5 Website Mistakes to Avoid

If you're thinking about updating your current insurance website, or getting your first website, in the new year, there are some mistakes you definitely want to avoid.

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Creating a Partner Page the Right Way

Over the years, I have seen multiple interpretations of partner or trusted professional pages. Most of them get the point across but they are more often than not just a list of partners and some contact information. While this satisfies the need, simple lists do not draw people in, and providing only basic contact info does not build a measurable partnership between an agency and their partners.
So when I set out to design partner pages for the Insurance Website Builder system, I had a few goals in mind. Here we go:

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4 Tips for Building Relationships on Social Media

Social media has many uses: driving traffic to your website, promoting your agency and services, sharing insurance information and knowledge, and increasing your online visibility. However, my favorite use for social media is building relationships.

Getting more followers can be exciting. But if you're not having meaningful conversations with your followers and building relationships, your posts will be seen by very few followers. Try these four tips to make your social media efforts meaningful and start building relationships.

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How to Write a Great Blog Post

Last week I talked about finding the time to blog. Now that you've found the time, let's continue talking about blogging with how to write a great blog post.

The first step is to decide what to write about. This is an easy step if you follow my suggestion from last week to keep a list of possible topics to blog about. Determining the subject of your next blog post can easily take up much of the time you allow yourself to write. Save yourself that time so that it can be spent actually writing. Here are some quick ideas on where to look for content for your blog:

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How to Find Time to Blog

We hear it all the time: I'm too busy to blog. If you're serious about your digital agency marketing and competing online, how can you not find the time to blog?

Blogging has so many great benefits for your website and your agency. It helps with SEO, brands you as an insurance expert and gives readers a look inside what makes your agency special and different from your competition.

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Don’t Chase Google’s Algorithm

In September 2012, Google stopped up-ranking Exact Match Domains (EMDs). EMDs are domain names that include keyword phrases such as commercial insurance in the domain name getcommercialinsuranceintexas.com. People would snatch these up by the hundreds in the hope of capturing the traffic. This worked for a while, but then Google caught on. Overnight, they downplayed the importance in their algorithm of EMDs. Webmasters that relied heavily on this tactic instantly lost rankings. In fact, it affected 0.6% of all U.S English search queries to a “noticeable degree.”

In the previous years, I had recommended that you not use EMDs and instead focus all of your SEO time and energy on a single domain. You could (and sometimes should) use an EMD if you are pointing a specific marketing campaign from television, radio or print to a landing page geared for capturing and keeping that exact traffic.

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Getting Photos for your Website

 The title says it all. I tried to think of something catchy for this entry, but alas, it is what it is. No matter how straightforward the title is, the subject is a bit more complex. If images are obtained improperly, you could be facing hefty legal fees.

For example, a few of our customers have gone to Google Images, searched for an image they liked, saved it to their computer, and then added it to a blog entry. A few months later, each of them received a letter from a law firm demanding thousands in fees for the unauthorized image. Unfortunately, there are little options for these users. You can fight it in court, or pay the fee. The image providers know that the latter is usually cheaper.

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Why Do-It-Yourself Marketing Doesn't Always Work

Agency owners often have to wear many hats relying on their do-it-yourself entrepreneurial spirit to accomplish the tasks required of running an agency. That spirit can help agencies in many ways, but there is one area to be cautious of doing it all yourself... marketing.

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Tips for Jump-Starting Your Website

Most of the time, success of a website is focused on Search Engine Optimization efforts. There’s plenty of tips and tricks for SEO that are constantly changing and being updated. But every once in a while, you should feel free to switch gears and just focus on having a website. Consider it your responsibility to the loyal visitor who has found your site by way of a search engine. Here’s a few tips to remember have absolutely nothing to do with SEO.

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How the Layout of Your Website Can Affect Google Rankings

I often discuss how a well-designed website will draw visitors and keep them viewing your pages. Did you know that the layout of your website could affect your Google ranking as well? That’s right, not only does Google look at the content of your website, it now looks at the website’s design, navigation and usability.

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