In 2012, roughly 38,500 independent insurance agencies were vying for a share of the insurance market. While the market remains healthy and many agencies are thriving, there’s still a tremendous amount of competition.
How can you ensure that your agency comes out at the top of the heap?
Since the majority of Americans now rely more heavily on the internet for research than any other tool, building a discoverable website is critical to your competitive edge. Search engine optimization (SEO) amplifies your website’s visibility, increasing traffic by securing your company’s post at the top of the list of results returned by search engines.
Most web traffic comes from the big three search engines: Yahoo!, Bing, and, of course, Google. However, Google’s last search algorithm update made it clear that internet users have also begun to use social channels as search tools.
Words are the foundation of search engine optimization; after all, consumers rely on specific words and phrases to find products and services. Finding the right words to use, then, is the first step towards a site that is easy to find.
Both Google and Bing provide tools to help insurance agents identify keywords for their SEO strategies, and a variety of additional third-party tools like keywordtool.io and ubersuggest.org can also be freely accessed to gain insight into the words that users are searching for.
However, before you even begin searching for keywords, it helps to understand what kinds of keywords will be the most beneficial.
You’ll want to begin by identifying the words that are the most relevant to your field. If your agency provides errors and omissions protection, “errors and omissions” would be relevant keywords. However, adding other natural search terms will increase the precision of your keywords’ relevance, which would help search engines match search queries with your site.
These long-tail keywords increase the specificity of your keywords which means that the people searching for them are looking for exactly the insurance that you’re selling, increasing the chance that they’ll become leads.
Adding other natural search terms will increase the precision of your keywords’ relevance.
Once you’ve selected a healthy list of keywords and phrases, be sure to check the demand for these search terms. Google’s keyword tool provides a keyword traffic estimator that lets you know if people are actually looking for the words that you’ve selected.
The big insurance companies have cornered the market on broader terms. If you conduct a search for “insurance” or “car insurance” or even “affordable car insurance,” there’s a good chance that Geico or Allstate already dominate those keywords, leaving little room for you on the search results page.
Google’s keyword tool also shows you which keywords have more or less competition. Again, more long-tail, specific keywords will help to precisely target consumers. While the number of searches may be smaller, the competition is also less intense and the consumers searching for these terms have something very specific in mind. You may find your site in front of fewer eyes, but eyes that are primed to purchase insurance.
The marketers at AgenciesOnline work exclusively with insurance agencies. By narrowing the field of our focus, we’re able to better serve our clients. We can focus on the specific needs of insurance agents and tailor marketing campaigns to those needs. If you’re interested in developing a marketing campaign that likewise focuses on your unique target market, get in touch with us today to get started.