Keywords, Content and Location! Location! Location

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Act cFluent Newsletter, March, 2010 - Subscribe today Subscriber benefits include early evaluation of new products and discounts.

Information for independent insurance agents about issues at the confluence of technology, consumerism, marketing and agency practices. Subscriber benefits include free trial evaluation of new products and programs.

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The Yellow Pages Aren't Yellow Any More - Why Local Search is Vital to Your Insurance Agency's Visibility

Let me tell you a story. I'm embellishing the facts a little, but only a little; when you do it for a story, it's called artistic license, not making stuff up. A business owner I know has had the positive experience in these difficult economic times to have out grown his current business premises. For him these are happy times; the landlords have a lot of vacancies and are well motivated to make deals. So, my friend finds a new location, and strikes a bargain with the landlord that includes improvements and betterments (in addition to a great lease rate and terms). He knows there are implications for his insurance program so he whips out his cell phone to get his insurance agent to answer a few questions so he can seal the deal. He can't get his agent on the line, so what does he do? He holds the phone up, speaks the word 'insurance' and is presented with contact information for other several insurance agents right around the corner from where he is right now standing. He clicks the links to a few of their websites, surfs around for a minute on his mobile browser and selects the most likely looking agent to call for answers and quote. Meet the new yellow pages.

Here's a similar scenario with a personal insurance twist. You are ready to make a big move and make an offer on the waterfront home you always wanted; the seller is willing to accept. You are savvy enough to know that insurance availability and cost, especially for waterfront property, may not be trivial concerns. Your agent is in another state...so, you speak the magic words 'homeowner insurance' in your phone and are presented with a list of nearby options...

Local search has come of age as a mobile information tool - and as a way to locate insurance agencies. Mobile devices, with their GPS locators, are quickly evoving to become at least as important as the PC. Local search, aka Google Maps, Bing Local, and Yahoo Local, has been an important factor for sometime for business wanting visibility in their local markets. That importance has increased dramatically in the last year and is poised to explode.

The bad news: most insurance agents aren't taking advantage of this free and potent source for new sales. The good news: most insurance agents aren't taking advantage of this free and potent source for new sales. That means the opportunity for your agency is wide open. At least at the moment. The search engines use different factors (algorithms) for local search than they do for organic search (or unlocalized search). Those algorithms are becoming more sophisticated but still are far easier to understand and leverage than organic search factors But local search is becoming a little more esoteric every day and that means that the wide open opportunity a local visibility advantage may not remain wide open for long.

Confluency Solutions provides all the information you need to push your way to the top of local search (and remain there). It's all in the Local Search Primer in the Insurance Agency Profit Resource Center for Confluency client agencies. If you want to learn a bit more about local search, how it works and how to take advantage of it, you may want to sit in on our upcoming webinar: The Local Search Imperative. It's free but there are a limited number of seats, so don't wait too long to sign up.

What Long Tail Keywords Mean to Your Insurance Agency

The world of SEO (search engine optimization), keywords and web analytics seems foreign to most insurance agents. So it is comforting when we are presented with an SEO term with a familiar ring to it. Enter long tail search. Most of us are familiar with the long tail as applied to claims and loss ratio development. More generically, according to Wikipedia: The long tail is a type of statistical distribution where a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually "tails off". Long tail search keywords are generally keyword phrases that consist of three, four, five or more keywords. Often these long tail search terms include brand names or highly generic product names like 'insurance'; these shorter keywords, which are at the root of long tail terms, are sometimes referred to as head keywords. It is easy to latch on to a highly competitive, head keyword like 'insurance' and many insurance agents and even SEO consultants will do just that.

But slavishly focusing on insurance as a keyword misses most of your opportunity in two ways: 1) remaining hidden to the majority of search queries and 2) missing out on high conversion rates of long tail searches. Every agency wants to rank #1 in Google search for 'insurance'. Most would settle for a top 10 ranking for 'insurance my city'. And some agencies are even able to get there. But for most, even 'insurance my town' is so competitive that the effort and expense of obtaining that top search ranking can be astonishing. Meanwhile, long tail search offers up a lot of low hanging fruit; again, from Wikipedia: "These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant traffic."

I blogged last October about how Google admitted up to 25% of all search queries were keyword strings their search engines had never seen before. More recently, the Wordtracker Academy blog posted a case study positing single keywords are for losers (their words, not mine). The post analyzed a management and leadership themed website and noted that in one month 95,036 search engine visits came via 44,655 keyword combinations. Further, the top 10 keywords generated only 10% of the visits. The point is, concentrating on single keywords, like 'insurance' misses a lot of traffic.

And then there is the conversion thing. In the insurance world we think of 'conversions' narrowly: what proportion of quotes convert to policyholders? The analog in the web world might be: how many website visitors requested a quote? But web marketers take a broader view of conversions and insurance agents should too because many website actions are just upstream of the opportunity to quote: a newsletter sign up, bookmarking your agency website, viewing a certain video or downloading a PDF white paper. Long tail search queries are highly correlated to consumers who are closer to a buying decision. That is, as I get closer and closer to the object of my search - moving my insurance - my search queries get longer and more specific. Wikipedia notes that conversions for long tail search terms can be up to 200% higher than for short tail terms. And after all, even though we all love drop by visitors, it is the paying visitors that keep our insurance agencies in business.

What does your agency need to do to capture the 90% of search queries missed by short tail keywords based on insurance? The answer, as is often the case, is a variation on 'content is king'. Confluency hosted sites typically have over 300 search-friendly pages covering a wide variety of keyword combinations. But you can do more and the Wordtracker post suggests an interesting tactic. Write a long article (they suggest 2000 words; for reference, this article is 789 words) and keep one or two short tail keywords in mind as you write. Don't over stuff the article with your keywords, but make sure it shows up often without marring the (human) readability of the article (links to your article page will be important, so the article should be high quality). Words occurring around your keywords will organically create numerous long tail terms, without you having to even think about them.

Writing a long article runs counter to accepted blogging wisdom where short (one or two paragraph) and frequent posts are de rigueur. But spicing up your agency blog with a few long articles won't get you kicked out off of Technorati for behavior unbecoming a blog so go ahead and use your blog, if you have one, for posting the occasional long article. Confluency hosted websites also provide the ability (no technical expertise required*) to add articles through the Risk Alert service so this can be a good place to add your long tail search friendly article.

*For a short video tutorial on adding an article using the Risk Alert service click this link while logged into your Insurance Zone or log into to your Insurance Zone and follow this path: Insurance Agency Profit --> Introductory Tutorials for Confluency Web Modules --> 7. Editing Articles, FAQs, Glossary

Tip for Blogging or Adding an Short Article to Your Website

We explored one technique for adding long tail search keyword content to your website in the article on Long Tail Keywords but there is another approach - using short blog posts (or Risk Alert article posts) to add long tail search terms. The blog on blogs - Technorati - recently noted that 95% of all blogs have not been updated in the last five months. The reason? Someone has to think up something to write and then write it. Since most blog posts really should be short - 100 - 250 words - the writing is actually the easy part. The challenge is coming up with topics. We would like to suggest a technique is made easy through the use of social media.

First, you need to have a few social media accounts; in this case, we will talk about LinkedIn and Twitter. In LinkedIn, join a few groups who are likely to discuss or produce the kind of content your customers and prospects would find useful or interesting. Follow those same people/companies in Twitter. Then all you have to do is monitor your RSS feeds, email alerts Twitter feeds for content gems. Re-Tweeting or posting comments to LinkedIn group posts are quick and easy ways to raise your profile within a community. Commenting on articles, charts or videos in your blog or Risk Alerts is a quick and easy way to populate your content and get those long tail keywords. Let's look at a concrete example.

I follow Agent and Broker Editor, Laura Toops, on Twitter and she also belongs to a few LinkedIn Groups I also belong to (Twitter: Lmazztoops ....LinkedIn Group). Recently Laura used Twitter and LinkedIn to highlight an article that was published in American Agent and Broker back in November about the risks of businesses sharing space. In this tough economic climate, some businesses will look at sharing services or premises as a way to cut costs. The article is timely, not only for readers of American Agent and Broker, but for your agency's customers and prospects as well.

Pick two of the keyword phrases and write a synopsis of the article working in variations on those keywords - be sure to cite and link back to the article. Here's an example, which you are free to use:

There it is, 20 minutes and 158 words, not counting the title. It may not win a Pulitzer, but it doesn't have to: all the post has to do is get one customer that would have otherwise missed your agency. When that happens, I think you'll agree that the twenty minutes was well spent.

Bonus - The State of the Internet

Confluency's Facebook page includes a video produced by JESS3 with some truly staggering statistics about just how quickly the internet has grown:

For more mind-numbing stats, visit us on Facebook (gratuitous, I know) - disclaimer: the video is served up via Vimeo's embedded player and viewing may be blocked inside some corporate firewalls. If you do visit us on Facebook, be sure to scroll down a little and watch James experience the best cup of coffee he's ever had - via the coffee siphon.

Improved Customer Feedback and Communication with a New Survey Tool

In the coming weeks, we will add a new survey tool to your agency insurance zone. It will include a built-in survey, The Insurance Service Report Card, which is 'on' by default. The Report Card survey will be sent, after a few days automatic delay, after a quote or policy change request is submitted through your website (take the survey here, if you want to try it out). The survey can be turned off through your Insurance Zone administrative panel - to see how to do that, take a look at the video tutorial in the Insurance Agency Profit Resource Center. Results for this survey are tabulated and displayed to website administrators and benchmarked against other agencies using the survey (you can't see the results of other agencies and other agencies can't see yours - only aggregates).

While you can turn the survey off, we think you should give it some thought before doing so. Negative survey results point up customer relationship problems your agency needs to know about and fix. Positive results should be shared as part of your branding message IAP.

You can also build custom surveys for a variety of purposes. To learn more about surveys and how you might use them, see the Survey tactic in the Customer Development area of the Insurance Agency Profit Resource Center.

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Confluency Solutions specializes in solutions that generate growth through high customer satisfaction. Easy to implement technology combined with traditional independent agency strengths vault your agency into the ranks of the top performers. Confluency Solutions provides complete business solutions, not just technology. We free you up to compete at an advantage, with any size competitor, in a way that just isn't possible without the right tools and without knowing how best to use them. Confluency Solutions makes the web work.
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