How Non-Technical Insurance Agents Can Avoid Getting Suckered
If you’re like most agents, you’ve heard of SEO, but you may not REALLY know what it is. You may know what it stands for as an acronym (Search Engine Optimization), but you may not really understand its significance…much less how to improve it, and that’s okay. You’re an insurance agent, not a web developer. And you’re NOT alone!
SEO is the elephant in the digital marketing room. Everyone knows it’s important. Everyone knows they should be doing more, but what does “more” mean? Well, that question is pretty difficult to answer depending on where you’re starting from. Unfortunately, as the digital space gets more crowded and competitive, what it takes ‘more’ of is intentionality. It won’t happen by default, no matter how good your agency is. This is why it’s so important, at the very least, to learn how SEO works, and what tools are available to you, so you can track the performance of your agency’s website.
Optimizing your website for search engines simply means making it more likely that your website will appear near the top when someone searches for a term that matches a product or service that you offer. The businesses with high visibility in the search engines will get “free traffic” and potential prospects to their website.
Maybe you’re one of the thousands of agents that signed up for a website through a vendor that claims they have the best websites and SEO around…Maybe they do. Many of those vendors do create really nice websites, and some also do really well with SEO. But if you’re like me, there’s always been the question in the back of your head “How do I know if they’re doing a good job on my website?”.
Of course they’re going to tell you “You’re in good hands. We’ve been doing this a long time. We have access to all these complex things you wouldn’t understand…blah blah blah”. They may even throw out a bunch of SEO jargon like meta data, and tags, and schemas, and so on that sounds like they really know what they’re doing. But at the end of the day you still have NO way to verify if they do, in fact, know what they’re doing, or if they’re putting that knowledge to work on your website. It’s like taking your car to a mechanic if you’ve never been under the hood. They could be telling you the absolute truth…or not…or they might mean well, but not know as much as they think they do. How would you know?!
Now again, many vendors out there do a great job, so this really isn’t a sales pitch to convince you to bail on them. This is simply an option to scratch that itching question you’ve had in the back of your head, “How can I know they’re doing what they say for my website?”.
As the old saying goes “sunlight is the best disinfectant”, and we provide sunlight in the form of education. It doesn’t matter your level of expertise. We start at the beginning for those just starting this journey and go all the way up to SEO veterans. In addition to the education, we provide multiple 3rd party reporting tools that will show you your websites’ status as seen by search engines. These reports will point out anything on your site that needs corrected as well as track your rankings within the search engines. With this, you’ll be able to see if there are SEO problems on your site that need to be addressed, or if something is causing your ranking to go down. In fact, through our education you’ll actually learn how to fix many issues yourself, or at the very least be able to effectively communicate what you want from your vendor, and have intelligent conversations about your SEO goals for your website.
Like anything in life worth doing, SEO is hard work. There’s no quick fix and anyone that tells you there is, isn’t being honest. It takes time and dedication to be done right, and there is no finish line. It’s constantly changing, which is why it’s that much more important to have access to tools, outside of those provided to you by your vendor that shows how great they are, that can give you signs of when those shifting SEO sands start to affect your website so you, or your vendor can take action.
If you haven’t registered yet, click one of the links on or home page to access our Digital Strategy Center for Free. It’s not just free this week, or this month…It’s FREE. You’ll have access to return as often or as seldom as you’d like and it gets updated with new information regularly as things change. In the strategy center we start at the very beginning for those who are brand new that may have just purchased their first domain or website. We discuss how to get set up with google in case you’ve never done that, and as you continue through, we discuss the importance of SEO and its implementation, the Do’s and Don’ts of websites, plus how to get started with digital marketing through advertising and more. This content will help you understand what these internet buzzwords are and how you can utilize them to grow your business.
For those who want more, you’ll have the option to upgrade to our Digital Consultant membership, where you’ll find more in depth knowledge and strategies on many of the topics discussed in the Strategy Center. You’ll also receive step by step instructions on how you, if you’re more the DIY type, or your vendor can implement these strategies on your website. If you would rather have someone else handle it for you, but you don’t have a vendor yet, we’re there to help when and where you need us.
Start learning about digital marketing, so YOU can avoid being suckered.
