SEO for Insurance Agents
As an insurance agent it’s crucial that you have a steady stream of leads to grow your business. SEO for insurance agents can be a great source of leads. The issue is that there are so many other potential marketing channels that it’s easy to get distracted trying to do everything at once.
Today, we’ll be going over how SEO works and why it’s one of the best traffic sources for insurance agents.
Benefits of SEO
SEO, when done right, can be one of the most profitable marketing strategies. The reason is because ranking at the top of search results brings in “free” traffic. So as you get more traffic the cost of SEO services doesn’t increase. Over time you’ll see your SEO campaign bring in consistent traffic and leads.
Another reason that SEO, especially local SEO, is highly profitable is because people tend to trust the companies that show up at the top. Anyone can pay for Google Ads, but only companies that earned Google’s trust can show up at the top organically.
A staggering 32% of all clicks goes to the #1 position on Google’s search results. The top 5 positions get 67% of all clicks and the first page gets 92% of all clicks.
In other words if you aren’t on the first page you don’t exist.
What’s crazier is that if you’re not showing up on the first page, your competitors are getting all that traffic. SEO is, in a way, a zero-sum game. So getting higher on the search results is crucial if you want high quality leads, regularly.
SEO vs Other Marketing Channels
We believe strongly in marketing your business through all the available channels. The reality is that resources are limited. You only have so much of a marketing budget or team to take on all the possibilities.
So when compared toe to toe, how does SEO stand?
SEO vs. Social Media Marketing
Social media is a great way to boost awareness of your insurance brand. When someone is on social media they aren’t an active buyer, but they may be in the future. If you promote your insurance business on social media you can build brand awareness so that when someone is ready to buy insurance they think of you first.
SEO on the other hand involves putting your business at the top when someone is actively searching for insurance. With SEO you’re able to advertise your business when the customer is ready to buy.
SEO vs Google Ads
Paid advertising is great if you have the budget for it, but Google Ads for insurance agencies can be extremely expensive.
In the screenshot above you can see the keyword “car insurance san diego” cost $20 per click. The average conversion rate of a website is 5%, so for every 20 visitors you get one conversion. That’s $400 per lead for this keyword on Google Ads.
There are definitely ways to lower the cost per click and increase the conversion rate but it can only go so far.
With SEO you can steadily increase your traffic without paying more for SEO services.
How SEO works
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of SEO for insurance agencies, let’s dive into what it takes to actually rank your business at the top of the search results.
Keyword Research
Keyword research can be very straightforward if you’re a local insurance agency. If you’re national or multi city it begins to get more complex. Typically you’ll see keywords such as “Service in City”. So whichever city or service you’d like to go after you can bet someone is searching for it.
Some important values when doing keyword research are things like search volume which is basically the number of searches a keyword gets on a monthly basis. Another important value to consider is Keyword Difficulty (KD) basically how difficult it is to rank for that keyword.
Google My Business SEO
The google my business (GMB) has become a solid source of leads for local businesses. Whether you’re a one location insurance agency or a national brand ranking your GMB at the top should be a priority.
The reason is simple, an optimized GMB will show up at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
On the mobile phone, the user has an option to either call or get directions to your location. Both of which are good for business. If they call, you get a lead, if they get directions you’ll have them sit in your office.
Google My Business Optimization
To properly optimize your GMB there are a few important things that need to be done.
For starters you’ll want to make sure every field is filled out on your GMB. This will take some time but it’s definitely worth it.
Filling out everything on your GMB will not only help optimize your but it may also help increase conversions. If a potential lead comes across your listing, you want to be sure you leave a good impression.
So be sure you take the time to make sure the information on your GMB listing is up to date and accurate.
Foundational Citations
Another crucial step to optimizing your GMB listing for search is to set up your foundational citations. Foundational citations are listings on high authority directory websites like Yelp and Foursquare. You want to be sure they have consistent Name, Address, Phone Number and Website. The more consistent they are the better.
Google crawls these directories to better understand how legitimate your business is. Checking for consistency is one of the main ways google verifies your business’ identity. Keeping your business’ information consistent will help Google classify you as an entity.
Niche Citations
Niche citations are from directories that are only relevant to your industry. For example if you’re a roofing contractor you’ll want to get a listing from handy.com, if you’re a lawyer you’ll want a citation from justia.com.
Other important factors for proper google my business optimization include:
- Uploading photos regularly (take them on your phone, this will include geotags)
- Reviews (Longer reviews are likely to help more, reviews from local guides also helps SEO)
- Setting up a free Google Website
- Brand searches and clicks on your listing
- Click Through Rate
Website SEO
When you search for any local service you’ll see ads, then the local map pack, followed by 10 websites. Although most clicks go to the maps listings, many people still go down and click on the websites that show up organically. Getting your website to show up on the first page is a great way to have another lead generating funnel in place to help boost sales.
Technical SEO Audit
To properly optimize your website you’ll want to be sure you start with a deep audit of your website. Fixing critical technical errors on your website can shoot your website up to the top if everything else is already done right. A solid technical audit will take at least 4 hours or so to run and it may take weeks to fix all of the issues.
Common technical SEO issues include but are not limited to:
- Broken outbound and internal links
- Duplicate content
- Duplicate pages without canonical
Meta description tag missing or empty
Page Time out
Orphan pages (has no incoming internal links)
Pages with no outgoing links
…and many others
Website Architecture and Internal Linking
When you have a small website (less than 10 pages or so) you’ll won’t have to worry too much about your website architecture. Although, it’s still important to understand if you want to rank your insurance website.
Website architecture is basically the way your website is set up and this will dictate how bots will crawl the website. The right website architecture will help show bots which pages are important on your website.
To keep it simple, try to group pages that are related to each other together through either internal links or inside of a blog category. An example would be grouping all blogs that talk about “San Diego” the city.
On Page SEO
There are many things that have to be done on the website to boost rankings. Optimizing individual pages is one of them. On Page SEO is a guessing game if you don’t have the right tools to properly optimize pages with.
Remember, Search engines rank pages, not websites. The domain authority of your website is a ranking factor, but at the end of the day search engines will show individual pages when to users. So making sure your page is properly optimized is crucial to rankings.
Keyword Density
You’ll want to optimize your page based on the top competitors on the first page. Using the right keyword densities in the header tags, page title, and body content is crucial.
LSI Keywords
You’ll also want to be sure you use the right LSI keywords. LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords are important to show search engines that you completely covered the topic you are discussing. Typically speaking, if you’re writing long form content, which you always should, you’ll be including LSI keywords naturally.
If you’re using the right on page SEO tools you’ll be able to see what keywords your competitors are using in what areas of the content/html.
Schema Markup
Schema markup can seem extremely complicated to the untrained marketer. Simply put, schema markup is code that you enter into the header of your website to define certain aspects of your business entity. You can show what industry you serve, your hours of operation, and other business details.
When Should You Hire an Insurance SEO Agency
As an insurance agent there are a million tasks you could be doing to grow your business, learning SEO is likely not one of them. Hiring a professional SEO agency can help you get the results you want. If you’re ready to hire an SEO agency to help you grow be sure you get in touch with our team members.
Can You Do Insurance SEO Yourself?
Yes, you can! But, there’s some things you have to watch out for. You want to be sure you don’t buy any cheap services, especially backlinks. Buying cheap, spammy backlinks will not only hurt your SEO, but can literally get your site deindexed.
More often than not business owners fall into the trap of trying to do everything themselves. If you’re just getting started and there isn’t much else for you to do, or your willing to invest time in the evenings to better your SEO, then go for it.
While we think you should hire a professional SEO agency if you want accelerated results that bring an ROI, you can do it yourself if you’re willing to invest the time in learning. Just like anything else, if you take the time to learn SEO online you’ll find out the right way to do it. If you have that time, and are willing to put in the hours you’ll see results, but only if you put in the hours. The question is, should you be investing that time into something else? Only you can decide.
SEO FAQ’s from Insurance Companies
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of getting a website on the first page of search engines for targeted keywords to improve visibility online.
