Effective insurance agency search engine optimization can help drive traffic to your website, generate inbound leads, and increase the health and credibility of your insurance website. Let’s review these top 10 tips when it comes to improving your insurance agency search engine optimization.
- Know Your Keyword Phrases
Keywords, which are technically keyword phrases, are short three to five word phrases your prospects might use when looking for insurance products and services. For example, Ohio business insurance, Charlotte employee benefits, and New Jersey truck insurance, are all keyword phrases potentially applicable to your agency. To create a list of these phrases, there are many free tools and techniques your agency can use. For example, Google AdWords and Keyword Planner will help you determine the number of searches, by phrase, for your preferred keyword phrases. It will also recommend similar phrases for you to consider. There are many other free and paid tools, including Moz Keyword Explorer and SEOBook Keyword Tool.
- Review Other Insurance Agency Websites
Many agencies and brokers don’t do a great job with insurance search engine optimization (insurance SEO). That said, it can be still helpful to investigate other insurance agency websites to see if your agency can glean keyword phrase ideas. To do this, simply navigate to another agency website in your state and View Page Source, and search (Ctrl F) for meta. Or you can install a free tool bar from Moz or SEOBook to make this process simpler.
- Social Bookmarking and Google URL Submission
Once your agency has optimized your website for SEO, make sure you submit any unranked pages to Google using the Google Webmaster Tool – Submit URL. And, to better ensure your pages will get ranked, add them to prominent social media platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.
- Keyword Phrases in Titles and Subtitles
Creating titles and subtitles on a web page that includes your preferred keywords will help search bots and human readers more readily scan your content. If they find relevant keywords in your subtitles, they are more likely to read the entire article.
- Alt Image Tags and Header Tags
The title for a page appears on the search engine results page. The main header will appear when viewers open the page, similar to a headline in a magazine or newspaper article. Focus each web page on a specific topic and keyword phrase. Your title and header will be indexed by the search engine and seen by prospects. It will increase the chance viewers will open your article instead of an alternate article. Make sure you limit each page to a maximum of three keyword phrases. Both your prospects and the search bots will be looking for well organized, focused content, so keep your content streamlined and relevant.
- Dynamic Content Not Duplicate Content
Search engine like to see new content as their search bots scan your insurance agency site. Adding dynamic content with a blog, video, and article publishing will help your insurance search engine optimization efforts. Make sure your website isn’t using boilerplate, duplicate content. If you purchased a site from a vendor that offers boilerplate content, rewrite all your content, as rapidly as possible, or your rankings will suffer the consequences.
- Word Density
When it comes to word density, you should repeat your phrase, a reasonable number of times. There are many opinions on word density, ranging from 4% to over 10%. In general, a simple rule should be, when reading your content, it should read well for your website visitors first, and search engines second. Beware of «keyword stuffing». When writing a page, focus on the topic, not the keyword phrase. When following this process, I find my keyword density is usually in the 5% to 8% range. For example, if you are writing about Florida flood insurance, it’s fine to repeat that phrase 4 or 5 times in 150 words, but not 10 times. You should include the phrase in your page name, page title, description and as header tags as discussed prior.
- Boldface, Italics, Underline, Links
It’s good to boldface, italicize or underline your keyword phrases, but do so within a reasonable writing context on your pages. Links can also be helpful, linking to other pages within your website, or conversely, linking from other pages to your preferred pages. Don’t confuse this process with «link building» schemes. Many agencies were led astray with SEO link building scams, such as link farms. Any external links to your insurance agency site should come from high quality, relevant sites.
- Insurance Videos
Website visitors are 80% more likely to watch video then read your content, and search engines weight webpages that contain videos. And if your video has a longer view time than other websites in the same search results then your rankings cam improve even more.
- SEO Tracking
There are tons of tools available for tracking insurance search engine optimization. Many are free, most are inexpensive. From Moz, to SEOBook, to WebCEO, your agency can pick from dozens of highly functional choices. That said, you’ll need to learn the tool you select, and run and measure the reports on a consistent (monthly should suffice) basis. And it goes without saying, that every agency should have Google Analytics loaded on their website, to track general traffic, traffic patterns, search engine referrals, and social media referrals to their website.
Source by Alan Blume