Updated: 11/13/2022

What Is SEO, and Why Is It Important for My Insurance Agency?

In today’s market, digital marketing is a simple fact of business. It is essential that your insurance agency has a strong internet presence by being easily searchable, comfortable to navigate, and organized. This will help you get ahead of other insurance agencies in your market. SEO for insurance is especially important in large, competitive markets, so it is an absolute necessity for local insurance agencies to succeed. All these things can be accomplished by optimizing your website for search engine compatibility.

Search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is a digital marketing strategy designed to make a business more prominent in internet search engines. Most internet users browse only the first page of search results, so having your insurance agency’s website appear there means it is much more likely that clients will find their way to you instead of your competitors.

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How to Get Started Optimizing Your Website for SEO

Although the prospect of optimizing your website may initially seem daunting, SEO really begins with an understanding of your industry and your audience. This means that you are familiar with common important keywords and phrases used in your market and can anticipate how internet users will formulate their internet searches. Make sure these keywords are included in your website in natural sentence structures. There are ways to incorporate keywords into everything from article titles to image descriptions to HTML code.

Site Audit

First step of starting with improving SEO is to do a Website audit to figure out areas where your site can improve. It will highlight on site issues, performance issues , backlinks, broken links etc. You can either hire a professional to do it or use one of the online services.

On site SEO for Insurance

You can use tools like “Yoast” to identify on site SEO related issues on your website/blog. For each article, Yoast will tell you items which you can improve to make it easier for search engine to find your article. Some examples are having a “Focus Keyword” in heading and first para of the article, having internal and external links, having article with certain length etc.

After this, the next step of SEO is making sure your website is clean, self-explanatory, and user-friendly. This means that there are clear menus, easy-to-follow links, and all the information that people will want to know when searching for a local insurance agency. Remember that the internet gives customers the ability to easily compare services, so if your website is confusing or hard to navigate, there is nothing keeping them from going to a competitor’s website instead. A user-friendly site makes it much more likely that customers will have their questions answered and be interested in the services you offer.

Best Chatbot for insurance Agency

Keyword Research and Industry-Specific Considerations for SEO

Making sure your website is comfortable to use, however, is only the first step.

Step 1: Think about keywords your customers may search

Your ultimate goal is to optimize your website so that if a user searches a phrase like “car insurance agency near me,” your company appears as close to the top of the search results as possible. Being on the first page of results is good. Being in the top three to five results is even better.

Other keywords to optimize for be phrases like “car insurance quotes,” “insurance comparison online,” or “where to get auto insurance in Victoria, Texas.” Think about the questions most new customers have for their insurance agents or what their primary goals are in seeking a new insurance agency. Those phrases will link your business website to future online queries and lead potential clients to your agency. There are dozens of potential keywords and keyword combinations that can be used in your site to make it more visible to online searches.

One tool which can help you in easily identifying what people are searching for is https://answerthepublic.com/ . Just type a keyword and it will give you all combination of queries people are asking for that keyword.

Step 2: Do Competitor analysis

You can use tools like SEMRUSH.COM to find out which keywords your competitor is ranking. After that you need to do analysis to figure out whether to buy that keyword using Adwords or rank organically by writing articles.

In order to make this decision you can use site like Moz.com and use their keyword explorer tool (https://moz.com/explorer) . This will tell you difficulty level of keyword. If difficulty level is less than 30 then it is a good idea to write an article and try to rank on top of that keyword.

Now if the difficulty level is high then you should log in to Google’s keyword explorer tool and find out how much will it cost to bid for that keyword. If cost is reasonable then go ahead and bid for that keyword. If the cost is very high then try to focus on longtail keywords which might be cheaper to bid.

Step 3: Focus on Long Tail Keywords

Keywords are a central part of SEO and how search engines order results. Nonetheless, while it is vital to use keywords that are common turns of phrase in your market, make sure to refrain from “keyword stuffing.” This is the unnatural use of keyword phrases in a sentence. Keywords should be incorporated naturally into articles, page titles, and other descriptors. Search engines look for phrases that are used in a normal, human way, not inserted awkwardly into sentences. Therefore, keyword stuffing can actually damage your web presence.

The highly competitive nature of the insurance market makes keywords even more complex. If your insurance agency is a local one, it makes little sense to try to dominate a national market with the use of common insurance phrases. It is simply not an effective SEO marketing strategy to pit your company against bigger corporations with more brand power. Instead, seek to use SEO to become a leader in your local insurance market. This means using keywords that help your business come up in search engines when users search for Long Tail Keywords, like “insurance agency in Charleston, West Virginia.”

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Optimizing Consistency, Quality, and Social Media Presence

Your website should have a consistent schedule of producing quality content, and you should make sure you strongly promote this content on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. Quality is the most important aspect of this: Your web content should be full of not only of keywords but also internal and external links (links to other pages on your site and to other sites, respectively). Long, quality posts promoted on social media help show that your insurance agency is knowledgeable and trustworthy, while short or infrequent posts showcase unreliability or fly under an audience’s radar.

Make use of the full scope of social media. Promote on the platforms where your clients spend time, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is also extremely important to have a Google Plus business page with all your business and contact information, as well as links to your website. Make sure this is updated consistently with the correct information in the proper format so that it can be picked up by search engines. Also encourage your customers to leave you Google reviews. Having a large number of positive online reviews will make your business more visible to search engines and can take you a long way in promoting your insurance agency.

Monitor and Improve

You should use Google Search console to keep track of keywords your site is ranking. Different parameters in console will point you towards areas of improvement.

CTR- Click through rate

For a particular keyword if CTR is low then it indicates that heading of your blog/article is not compelling enough for users to click on it. Hence your try modifying heading and test which ones are performing better.

Impressions

If you are ranking low on a particular keyword but it is getting lot of impressions then it means that people are searching for that keyword a lot. In this case either you should write one more article with this keyword as focus or add more content to an existing article.

Fetch as Google

Whenever you write a new article/blog or add a new page to the website then make sure you use “Fetch as Google” feature in Google console to index that article. This will help in raking new articles faster else you will be waiting for Google to crawl this new article which may take months.

How to use Machine Learning/ AI in Google Analytics?

In your Google analytics dashboard, you can find “INSIGTHS” on top right side.

The INSIGHT tool taps Google machine intelligence to find key insights from among the thousands of metric and dimension combinations that can be reported in Google Analytics. The tool also offers quick tips on how to improve your Google Analytics data. And because it’s based on artificial intelligence, it gets smarter over time as it learns more about your business and how you use the software, Google says. You can also type certain questions which you are curious about like “ Why traffic reduced on site this month” , “Which Page gets most traffic” etc.

Backlinks for Insurance Agency

Backlinks basically refer to other websites mentioning article or blog of your website and having URL corresponding to it. More relevant backlinks your site has more credibility it achieves in front of google and this helps you in ranking higher.

Tips for getting backlinks

• Reach out to Industry connects- You can reach out to other insurance agencies and different insurance organizations like PIA/IIA . Ask them to mention your website or article on their site in exchange for mentioning theirs in your site.
• Reclaim links on Publication- Certain publications may have mentioned your agency on their site but forgot to provide a link to your site. Make sure you reach out to them and ask to include a link on their site.
• List on Anglelist/Crunchbase – You can add your website link on websites which provide listing in your area.
• Quora/Pinterest- Many times in Quora people may have asked a certain question and you may have a relevant article for that query. In this case you can provide answer and drop your website link.

There are many other aspects to optimizing your insurance agency website for SEO. In a highly competitive market combined with the continuously updating algorithms of search engines, SEO is not a one-and-done affair. It is important to make sure your website is also frequently updated to keep your insurance agency at the top of search engine results and at the top of your market.

SEO  for Insurance can help customers in finding your website via google search. Friendly agent can help you convert your organic traffic into leads.

Setup your free Success call with our team to form  SEO strategy and to figure out how you can take your Insurance Agency to next level.