Insurance SEO in 90 Seconds: A Foundation for Better Digital Marketing Decisions

Is SEO the gift that keeps on giving?

It has been said, and it's true, that search engine optimization is the gift that keeps on giving. But you can't just do a one-time website optimization and expect your insurance agency to show up near the top of search results day after day, month after month, year after year. A little basic feeding, watering and weeding is necessary because search engines change, so do consumer behaviors and technology (hello voice search and AI), and so does competition for the same hearts and minds your agency is after.

What should SEO cost?

Asking what search engine optimization costs is a little like asking what car insurance costs. As an insurance agent you know there are a lot of variables that go into auto insurance premium calculations and no two insureds are exactly alike. The same is true of search engine optimization for an insurance agency. A car insurance premium calculation starts by identifying risks and choosing limits, deductibles and endorsements. The equivalent of that for an insurance agency website would be:

• Setting a budget
• Getting an analysis of your current search visibility
• Assessing how much and what kind of SEO will meet your goals within your budget
• Honestly assessing what SEO work you can do in house and what can be outsourced
• Identifying who will do ongoing website updates, both technical and content updates
• Identifying measures of success (site visits, lead generation, e.g.)

Can you be an SEO expert and an insurance agent at the same time?

Having spent time on the insurance agent's side of the desk, several of us here at Confluency know that it can sometimes be a challenge to get quotes out on time, return phone calls, answer emails, make sure you have coverage for an absent CSR and enjoy donuts and coffee with the insurance company marketing rep. And then a summer storm makes the phones hail down claim phone calls. Very, very few of us have time to keep up with changes in search engine optimization and perform the related updates.

You don't have to *do* SEO but if you understand SEO you will save you time, get you more leads and better ROI, and save you marketing dollars in the long run. That's what we want to do with SEO in 90 seconds: help you make better decisions and get more bang for your marketing buck. And maybe preserve a little of your dwindling sanity.

Introducing SEO in 90 Seconds: Better Digital Marketing Decisions

3 types of search engine optimization:

SEO as a term gets tossed around like it's just one, monolithic thing. As the car insurance analogy illustrates, SEO is far from one thing or a one-size-fits-all-proposition. In fact, there are three types of search engine optimization:

• Technical
• Local
• Organic (or, for our purposes, everything else)

The purpose of SEO in 90 Seconds isn't to teach you how to do each type of SEO (I mean, c'mon, if we could do that the who would hire us to do SEO?). But we do think that by breaking SEO down into bite-sized morsels we can help you make better digital marketing decisions and outrun your competition without having to buy a $200 pair of running shores.

How to know if your insurance agency website is search optimized:

Technical SEO should be thought of as table stakes, every website should have good technical optimization. We have seen some instances where technical SEO alone is enough to meet an individual agency's visibility and lead generation goals, though this happens less often than in the past due to increased competition for search visibility.

What is technical SEO?

As the video below explains, technical SEO involves using code to help Google understand what your website and individual web pages are about. There are over 200 factors in Google's search algorithm and many of those have to do with the technical aspects of SEO. Simply tossing a few city and state names along with the name of an insurance product or two isn't search optimization by itself, even though some web designers will tell you it is.

Website graders: A standardized test

One place to start analyzing your insurance agency's online visibility via SEO is with a website grader, or more accurately in most cases, a web *page* grader. We will talk more about website graders in an upcoming post and video but they can be a starting point for a conversation about what might need to be cleaned upon your website.

Website graders have limitations:

Bear in mind that many graders have not been updated to keep up with search algorithm changes, many graders will tend to inflate the importance of the web page elements the grader can 'see' vs. even more important website and SEO elements the graders can't see. Robots that crawl websites are a little on the dumb side and they miss a lot of important SEO elements, so remember, a website grade isn't gospel, a grader is just a starting point for an SEO review.

If you want to check out your insurance agency's online visibility, including SEO scoring, you can get a free Marketing Foundation Report (MFR). The MFR provides a more comprehensive view of your agency's marketing competitive readiness.

Get your free report.

SEO in 90 Seconds: The 3 types of SEO

Would you rather battle a gorilla or a turtle?

The good news for a local insurance agency is that you don't have to go head-to-head with GEICO and Progressive for search visibility. Google will try to determine search intent when providing search results, and if Google thinks the searcher might be looking for a local business, the search results will include what is sometimes called the local pack, sometimes the 3-pack and other times the snack pack, near the top of search results. A lot of insurance related searches have local intent so you definitely want your agency to appear in the snack pack for insurance related search results.

GEICO and Progressive aren't local, so you only have to compete with other local agencies for local search visibility. They have budgets like yours and they can be beaten.

Local pack example:

We'll talk more about local search optimization in an upcoming video and blog post, but suffice to say, most of the factors influencing local search visibility are not on your website. Managing local SEO means managing your insurance agency's Google My Business profile, getting some links to your website from other websites, managing online reviews, and managing your agency's citations (name, address, phone number) across online directories, review websites and search engines.

Does anyone care about keywords anymore? The truth about organic SEO.

Back in the day, cramming a bunch of keywords on a web page (insurance, insurance, insurance, insurance...) made a difference and could get a page or website to the top of search results. Then Google got smarter, changed their algorithm, and all of a sudden keyword cramming was tagged for what it was: a spammy black hat SEO tactic. Google makes 500 - 600 algorithm changes each year, and keywords are still important, but so are a lot of other things. Chief among those things are:

• The number and quality of websites linking to your insurance agency website
• The quality, recency, and search relevance of your website content

If you want to attract website traffic and leads outside your immediate market area then organic search is something you will need to focus on. It's more expensive than technical and local SEO and usually takes 90 days or more before results start to show.

More on this later...

We'll dig a little deeper into technical, local and organic SEO in upcoming blog posts, and if you would like to be notified when new posts and videos are available, be sure to sign up for our newsletter!