How Your Insurance Website is Losing Money on Google

Or more accurately, how to lose money by not being on Google. It's simple to lose money by not ranking in Google's search results... don't invest in SEO.
When you have a few minutes, conduct an experiment. Go to Google (make sure you're not logged in if you have a Google account), and search for one of your top keywords. If you don't have a keyword, use the line of business you are promoting right now with your city or geographic region if your agency is in a small town. Some examples: "Carrollton home insurance" or "Fort Worth auto insurance." Is your agency on the first page of results? If it's not, you could be losing money.
SEO services can take up a lot of your marketing budget. To determine if investing in SEO makes sense for your agency, you first need to calculate your potential return on investment.

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Microdata, an Important Update to Your Website, That No One Will Ever See

In previous posts I have mentioned that search engines are becoming smarter. They are no longer looking for backlinks to determine your website’s content relevancy. They are looking at the content itself. They are looking for data.
Your website is littered with data: phone numbers, product offerings, address information, company facts and figures, employee details and much more. More often than not, the data is placed in the web page HTML, formatted to look good for a visitor and forgotten. 

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What is Keyword Research?

Articles on search engine optimization often talk about keyword research (or keyword analysis). But what exactly is it?
Keyword research is the process of identifying which keywords or keyword phrases people are likely to use on Google and other search engines when searching insurance.

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Website Smackdown : Insurance Website Builder vs. WordPress

You have many options for your insurance agency website. A common question agents ask me is whether they should use WordPress (or a similar content management system) for their website or go with a product that is focused on the insurance industry like ITC’s Insurance Website Builder.
Before we break down the differences between Insurance Website Builder and WordPress, I want to cover a brief history about the Insurance Website Builder system. In 2003 (the first year of WordPress’s initial release), I was developing websites for multiple insurance agencies. I noticed that each website included the exact same features and decided to develop a content management system dedicated to building insurance agency websites. In 2005 after two years of development, we launched Insurance Website Builder.
From that point, the rest is history. Even though they were developed independently, at the core of both Insurance Website Builder and WordPress is a basic content management system. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s break it down.

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2013 Predictions – Insurance Agency Marketing

In 2012, ITC continued our pledge of helping insurance agents grow and succeed with their agencies through constant upgrades to our products: Insurance Website Builder, AgencyBuzz, TurboRater, and InsurancePro. Now, the New Year is upon us, and I am looking forward to the great things we can accomplish together in 2013. Let’s explore my predictions regarding insurance agency marketing in 2013.

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Looking Back at Insurance Website Builder in 2012

One of the advantages of using the Insurance Website Builder online marketing system is the fact that our users receive new features and upgrades automatically. This is done in the background without requiring agents to modify or re-upload their website files to their hosts. In addition to the introduction of new features, Insurance Website Builder automatically updates the sitemap.xml file that notifies the search engines. With this automatic update, we normally see that Insurance Website Builder websites are re-indexed almost daily by the search bots.
So let us take a look at what we have added in 2012. 

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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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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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Search Engine Marketing for the Everyday Insurance Agent - Part 1

I speak to many agents about Internet marketing. One subject that always rises to the top is paid search marketing (SEM) or pay per click (PPC). These paid ads show up at the top and right of most search results. These are above the organic free listings targeted by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. 

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Earning Backlinks vs. Building Them

The goal of any SEO strategy is to get your website noticed. One of the more important aspects of most SEO strategies is developing backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that link back to your site. These links tell the search engines, “Hey, this site has some good info, and I link to it!” Most search engines use this to determine how popular a website is on the Internet. Let us first look at why search engines use this as a primary metric in determining where your website shows within the organic search results.

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10 Common Mistakes that are Hurting your SEO

Search engine optimization can be overwhelming and confusing. There are a few key tips to always remember when optimizing your site, but there are also a few key things to always watch out for. Make sure you’re not letting your hard work be undone by any of these common mistakes.

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Easy List of How to Fully Benefit from Your Website

1. Site Title & Description
   This is what search engines read and display, so make it concise, but descriptive. (For example, ‘Auto, Home, Life Insurance – Dallas, Plano, Richardson TX’ for the title and ‘Example Insurance Agency specializes in auto, home and life insurance in Dallas, Plano, Richardson and the surrounding areas of Texas.’ for the description ) Limit your title to 65 characters and description to 150 characters. Search engines will not index characters beyond this limit. Use this Javascript Kit webpage to count your characters.

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7 Tips for Marketing an Insurance Agency Online on a Limited Budget

There are many reasons to focus on online marketing. For one, consumers are relying more and more on the Internet and use it to get the majority of information about products and services before they buy, including insurance. It’s easier to monitor your online marketing campaigns and determine their success.

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Let's Talk Expiration Dates

You've heard it time and time again. Content is King.

To show how your content is a reflection of your site to Google, let's consider expiration dates.

Somewhere, either sitting in your refrigerator, on your kitchen counter, under the seat in your car, or at your desk, you probably have food that will one day go bad. It will eventually sit there too long, start to grow mold, eventually stink up everything, and you will finally throw it out. Imagine if Google viewed your site the way you view that food.

Well it does. Kinda.

Google wants to expose its users to fresh sites. That means it will take note of sites that are updated often and updated with meanigful changes. Sites that are left too long and become stale will be tossed aside and may never be served up as a search result. So if it hasn't been stressed enough already, keep your site fresh.

How often should a site be updated? Often. Weekly, if possible.

How much should a site be updated? A lot. More should be changed than just the date, navigation, or advertisement.

What kind of content should be added to the site? New Pages. Not just new content on existing pages. Google wants to provide new value, so it wants to find new pages.

As a bonus, here's an infographic from bitrebels to further breakdown how to make your content King.

Masters of Marketing: Basics of Search Engine Optimization

We had our second weekly Webinar yesterday, thank you to all that made it. As promised here is the presentation:

Masters of Marketing: Basics of SEO

View more presentations from iwb_insurance.

Small Business and Marketing

Social Media is not only great for SEO, but it's a good way to stay in touch with your customers and assess your own presence on the internet. Our SEO team at Insurance Website Builder can help improve your social media and make recommendations. Call us today at 1-800-383-3482 to see how we can take your insurance website to the next level.

Keeping It Fresh

One of the biggest challenges for today’s websites is keeping Google happy and interested. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s simply time-consuming (when done correctly) and overwhelming if you don’t have a strategy setup to guide you.

As the saying goes, ‘Content is King,’ and it’s fresh content that keeps visitors engaged, because really, who wants to read about your Christmas Contest in March? Unfortunately, more than half of business owners fail to update their site even once a month. To put it in perspective:

– Sites that update their content  5 times a month receive 300% more traffic
– Businesses that utilize social media marketing receive 400% more site hits

Source

4 Easy Types of Content to Make Google Happy

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and the other various social media sites attract millions of people every single day. News articles, helpful tips, or special events posted on Facebook, or even a 140-character tweet about new products on Twitter all have search engine optimization advantages. Since social media content is essentially the epitome of fresh & relevant content, it is the most likely to be picked up by Google.

Press Releases

By definition, a press release is the announcement of something new. This makes it another type of content that search engines favor. Press releases can target your SEO keywords, improve your brand-association, and in the end, be posted to your social media accounts. Benefits like that should never be ignored.

User Generated Content

As an insurance agent, your business can rely heavily on the comments and reviews of your customers. This can be a double-edged sword, but the rewards definitely outweigh the risks. Invite people to comment on your blogs or your Facebook wall. Direct them to reviews on your Google business listing. Many consumers rely on the experiences and evaluations of others to determine the quality and value of your services. Search engines take into account how people interact with your site, so to gain new visitors, be sure those returning visitors are making their satisfaction known. Most importantly, you can also combine these efforts with your social media platform.

Marketing Automation Content

Lastly, this overlooked, yet important tool is essential to your website’s overall optimization and relevance. If you have helpful information that’s industry specific and appeals to your audience, post it on your site! Use it to gain more information about your visitors. With this focused content, people will not only want to gain access, but the content itself will help build relevancy for your target keywords. An example of this is to offer free reports for download off of your site in exchange for a Name & E-mail address. It’s a win-win-win for all parties involved. Consumers gain free information, Businesses gain leads, and search engines gain helpful data.

Source

Gain access to even more tips, help, guidance, and strategy for your Insurance Website today!

Au Naturale...

search en·gine op·ti·mi·za·tion
"SEO: the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the natural, un-paid, or organic search results"

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Back to the Basics

SEO combines the methods of how search engines work, what people search for, the actual terms or keywords entered into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by target audiences.

Optimizing a website for SEO involves editing the content, promoting that site around the web, and removing any barriers possible so that search engines can index the site.


No Cheaters Allowed

Don't cheat yourself out of something rewarding to get something easy. SEO can be thought of similarly to a relationship. Your site should be accessible, have goals set for the future, always know the right things to say, know the likes and dislikes of search engines, never come off as fake, automated, or a copy-cat, and never ever bore them. Never.


The Truth of the Matter

If you would prefer to find love by going on reality television, getting engaged after 1 week, and becoming married after 1 month, then I can already guess how long that marriage will last...

But if you prefer the tried and true way of meeting someone at your local coffee shop, getting to know that person over a few dates, then embarking on a lifelong journey of happiness, you're already one step closer to understanding SEO!


Making it Make Sense

They say love is fleeting. And search engines can be just as tricky. So if you haven't figured it out by now, you have the power to choose that regrettable rush of a drive-thru wedding in Vegas or holding on to the lasting satisfaction of a relationship sustained through the ups and downs. This is similar to Paid SEO tactics and Natural SEO tactics. You can pay to feel that instant, however short-lived rush, or you can grow naturally. The results will speak for themselves.

In dating and in SEO.