SEO as a Part of Your Agency’s Marketing Strategy

Did you ever wonder about making your insurance website more appealing to the three core search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo)? First I would say forget about Bing and Yahoo. Why?  The stats don’t lie – 79% of people use Google. In my opinion, that’s where your focus should be.

Have you been scared off by the high costs that SEO specialists charge for their services? If so, I have some good advice for you and your agency. There are only a few very effective ways to get good search engine rankings by doing it yourself. These techniques are not very difficult to learn and really only require some small amounts of time and patience on your part or your marketing team’s part. Let’s get started with a few techniques that you and your agency can do.

Your Agency’s Domain Name

The trick here is to register a domain name for your agency that your customers can remember and the search engines think is relevant to you and your agency. Use words in your domain name that describe the insurance your agency’s trying to sell. For example, don’t call your site  www.SmithAgency.com, if you sell insurance. You’re better off calling your site www.SmithInsuranceAgency.com. Simply because we need to ensure that the poten- tial customer doesn’t have to remember that he or she needs to input a hyphen after every word.  (YES I’ve seen 39-character domain names with a hyphen in-between every word and I can assure you that no one will remember that domain.)

Title Tags Matter

Search Engines value the contents of the Title Tag when ranking your site for key- words. Put your most important keywords in your title tags, using singular and plural versions of each word. Make your tags dif- ferent and specific for each page on your insurance agency’s site. For example, using “EPLI” won’t always work. Spelling out “Employment Practices Liability Insurance” may be a better option. Your Title Tags should be concise (keep it to 65 characters) and should be topically relevant.

Meta Descriptions

Although Meta Descriptions are no longer used as part of the ranking algorithm, they should still be a key piece of your opti- mization strategy. The Meta Description tag is used by search engines to display a short description of your webpage.

You should limit your Meta Description to about 150 characters, or else it may become truncated in the search engine’s results pages. Although the Meta Description tag is no longer a ranking fac- tor, they should still include your agency’s target keywords as it can help elicit higher click-through rates. Like the Title Tags, you should have a unique, relevant, and com- pelling Meta Description for each page of your website.

Image ALT Text

The Image ALT text is used for a very short description of an image, giving you another way to incorporate some of your target keywords.

The world has gone visual, so please stay focused on great visual content because it matters to your agency’s bottom line. Your content needs visuals and with- out them your content is going to be skipped over.

Keyword Density

“Keyword density” is defined as the per- centage of your content that is comprised of your target keywords. Although not something that many people talk about any- more, it is something to be mindful of. While there is no magic percentage, it’s important to include your keywords when- ever it seems natural to do so. You should feel free to use plurals and synonyms of your keywords throughout your copy, but keyword stuffing should be avoided at all costs.

I would recommend you use the H1 and H2 heading tags to elevate your important agency keywords within your agency’s website. The agency keywords contained in those tags are considered more important by search engines.

Your Agency’s Inbound Links

Getting inbound links should be con- sidered one of the most important pieces of your SEO strategy.   All of the major search engines use inbound link metrics as part of their ranking algorithms.

Links from other highly ranked sites are very valuable and will increase the over- all authority of your agency website. Contacting other website owners with whom you may do business and asking them for links is a good starting point. The sites linking to you should not be your competitors’, so insurance agency-to-insur- ance agency may hurt you depending on where they are located. As an example, a motorbike repair shop would benefit by exchanging links with a motorbike trail site.

When arranging a link exchange, make sure that your important agency keywords are included in the anchor text. Search engines use anchor text when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your web pages. This is a very important step, so please make sure to handle this with care because if done right it can help you and your agency out a lot, but if done wrong it can backfire on you. Like keyword density, it’s all about balance and should not seem forced or spammy.

Keep in mind, when working with an SEO specialist they will have numerous other tricks and techniques, but here are just a few techniques you can use and not spend all kinds of money.

All the best with your online market- ing but let’s always remember if you want big-time results you will have to invest in an SEO specialist — our agency does and we spend $500-1K a month and I have to say he more than pays for himself. So if you want advice please call me or email me because like you I am an insurance agent not an SEO Guru!