtags used across all social media.
Every time I see one of their ads, I smile with how well they’ve thought things through, from brand identity to measurability. Irn-Bru not only has a distinctive taste, it’s got an distinctive personality. It truly makes me laugh when I realise that A. G. Barr’s marketing staff are much more sophisticated and get better performance marketing data than financial institutions worth billions.
Googling is what we do where nobody’s judging
The things people want to know about pensions should help drive content strategy of any provider’s website, regardless if these pages themselves become the high converting landing pages of the CFOs dreams or not.
Search demand offers an unfiltered insight to what the public want to know about pensions, more honest than any customer focus group or survey. And it’s considerably cheaper. Thinking every page has to earn its keep like it’s an ASOS product page is nonsensical.
Pension providers seem to have understood that the halo effect of adverts on TV and billboards isn’t always immediate, and some faith in the longer-term impact of keeping adverts going has to be in place. But when it comes to organic search? Not so much. Even paid search tends to get a bigger budget, in part due to the short term measurability of traffic.
Search analytics can also tell us exactly what existing customers want to know about a provider and its products. Sure, some people will be willing to go to the homepage and try to navigate to the section they want, but many simply want to google the answer and enter the site at the relevant pages, e.g. “aegon pension login”, known in SEO as navigational queries.
Analysing these for pension providers will likely uncover significant failure demand, where customers are unable to find a page that lets them complete a task and therefore need to call customer-facing colleagues. Correctly signposting where customers can self-serve online at a time of their choosing is simply the right thing to do.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the workplace pension market share correlates well with organic search visibility.
I certainly don’t think that organic search is the main contributing factor to market share, but it is interesting. I suspect this correlation is more symptomatic of how well these organisations are ran.
Enter PensionBee
PensionBee is a direct-to-consumer online pension provider that has very deftly understood that people googling pension information can be a great way to create awareness with a new audience. Imagine that.
They’re the number 1 provider in Google for “pension calculator”, probably the most popular generic search term related to pensions.
This is very impressive, especially when you consider that pensions are a YMYL topic. You can create the best content ever on a new website, but the sheer domain strength and history of established pension providers mean a steep uphill battle to unseat them in the eyes of Google. David really has slain Goliath here.
Most of its public site content is created with SEO in mind, with Pensions Explained in particular taking its cue from what people search online. This content is not only reviewed regularly, but it is often much better than the likes of Scottish Widows to begin with.
And what about if we look at their traffic levels?
PensionBee may receive significantly less total traffic that the big occupational providers, but if you look at the type of traffic they get, you’ll discover about half is from generic searches – people who actually want to know more about pensions in that moment.
If we look at the amount of total generic traffic to the pension sections of these websites:
| Website | Est. generic search traffic |
|---|---|
| Legal & General | 75,800 |
| PensionBee | 40,400 |
| Aviva | 35,100 |
| Hargreaves Lansdown | 16,600 |
| Standard Life | 14,800 |
| Scottish Widows | 7,300 |
| Aegon | 2,300 |
| Royal London | 1,300 |
They’re doing very well, indeed, owning much bigger companies on the screen we take with us.
They also understand that the dormant pension market is already huge and will only continue to grow. To reference the stats mentioned in my pension article – 12+ jobs for Millennials and beyond. 27m dormant pensions by 2035. While big providers are focused on enrolling big schemes, PensionBee recognise that people are going to leave those schemes behind with dormant pensions as they move through their working life.
This is why their target demographic is people “in the middle of their careers”, in other words, people who have moderate pension pots and are financially savvy enough to care about their pensions.
These people don’t want to suffer through draconian apps squeezed out as a tickbox exercise or do the donkey work of transferring in old pensions. PensionBee will do this for you, provided you have enough information about your time working with old employers and some scheme info.
From what I’ve been told by customers and can be gleaned from Trustpilot, they do a pretty good job of this, though this tends to be done faster and more efficiently, the bigger the transferred pots are. Some people have, of course, had bad experiences and PensionBee won’t be right for everyone.
And what about attribution modelling for PensionBee? Well, they make a big point about being able to “sign up in minutes”. All you need to register and start the process is a name and e-mail address. This is good for people who want to save their progress and return at a later date, but it’s also good for PensionBee, because now they can more clearly see each touchpoint a new customer had.
There’s also nothing stopping someone keeping a PensionBee account with them for the remainder of their working life while their current occupational pension provider changes. The PensionBee app is slick and easy to check, it is probably very convenient to keep it as a constant and have just one additional pension to keep track of during your working life.
When a job is left, just roll the latest dormant scheme into PensionBee and deal with the headache of the new scheme’s clumsy app for the next 2 years you’re in the job.
PensionBee are already making their services available to employers, according to their website. For smaller employers, they could simply use them, especially if the staff involved with setting up pensions have done a bit of research on Google and Trustpilot.
I actually wrote an article specifically about PensionBee a few years ago, which can be accessed here.
Hargreaves – the Waitrose of pensions
Hargreaves Lansdown is very visible online, and has focused very much on its SIPP product for affluent target customers who can either manage the SIPP themselves or afford an IFA to do so for them.
Hargreaves’ app lets you see your pension and act directly in-app to make trades on shares from the palm of your hand. You can save and watch stocks, track performance and make transactions, which is ideal if you are comfortable self-managing your pension. They also produce really good articles on things like stock trends and top stocks to watch.
HL’s site in general is very focused on SEO, getting about 7m clicks a month from organic search, predominantly to its stock trading section. It makes sense that they include their SIPP product in its SEO efforts.
Hargreaves’ SIPP holders may seem like a very attractive user base to the likes of Scottish Widows and Standard Life, but the reality is, they are very different businesses who appeal to different customers.
In supermarket terms, Scottish Widows and Standard Life, et al are Tesco and Sainsbury’s, whereas Hargreaves is Waitrose. Their customers have a lot of money, but they also expect the sophisticated features, investment options and slick interface that only HL can provide.
Instead of going for customers that aren’t right, they’d be better off servicing the ones that are.
Ignorance and status quo – for now
The market position and business conduct for providers like Scottish Widows and Towers Watson Willis are currently secure for the reasons discussed. Workplace pensions are essentially a b2b2c product that is onerous to switch if end-customers have had enough, and they often give up caring quickly.
The financial value of investing in organic search to drive new business really isn’t there when put against the massive schemes these providers put together for employers through direct contact.
However, are there challenges to that?
Generational shifts
Currently, people coming up to retirement are Baby Boomers and early Gen Xers. These are people who did not grow up with the Internet in their pocket. While they are capable of using Google, their efficiency and reliance on doing so is less than later generations.
They also had arguably better financial standpoints to enter working life and are more likely to be able to afford an independent financial advisor to help them understand their pension options. This is, of course, a bit of a generalisation. There is a subset of this cohort who work manual and lower skilled jobs who don’t have much in the way of savings who are now looking at extending their working lives beyond what they had hoped to.
Younger generations have much harder circumstances. Not only are they facing a tougher job market, but usual financial goals such as buying property are further away. Setting aside money to see a financial advisor to help them understand pensions is a tough ask.
As a younger acquaintance put it to me once: “I don’t know why anyone would use an IFA, my friends and I would just google our way forward”.
While this statement shows both the hubris of youth and the myopic bias of not being able to relate to anyone outside of their immediate circle of friends, I believe this to be a growing sentiment.
Pension providers like Royal London have historically relied on strong relationships with financial advisors, but this is likely to play a smaller part in people’s understanding of pensions in future. Asking an advisor for help costs money, whereas googling is free.
Moreover, the amount of fully qualified IFAs is shrinking, as a maturing workforce is headed towards their own retirement and fewer young professionals enter with pension qualifications.
Therefore, ignoring organic search is not only a mistake today, but one that’s going to become more important over time.
Younger generations like Gen Z have grown up with smartphones and are not going to be happy with clumsy apps and registration processes. They are not just comparing their pension provider with others, they’re comparing it with the sites they use daily – Amazon, TikTok and Google. They will not be happy to have to keep registering their details for servicing because some ancient IT platform can’t accommodate a forgotten password.
Even Google’s place in this is at risk at being displaced in time. Their own research shows that younger people are more likely to reach for TikTok or IG than Google when searching for information. I don’t think pension providers need to worry about TikTok just yet – after all, they probably care more about the grandparents of TikTok’s core users – but building the pension of the future means looking further ahead than just the next 5 years.
Employee dissatisfaction
While employers likely have many channels that influence the selection of pension provider for its employees, Google is likely a channel for them, too. Even doing a bit of due diligence on potential candidates could unravel a lot of unsettling information.
If you were part of the committee that was going to select a pension provider, would you ignore reviews like this from Trustpilot? Or would they give you pause for thought?
Interestingly, since I did my case study on PensionBee in 2020, a lot of the providers I reviewed have started to take Trustpilot more seriously and are now asking for customer reviews. Good stuff. Let’s hope this is now a truer reflection of how customers are treated and not artificially altered through filtered sampling of positive customer experiences.
Employees can also bandy together and complain. While apathy towards pensions is commonplace, there’s a chance that enough dissatisfaction finally pushes employees to demand their employer take their pension provider to task.
This may result in a different provider being selected when the scheme is up for renewal or it may result in a better service, like an improved mobile app or easier servicing. Either is a good outcome for the employees.
New legislation?
The government could also bring in legislation to allow employees to select or influence the selection of pension provider in the same way that they are currently influencing investment choices.
The recent influx of fund choices, such as carbon neutral or Halal investments, have been directly influenced by costumers seeking this out from the likes of PensionBee. Big providers simply followed suit and now offer this, but that is also ultimately good for end users.
Lest we forget, switching current accounts used to be a bit of a headache. The biggest issues were: opening a new account, transferring incoming and outgoing payments and a guarantee in case something went wrong.
The amount of documents, calls and paperwork required was often enough to keep people where they were. Sound familiar?
People would often just stick with the current account provider their parents chose for them as children or the one they chose when they turned 18 and went off to university or started an apprenticeship.
The FCA realised this meant current account providers had little incentive to improve their products and lessened competition. Sound familiar?
Therefore, the Current Account Switch Service launched in September 2013, a voluntary scheme that 99% of the current account market participate in. This has made switching current account provider much easier and people can now do so within 7 working days with confidence.
An occupational pension is significantly more complex than a current account. The FCA is unlikely to demand quite the same level of flexibility and speed switching pensions, but auto enrolment doesn’t have to end with just making sure pensions are set up for the workforce.
The government is also working towards a Pension Dashboard that will allow people to see all their pensions, including the State Pension in one place. This is being undertaken by the Pension Dashboard Programme team, which you can learn more about, including timelines for participation and availability at their website here.
Hopefully this will really make people sit up and take notice of where their money is and be less willing to put up with terrible service from pension providers.
Finally catching up to the innovators
As touched on above, big occupational pension providers could simply steal the best features of PensionBee, Nutmeg, et al and make them their own.
It happens all the time in every industry.
For example, Monzo introduced the ability to freeze and defrost your bank card within their app in 2016. This was incredibly useful and saved a lot of people a lot of headache. This handy “new” feature was then introduced by Halifax in 2018 and 2019 for their debit and credit cards, respectively. Much innovation.
Apple do this all the time. The introduction of AirTags pretty much killed Tile effortlessly. RIP f.lux, Night Shift is here now.
There’s little stopping the occupational pension providers taking the best of what PensionBee and Hargreaves do and apply it their own apps and websites. Well, little except the dated and rigid platforms, internal politics and budget misallocation that these organisations have. The point is, they bloody well should do that, and if they do – great. That’s what their customers actually deserve.
It may also end up having a bigger impact on brand awareness and reputation than a television advert of a woman walking across the screen in a cloak.
SEO is the right thing to do
While organic search may not be, currently, or in future, a big driver of directly attributable funds under management, it’s still something that all pension providers should pay attention and invest in. It also seems to work fairly well for the companies that invest in earnest, like PensionBee and Hargreaves.
Most SEO recommendations are simply good for UX. Mobile usability, fast load speeds and useful content all help your SEO, but also other user metrics like pages per visit, time spent on site and conversions.
The UK government’s websites, for example, score highly on most pages for Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics, even when they don’t really need to. Their domains are so strong, they could rank on page 1 for any content they create, regardless of UX. And they’re not trying to sell anything. Yet somehow, the staff have understood that paying attention to SEO is important just to help people find what they need to know.
In conclusion
If you’ve made it to the end of this article, thank you so much for reading. Hopefully you’ve found it interesting and helpful to your job, whether that’s in SEO, service design, analytics or marketing.
Please feel free to share this or the companion article on how pensions in the UK work with those who need it.
Catch you in the next one.