A good SEO strategy can propel just about any business to stardom. Brands that rank at the top of search results for lucrative keywords are generally perceived as industry leaders. By increasing your visibility within Google, you can increase the number of leads and convert them at a higher rate.
Like with other businesses, SEO services are crucial for the insurance industry. This marketing approach is incredible in the long run, helping you establish your brand as the market leader. SEO can help increase the number of leads and have a fantastic impact on your overall marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll explain how optimization can help your insurance agency’s website. After that, we’ll share some of the best methods of boosting your organic online presence.
What makes insurance SEO so important?
Insurance agents often have to be pushy to close a deal. Similar to other financial services, potential clients are generally reluctant to leave their money with an insurance company. Most people prefer spending their resources elsewhere or putting them in different investment vehicles.
Whatever the case may be, brands have to create a stable rapport with a person. Getting life or home insurance is expensive. Unlike selling other products, it’s not an impulsive purchase, which is why clients are generally cautious when choosing a provider.
That being said, here are a few ways SEO can help your business:
- Builds online and offline reputation.
- Higher visibility and brand awareness.
- Increases the number of leads
- Increases conversion rates.
- Helps analyze the competition.
- Provides new partnership opportunities.
- Helps improve other marketing efforts.
Aside from generating leads, search engine optimization is fantastic for building authority. By increasing your presence in Google and other search engines, you slowly build a reputation within the industry, which is crucial for closing clients.
Simply put, your target audience won’t put their money into a brand they don’t trust.
How does SEO affect your overall marketing strategy?
Many people look at search engine optimization in a bubble. When analyzing their SEO strategies, they only consider organic traffic while neglecting the impact of optimization on marketing.
As it turns out, your SEO efforts can also help other marketing channels. The promotional method has a cascading impact, affecting your insurance business on all levels. Here’s how SEO affects other marketing processes:
Competitive analysis
Keywords research is the basis of any SEO process. It helps you analyze the target audience’s search intent and find phrases with high volume. In the end, reaching the top spots in search engine results for low-traffic phrases is a fool’s errand.
During keyword research, you also get acquainted with the local and global competitors. An insurance agency can analyze the opposition’s data to improve its own marketing, whether we’re talking about digital or traditional channels.
Demographic analysis
Every insurance company is aware of its target audience. However, as you start dabbling in data, you sometimes get surprised by the results.
During the optimization process, a service provider uses various tools, such as Google Search Console, to analyze visitor data. They track metrics such as time spent on site, bounce rate, number of pages per session, etc. Based on the data, a professional can tell how each page is performing.
When performing a thorough analysis, you can also evaluate demographic data. You can check where the majority of traffic is coming from. Aside from that, you can check their age, sex, and interests. Every insight you gain during analysis can be used not only for SEO but other marketing processes as well.
Risk mitigation
Investing most of your budget in one marketing channel or campaign is extremely risky. Although, in theory, every marketing process will have a positive impact on your bottom line, you still need to optimize your strategy.
Putting money into SEO is a fantastic way to slowly build your brand over time. Every piece of content you write will remain online as long as you want it. Most importantly, it allows you to distribute money into different channels and tie everything together.
Brand awareness
Simply increasing your traffic won’t do your insurance agency any good if there’s no trust between the clients and the company. A person has to see your message several times just to build basic awareness. This is why putting lots of money into paid ads usually isn’t the best choice for insurance businesses.
With SEO, you’re slowly starting to build authority within the industry. The more users see your website as they’re browsing insurance-related topics, the more they start perceiving you as an authoritative source. This works well in conjunction with other digital marketing channels.
Given that the amount of traffic you can get from Google is virtually limitless, your growth potential is limitless as well.
International growth
Another major perk of organic web traffic is that you can grow internationally. People from various countries can get acquainted with your business, even if you have no presence in their local market.
However, it’s worth mentioning this factor isn’t as important for insurance companies. Unlike, let’s say, web shops, these businesses can’t sell online. Nevertheless, it can be beneficial if you’re planning expansion onto a specific market, as it would give you a nice head start.
Improves other marketing channels
Having a well-optimized site is always important. For example, putting lots of money into paid ads doesn’t help if your website pages can’t load properly or if you have a broken design.
Sooner than later, a person will have to reach your web pages to make a purchase. Whether the traffic is coming from email links, Facebook, or influencer campaigns, your main landing page is the place where these visitors become paying clients.
Furthermore, when you create a piece of content for your site, you can easily share it on social media. You can use the same promotional material for SEO, SMM, newsletters, and influencer campaigns. And as you get more and more organic traffic, you’ll increase the number of social media followers and vice versa.
How to implement insurance SEO services?
Using SEO for insurance agents is very similar to standard search engine optimization. You’ll have to improve site structure and design, increase page speed, create high-quality content, and build links. An insurance site can benefit from a few basic SEO services, but MiroMind always recommends paying for a full plan.
1. Technical SEO
Whenever you hire SEO experts, the first thing they do is perform a technical audit. They check your site’s overall performance, focusing on things such as crawlability and user experience. Here are things you need to do during technical SEO:
- Improve site structure.
- Submit sitemap to search engines.
- Increase website speed.
- Improve mobile-friendliness.
- Check content duplicates and cannibalization.
- Fix the overall design.
- Make sure that a website isn’t suffering from any penalties.
Technical SEO is a part of on-page SEO. As the name indicates, this is a set of practices meant to improve the performance of your pages. Your main focus is making things easier for search engine bots by allowing them to quickly crawl your pages. We also can’t neglect all the improvements to user experience, which help both optimization and conversion.
Basically, technical SEO is the backbone of optimization and the most important digital marketing process. If your insurance company’s site isn’t working, there’s no point in paying for ads, social media, and other channels.
2. Competitive analysis
Even if you’re well acquainted with the insurance industry, digital marketing is a completely different thing. Some companies make enormous money by ranking for keywords that might not seem lucrative enough.
Here are some of the main processes you perform during competitive analysis:
- Discover top competitors.
- Determine how they drive traffic.
- Find their best-performing pages.
- Analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
- Compare their performance and strategy to yours.
- Discover common sources of links and the best link-building strategies.
- Analyze cost-per-click for the lucrative keywords.
The competitive analysis goes way beyond simple numbers in Google Analytics. You’re trying to figure out things that other insurance companies are doing right and whether you can replicate the process. You also need to find their potential weaknesses and try to create a competitive advantage.
Among others, SEO competitive analysis can be used for all your marketing processes. As previously mentioned, you’re also checking cost-per-click for keywords, which is something you can use for PPC. You can also check their social media traffic, which can tell you how much they’re relying on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms.
3. Keyword research
Often, we do keyword research as a part of competitive analysis or its extension. Your main goal is to find keywords that can drive high organic traffic while being easy to optimize for. In other words, you’re looking to generate as much traffic as possible with minimal effort.
Another important part of keyword research is user intent. Every time a person uses Google, they’re looking to achieve a certain goal. Some people just want to be entertained, while others want to gain valuable insights. A smaller percentage of users are looking to purchase a product or a service.
In a perfect world, you would only pursue keywords that drive direct sales. However, as they are highly competitive, it’s extremely hard to reach the top of search rankings for these phrases. So, we usually have to resort to workarounds.
The basic principle of keyword research is finding long-tail keywords. These phrases aren’t as competitive but should still have enough traffic to justify the content creation. Although they shouldn’t necessarily be profitable, AKA money keywords, they should be closely related to insurance.
4. Content creation
Once you create a list of the best keywords, it’s time to create appropriate pages for each one of them. Bear in mind you’re not necessarily pursuing competitive phrases such as “Life insurance” or “Home insurance.” Instead, you should go with something like “Financial needs analysis” or “Does life insurance cover hospital bills?”
Here are a few bulletproof tips and tricks that can work for you:
- Create longer posts with lots of unique information.
- Make sure to add unique pictures, infographics, and other visual solutions.
- Embed videos can also improve the performance of a page.
- Reroute visitors and increase the importance of certain pages by creating topical clusters.
- Follow best SEO formatting practices.
- Use content tools such as Grammarly, SurferSEO, and Frase AI.
As a service provider, your emphasis should always be on sales pages. You need to create a page for each service that you provide, such as “Car insurance” and “Home insurance.”
Due to high competition, it’s hard to drive direct organic traffic to these landing pages. But you can still reroute visitors from other parts of the site. To do so, you’ll need an effective internal link-building strategy. Not only does interlinking increase traffic, but it can also increase the importance of certain pages in the eyes of Google.
5. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, or link building, is a practice where you acquire backlinks from reputable sources. When someone links to you, this shows Google that the page is of high quality to the point where other bloggers are willing to promote it.
Some of the most popular link-building strategies are:
- Guest posts.
- PBNs.
- HARO.
- Link exchange.
- Broken link building.
- Various link baits.
- Content roundups and event content.
Bear in mind that some of these strategies are considered gray or even black-hat SEO. The MiroMind team suggests against using PBNs and link exchanges as they can eventually harm your site and lead to a Google penalty. Even guest posting, which is a common strategy, is sometimes perceived as potentially dangerous.
Unlike content creation, where you have full control over the product, link building is much harder to pull off. In part because you depend on other people to boost your content.
Things become even trickier when we consider that a link from the insurance industry is more valuable than a link from any other industry. In other words, you have to hope and pray that some of the insurance competitors will boost your content marketing.
6. Local SEO
When doing insurance agency SEO, it pays off to focus on local searches. Most clients buy services from local providers, so you can quickly create a name for yourself by managing your online reputation.
In a way, local SEO is separate from traditional SEO, although they rely on the same things. For example, to master both approaches, you need clean pages and good content. However, unlike traditional SEO, where you rely on links, local optimization is more dependent on user reviews.
Here’s how the usual process goes:
- Add your site to Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, Bing Maps, and other major directories.
- Make sure that all your data is the same across the map.
- Start acquiring online reviews and manage your reputation.
The main goal of local SEO is for your company to appear in the three-pack. This is a type of snippet that appears on top of a search engine results page. It commonly appears when a user looks for local results such as “Insurance company Boston” or “Life insurance Toronto.”
The snippet is called three-pack as it features the three top companies in the city/area (there is also one paid result above them). Each of the top companies is shown on the local map with a pin. You can also see additional business data on the snippet, including featured brands’ addresses, work hours, phones, and website links.
7. Social media marketing
Generally speaking, SMM or social media marketing isn’t a part of SEO. However, thinking that your brand can survive without a working Facebook or Instagram page would be ludicrous.
Due to the nature of insurance, you can focus on regular clients or businesses. The data indicates that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are the best platforms for selling to individuals. LinkedIn, on the other hand, excels at B2B selling.
Although SEO experts rarely dabble in SMM and prefer focusing on best optimization practices, you can argue that social media can help your Google performance. For example, if you have a large followership on social media, you can gain lots of traction when sharing a new post. As a result, your articles can gain numerous easy links with minimal effort.
Another benefit of having active social media profiles is that it allows you to repurpose content. Every piece of marketing material you create can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, which increases the company’s cost efficiency.
A combination of SEO and SMM is especially great for direct sales. Both methods improve brand awareness, which makes it easier to close clients. Social media also allows you to contact website visitors who leave their data and approach them in a friendly, unimposing manner.
If you’re looking for an SEO agency to help you with your insurance website, contact MiroMind today!