SEO for Insurance Companies: Getting Closer to Local Customers Near You

As in many other industries, people look for insurance companies almost entirely online these days. Gone are the days when people would open up the Yellow Pages and look for the section of insurers. If you’re running an agency in your area, you are likely one of a small group of insurers that is competing for business among your community (not to mention the larger, national insurers).

Therefore, it is imperative that you step up your SEO game in order to attract and maintain customers. If you are a small company, it is already a challenge for you to compete with industry giants. Optimizing your website is critical if you want to make your presence known online, particularly in your region.

Let’s take a closer look at what goes into insurance SEO services, and some tips for insurance agents to follow.

What is SEO for Insurance Agents?

SEO for insurance agents is the process of optimizing insurance websites for the purpose of attracting traffic to those sites and getting new customers. SEO for insurance agents is similar to that of other industries, although it involves the use of insurance-related keywords, content, etc.

In this industry in particular, people are much more likely to conduct searches based upon services, rather than names. Therefore, as a business owner, you want to ensure that your site is fully optimized for the type of information potential customers are likely looking for.

Insurance Businesses Benefits from SEO

The benefits to be gained by optimizing your site are many. If yours is an insurance company looking to firmly establish your presence online, optimizing your site will help you gain traffic overall, and more serious traffic in particular. The people who really know what they are looking for are the ones who will search for specific industry terms online. These are the kinds of people you want coming to your site as they are likely looking to get new policies soon. For this reason, learning and using the relevant terms on your site will help increase your ranking in SERPs.

As mentioned above, as there are usually a limited number of local agents in any given geographical region, raising your site ranking will almost certainly make you stand out if you optimize your site for your location. As there are only a certain number of results that appear on any SERP, those companies that optimize for their locations are sure to make the list in local searches.

5 Ways to Implement Good SEO for Insurance Agents

Now that we’ve established the general benefits to be gained from site optimization, let’s take a look at some concrete steps that you can take to improve your insurance site and increase traffic.

Do Keyword Research

As in other industries, insurance has its own specific set of keywords and keyword phrases. In order to do this effectively, you should first put yourself in the position of a potential client, and think about what you yourself would want in an agent.

People often search for specific services, rather than simply insurance policies in general. If someone just bought a car, they will be looking for auto insurance rather than home insurance. Therefore, it is your job as an agent to make potential customers’ lives as easy as possible and organize your site in such a way that they can find the services they want as easily as possible.

If you specialize in certain types of insurance, you should figure out what effective keyword phrases are for each of the policies and related services that you offer, and utilize them accordingly throughout your site. This includes usage in content, titles, meta descriptions, and URLs.

Develop Your On-page SEO

It would also be helpful to optimize each of your pages for individual services. On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing each component of your site so that they all make sense to the search engines. Both your keyword usage, as well as your overall content should be relevant to individual services specifically on the pages that you have dedicated to those services.

If you can do this effectively, your individual page results will appear directly on SERPs, and this will eliminate the need for people to fish around your site before they get to the service they want. Otherwise, it could cause problems as the search engines might get confused about your intent, and they won’t know where to rank you.

If you work in the insurance industry, you might offer different kinds of insurance (life, home, car, etc). Developing effective on-page SEO means that you should create dedicated pages for each of these services and optimize them accordingly.

Blogging for Insurance Businesses

Blogging can be an effective way to attract attention to your business. Blogging is not only a way to show people how effectively you know your industry, it is also a way to get your name out and direct people to your site.

There are a wide range of topics that you could focus on in your blogging, including such things as customer “pain points.” These are common complaints that people have in any given industry. In the insurance industry in particular, there are many of these, and demonstrating that you have knowledge about how to address them could be to your benefit.

You could also blog about particular types of insurance, conduct client interviews, or touch upon any number of other subjects. Look around online and see what people are talking about in discussion forums.

In addition to blogs, some agents also use other types of methods to attract attention, including conducting webinars, forming partnerships with other types of companies that offer complementary services, and offering incentives for client referrals.

As with other forms of online activity, you’ll of course want to be sure that the places you choose to blog are themselves reputable sites. You can check this by looking at third-party reviews of those sites before you reach out to them.

Build a Logical Website Structure

To really have a top-quality site – one that will both make top ranks in the search engines and appeal to site visitors – you should make sure that your site has a logical structure to it.

There are many benefits to be gained from making sure that your structure is logical. Among these are the following:

• Your website will be easier to navigate. No one wants to sift around a website for 20 minutes searching for basic information. You should figure out what the most logical structure would be, starting with your basic company information and adding pages for each of your specific services. You should also make your contact information clear and easy for people to access. Adding a chatbot might not hurt, either.
• The search engines will have an easier time categorizing you. It is said that search engines have a rule of “3 clicks,” which states that important site information should be found within three clicks. If you have a messy website and major pages are links of links of links, this won’t bode well with the search engines. Think about the process that you would want to go through when you look for a comparable service, and organize your site accordingly.
• Your pages should be properly weighted so that keywords, links, etc appear in more or less equal amounts on each major page. If all of your links, for example, are bunched together on the main page, the search engines will frown upon it and your ranking will be lowered. Beyond that, your individual pages won’t appear on the SERP results.

There are three major kinds of logical site structures. Depending on the services you offer, you could choose one of the three:

• Linear – In the linear model, pages follow one another in a continuous, linear succession. If your business structure is simple and you have a clear line of services that follow one another in a natural order, you might choose this type of structure.
• Hierarchical – In the hierarchical model, sites have major categories and branches of subcategories beneath them. If you have a number of subdivisions of your insurance types, this could be a preferable model for you.
• Webbed – The webbed model takes its name because its link structure resembles that of a web. In other words, main pages connect not only to their respective sub-pages, but also to the sub-pages of other categories within the site. If you have, for example, policies that you want to link particular pages back to because they are relevant to different types, you might consider using this type of structure.

In creating your structure, you should take care to avoid several mistakes that people commonly make:

1. Creating confusing or duplicate titles. You don’t want different services to appear more than once or in the wrong category of your site. Neither people nor search engines will know which category the services really fall under. Double-check your site to make sure that categories are distinct and correct.
2. Putting the main menu in the wrong place. This is also confusing for site visitors. Remember that the general public doesn’t typically know much about the insurance industry anyway. You want to make their journeys around your site as easy as possible, so keep the main menu on the landing page and nowhere else.
3. Confusing major categories with subcategories. If you have pages for life insurance, home insurance, etc., make sure that these are the main pages that other subcategories fall under. You don’t want to have one page for life insurance, one for home insurance, and a third for group life insurance, for example. Group life insurance should fall under the category of life insurance.

Use Correct Technical SEO for Insurance Pages

If you’re working on insurance website SEO, you’ll want to be sure that your technical SEO is up to snuff. Technical SEO refers to all of the things that you need to do to optimize for search engines, including:

• Creating a structure that is suitable for search engines
• Making sure that your site loads quickly. If your loading time is slow, this could be a killer for you as people might assume that your site doesn’t function and move on to the next option.
• Optimizing your site for different types of devices. Remember that interfaces change from device to device, and it could be that a significant number of your potential customers are looking for providers on their mobiles. You should always cross-check your site on mobile to ensure that everything is in order.
• Ensuring that you don’t accidentally duplicate content. This is an indication of sloppiness on the part of the webmaster, and it doesn’t look good for site visitors. People want to see information that is clean, logical, and carefully constructed.

Technical SEO for insurance companies is much like that of other industries. You just want to be sure that you have all your industry information together and laid out logically. If you do this correctly, it will help your ranking significantly. If not, the search engines will become confused and not know where to place you, and this will result in your being downgraded.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, optimizing insurance-related sites is very similar to optimizing other kinds of sites. You want your insurance SEO services to be logical, clear, and also contain all of the necessary information that people will need to learn about your services. If your competitors’ sites start outpacing yours in the rankings, it might be time to sit down and figure out what it is that you’re missing.

This guide should be a good starting point. Be sure to keep revising your material as necessary, and stay on top of changing keyword trends as the search engines update their criteria frequently.

For more information on how to optimize your site and keep it on top of the rankings, check out our services and blog, where we discuss topics related to the industry on a regular basis.