SEO is Crucial for Insurance Agency Growth
Insurance agencies have the unique challenge of being in an industry where there is a tremendous amount of competition for visibility in search engines. As an agency owner, you don’t just compete with other agencies, but insurance companies and aggregators and direct writers are all targeting some of the same audiences and keywords to build visibility for their brand. According to Wordstream.com, just the top 25 most common insurance terms represent over $4mil monthly searches. If you add the dozens of variations that people search for, the numbers get truly staggering.
Competition is real and it drives up cost and the need for sophistication. Your job is much more difficult than a different kind of business that is optimizing for a specific product or widget. The goods news is that the prospect pool is seemingly infinite and small improvements in your insurance agency’s SEO efforts can have a big impact.
Properly Defining SEO for Insurance Agencies
In order to understand how to execute an SEO strategy or whether to engage 3rd party tools or vendors for assistance, let’s first start with properly defining the goal. SEO is often understood to mean “organic” search results. In other words, someone searches a term- and Google (or Bing or Yahoo) presents them with a list of matches- and none of the businesses on that list paid to be there. However, the time and effort to produce, structure, and promote your content successfully enough to get listed for “free” is not without cost. It takes time to write good content. It takes expertise to structure the website in a way that is friendly to the search algorithm for the most valuable terms. It takes time to get other websites to link to your business and lend it more credibility.
In that context, it doesn’t make sense to separate the organic search results from paid advertising. The question is not whether it will cost you something. The question is what strategies are most efficient for your business. Specifically, we advocate a 3D approach to SEO.
- On-site. Create engaging content on a properly structured site.
- Off-site. Promote your website on social media, industry and business directories- and affiliate websites and blogs that are willing to link to you.
- Paid Ads. Unless/until you achieve top positions for your highest value search terms, you can jump the line in creative ways at opportune moments.
Are you the type of agent that can benefit from our Insurance Agency SEO tools?
As outlined above, Insurance Agency SEO has more than one component and we’ll be the first to tell you that our platform isn’t for all agents. If you are interested specifically in the SEO related services- there are two kinds of agents that would benefit the most:
The first is any agent or agency that plans to do some or all of the SEO work in-house. Our platform is the most affordable way to get the maximum edge on your competitors- hands down! Site audits, track ranking for unlimited keywords, traffic projections, competitor research, backlink tracking….the list goes on. To have these tools and their configuration currently INCLUDED with the basic access level is basically like getting them for free. It probably won’t last forever, but take advantage while you can!
The second type of agent is someone who doesn’t plan to do this themselves, but has enough curiosity and interest to maintain their own perspective. If you hire SEO vendors, it’s prudent to have your own performance reports to reference- not just the the performance data that your vendor selectively feeds you. Consistent with our 3D approach, our MarkitPulse module differentiates your website performance across different search channels (organic, paid, maps, etc) and it also helps you see the quality of the traffic you are getting by measuring total quote requests, phone calls, and other engagement actions. In fact, most agents don’t execute their own agency’s SEO, but many of them do want to keep tabs on the vendors who are.
