At the core of the technological revolution is the transition of information to the internet and other digital platforms. Now more than ever, a company’s website is the central hub for all resources and all audiences — it is the center of the marketing mix and a critical component for generating business leads.
Regardless of whether the final purchase happens in-person or online, the vast majority of consumers do research online before making a decision. Looking specifically at the insurance industry, the J.D. Power 2016 U.S. Insurance Shopping StudySM discovered that 74 percent of consumers looking for insurance providers use insurer websites or aggregators first for obtaining quotes and researching information.
With about 63,000 Google searches happening every second, it is imperative for your insurance agency or brokerage to have an SEO-optimized website that attracts your target audience. Read below for some key insights that will help your business better connect with qualified insurance prospects.
Optimizing Your Insurance Agency Website
There are several elements that factor into a website’s SEO value. Every time a consumer actually types something into Google, or any search engine, to conduct a search, the back-end algorithm weighs these factors to determine the pages that best align with what it thinks the searcher wants. This then delivers what is called a search engine results page (or SERP), which is the actual results the searcher sees after entering the search query, and it varies for every user based off of location, search history, previous site visits and many more factors. Even if two people type in the same query in the same order, they could get different results because of their location or previous search habits.
Still, there are ways to improve your chances of visibility. Two of the most impactful SEO factors are high-quality content and external links going to your site.
How Do You Improve Your Online Content?
When discussing “content” from an SEO perspective, we’re talking about any text that lives on your site, which could mean section headers, taglines and actual explanations of what your business does.
Writing and publishing long-form articles consistently is one of the best things ways to enhance any business’s presence online, including insurance agencies and brokerages, but many smaller agencies don’t have the bandwidth to keep a blog running on any regular basis. Because this is the case for many independent insurance agencies, your on-site content becomes that much more important.
The first step to creating valuable content is to define and understand the audience that is buying your insurance services. Multiply your efforts by adding a keyword specific to their needs in the headings, title and URL, plus a couple of keywords in the body copy. Because so many independent insurance agencies are hyper local, it can be smart to add your city or region as a keyword to certain pages. For example, instead of titling a page “Insurance Services,” you might change it to “Insurance Services in Nashville.” Using tools like Google Keyword Planner can help determine the popularity of various keywords for your agency or brokerage based off of average monthly search volume.
Some other ways to optimize your content include:
- Instead of using paragraphs, use bulleted or numbered lists
- Incorporate images with keyword-optimized URL paths and descriptions (alt text)
- Use keywords in title tags and descriptions (this is what shows up in search engine results and therefore is more likely to be pulled into a results page if properly optimized
- Link to other pages on your site
- Link to get a quote or an estimate for your services online
The Digital Buyer’s Journey for Insurance Prospects
Gaining traction and traffic to your website is definitely positive, but how do you leverage search traffic to gather qualified business leads? Make sure you have a defined path for users who enter the site to get to the next step in buyer’s funnel. If you have an online quote or estimate functionality, the link should be easy to get to from these highly trafficked pages. Another tactic that works well for B2B insurance agencies is to create thought-leadership content, like whitepapers, that speak to specific pain points or issues your prospects may be experiencing, and then have those assets live behind a gated form so that you collect their contact information in exchange for access to the whitepaper. Gathering the contact information and other data through a simple form submission gives your insurance agency additional opportunities to sell and market to them. As long as the information they’re getting from you is valuable, they will not see an issue with providing their email address for further contact from your business.
A strong marketing strategy will place a big emphasis on driving traffic to the website through various channels and communication efforts. All of these tactics can help your insurance agency or brokerage gain additional visibility in an increasingly competitive digital environment.