Blogging is both an art and a science. With regards to the latter, we recommend at least two blogs per week, and if possible, multiple blogs per organization. The art of blogging revolves around the ability to offer relevant content of interest to your target audience. If it is a business blog, the entries don’t always have to be about insurance for example, other diverse topics can be of interest too. However, be wary of political topics which can often be polarizing. Blogging once a day, if you have something of value to share, can help in many ways including longtail keyword utilization, SEO rankings, refining keyword density, and as the basis for ePublishing. Of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the importance of Vlogs (Video Blogs). Video, podcasts, Skype recordings, and vlogs are becoming increasingly more important to insurance agent blogging. Video dramatically increases time spent on websites and can be uploaded to YouTube to improve web presence and as mentioned previously, insurance agency SEO. For more information about insurance agent blogging: http://startupselling.com/blogs/alanblume/5-simple-steps-to-start-an-insurance-agency-blog/ or for vlogging: http://startupselling.com/blogs/mikelauducci/a-blog-about-vlogs/. By the way, if you’re doing a quality job with your blogs – you should be able to answer a question by suggesting someone reads a detailed blog on that subject.
All posts with the tag 'insurance agency seo'
Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing And The Car Mechanic
Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing is growing in importance and complexity, much like cars and car engines as they evolved from the Ford Model T to today’s complex hybrid vehicles. However, the evolution of Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing is evolving at a much more rapid pace. Decades ago, you might be able to take a simple tool and fix an engine in your driveway with a wrench and a screw driver. Today, highly specialized tools are needed to fix the ever increasing complexity of car engines, one of which is often a diagnostic computer. This is analogous in many ways to Social Media Marketing, which is also complex and requires specialized tools which can include website analytics, SEO analysis, Meta changes and keyword density analysis to mention a few.
Of course tools are only one aspect of either respective challenge. For example, let’s say your hybrid is spontaneously leaking electricity, possibly because of temperature increases as a result of polarity reversals. Perhaps it is happening because your nickel-metal hydride cells are discharging too quickly and the higher their capacity, the more prone they are to such rapid self-discharging. Then again, it might be something completely different. Master mechanics are needed to diagnose these issues and to leverage the correct tools in the most efficient way to create a successful resolution. Should you endeavor to fix this issue on your own, you might buy a computer analysis console, battery tester, charger, replacement parts, and tools, as you like to do things yourself. I guess this is possible, though likely unwise for most of us, as the time would be better spent in other pursuits, leaving the repairs to master mechanics who, could likely help us in a more expeditious manner. Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing is arguably similar, requiring sophisticated tools, analysis and know how to diagnose complex issues and effectuate a successful web marketing solution for any given insurance agency.
Insurance agencies investing in web marketing and social media marketing tools or platforms are much less likely to succeed unless they invest commensurately in the skills needed to operate and optimize these tools. There are several choices here, as agencies can hire new employees to leverage these tools, or they can try to invest in education for internal staff, realizing this staff may have to overlook some of their current responsibilities (and that have the aptitude to do this type of work) or they can outsource all or some of these tasks. If an agency has yet to invest in these tools, they may not need to do so, as competent insurance agency marketing agencies may already have many of these tools in place. As with the expert car mechanic, you don’t need to bring a computer console to them to diagnose your engine, Similarly, insurance marketing agencies may have Social Media Marketing Tools and web marketing tools in place so that an agency does not need to purchase their own. If an agency has already invested in these tools, then the outsourced resources can and should be able to help properly utilize the tools.
Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing is rapidly increasing in importance for insurance agent marketers, and requires tools, skills, analysis and competent writing (content) to be successful. Agency principals should not hire a master car mechanic to help them with Social Media Marketing, nor should they invest in tools without a plan to leverage proficient skills. Successful Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing correlates to directly to the utilization of good tools, quality analytics and up to date skills and knowledge. You need all three of these to ensure a successful insurance agency social media marketing program.
http://startupselling.com/insurance-agency-marketing.html
5 Simple Steps To Start Your Insurance Agency SEO Initiative
If your insurance agency has not yet started on your insurance agency SEO (or an insurance agency search engine marketing imitative), consider these 5 basic steps to move forward, and to do so quickly.
1. Create a list of you preferred keyword phrases. Examples of this include: New York Liability Insurance, Connecticut Business Insurance, Owner Operator Insurance or Group Health Insurance. These are called long tail keyword phrases and need to appear prominently on your insurance agency website. Agents should be able to determine many of these without assistance as they are mentioned in your ever day discussions, and then should review these phrases in Google AdWords, a free and simple tool provided by Google.
2. Select the best phrases for your agency after reviewing them in Google AdWords using both competitive and less competitive phrases. Even searches that occur 10 times a month can be valuable to your insurance agency marketing plans.
3. Incorporate these phrases into your insurance agency website. Target 6% as an ideal keyword density (as of this writing) for each of your best phrases. This is easier if you have a page dedicated to a particular type of coverage. For example, if your agency was in Connecticut and you have a page dedicated to group health insurance, your insurance agency should target a 6% density for this phrase (Connecticut Group Health Insurance) on that page. An oversimplification of this would be that this phrase would appear six times for every 100 words on that website page (the formula is a little more complicated than this – but this is the basic concept).
4. Add this phrase to the HTML coding on your website. You may need a technical person or “coder” to do this for your agency. These should be added to the meta description and meta keywords to start. There are many other places within the actual HTML code that allows for keyword phrase addition, but at a minimum, start with the meta keywords and description.
5. Add these keyword phrases to your insurance agency blog. If you don’t have an integrated website blog, your insurance agency should add one right away. Insurance agency blogs optimize content creation and help with both insurance agency SEO and insurance agency search engine marketing. Remember, if you have very little content, there is little for the search engine robots (Google, Bing, etc.) to index. Blogs offer a great way to provide relevant content to clients, prospects, and yes, to the search engine indexing “bots” too.
Of course, these are just the basics for an insurance agency SEO initiative. There are much more sophisticated tools available than those provided for free, and many sophisticated nuances to insurance SEO and search engine marketing (sometimes referred to as Search Marketing Optimization). That said, there is nothing wrong with a “crawl, walk, run” approach, and these basics can help move your agency past the infancy stage of insurance agency SEO. Follow these basic steps and you’ll be walking before you know it. However, if your agency is a sprinter as opposed to a walker, you can outsource your insurance agency search engine marketing initiative to a reputable insurance agency marketing agency and get off to a running start.
Twenty Important Questions About Insurance Agency SEO
Is your insurance agency better off focusing on search terms which yield thousands of searches each month or merely a few dozen searches each month? The answer to this question lies within your budget, expertise and business goals. To determine this, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Have you determined if Insurance Agency SEO is a key component of your insurance agency marketing plan?
2. How long do you intend to invest in your Agency SEO and how important is it to your ongoing web marketing strategy?
3. Are you going to leverage organic Insurance Agency SEO, PPC or both?
4. Do you have internal resources to do this (if you’re assuming your existing technical in house resources can do this, you may not be correct)?
5. Or are you intending to outsource this campaign?
6. Have you established a budget if you do not have the internal resources or intend to outsource your Insurance SEO?
7. How will you measure campaign efficacy? Will you dominate less competitive long-tail keyword phrases and be highly selective in directing traffic, or will you target higher volume keyword phrases?
8. How will you measure conversions for either or both approaches above?
9. How long will it take to achieve Google page one rankings (currently that is about 70% of the market, thus the use of that search engine name specifically)?
10. Is your insurance agency or insurance broker book of business horizontal or vertical, and how much traffic do you need?
11. What is the price point, margin and conversion rate expected?
12. Are you taking a shotgun approach and hope to drive large volumes of visitors to your website, or are you taking a sniper approach and wish to drive and target highly specific types of traffic?
13. Will you dedicate specific landing pages for specific Insurance SEO initiatives, and if so, how will those be created?
14. Is your insurance agency website ready to capitalize on SEO, is your website current, professional with relevant and compelling content?
15. Does your agency focus solely on B2B, or are you also targeting B2C, and are there any reciprocally beneficial campaign opportunities in this situation?
16. How long will it take to achieve page one search engine results (anything after page one matters very little)?
17. Does your insurance agency website have dedicated landing pages? A clear call to action? Even if web traffic is dramatically increased, your insurance agency website needs to capture these opportunities.
18. Is your call to action easily visible for all insurance agency prospects to see? What is a call to action: Click here to sign up for our newsletter; Click here to register for our workshop; Click here to contact us for case studies.
19. Will your unique value proposition be immediately understood by website visitors?
20. Lastly, have you separated on page and off page SEO initiatives?
Before embarking on an SEO initiative, ask these questions and determine if you will target and dominate less competitive keywords or focus on higher volume more competitive keywords. If your agency intends to outsource your search engine optimization make sure your insurance agency SEO vendor can answer your questions completely, with verifiable results to validate all claims. In any emerging industry like search engine optimization, it’s important that clear and accurate expectations are established, and that you understand the budget, timeframe and expected results before you embark upon your campaign. For most agencies, the general expectation should be page one search engine rankings in as few as 60 to 90 days.
Insurance Agency SEO, Page Rank, And Inbound Links For Organic Search Engine Ranking Results
Some companies think SEO is mainly about page rank and inbound links, and that improved search engine ranking results for insurance agencies take a long time. From our experience, this is not the case. For most agencies, dramatically improved results typically happen within 60 to 90 days. What do we mean by dramatically improved results? Insurance agency websites that are ranked page 10 or lower will see many of their top keywords result in placement on Google page one and page two. This is not accomplished by building hundreds or thousands of inbound links, rather this is determined by very specific utilization of insurance agency on page website optimization, and external content creation.
Another misnomer pertains to page rank. At one time, page rank was the ultimate guide for search engine ranking success. Today, it is merely one of the attributes to consider, and in the insurance agency space, most assuredly not the most important attribute in achieving high rankings. Consequently, fear not if your agency has a page rank of zero and has less than a dozen links. You can still achieve Google page one rankings for many, most perhaps almost all of your preferred long-tail keywords.
Lastly, let’s discuss keyword search tools. Some companies suggest that an agency does their own keyword research, perhaps using some of the free tools on the market. This can work for those agencies with time, talent and technical acumen pertaining to SEO. There are, however, much better tools available to assess keyword efficacy. These more advanced tools are capable of tracking competitor rankings, daily or weekly changes, the snippets which are actually pulled by each search engine, which pages or an agency website are associated with the rankings and snippets, and a ranking index by keyword which shows increases and decreases by keyword and competitor. With these advanced tools, SEO becomes much less of an art, and more of a science, to ensure top insurance agency search engine rankings for their preferred long-tail keywords. If your agency is hearing vague statements and receives no type of performance guarantee from an SEO vendor, it’s likely the vendor is uncertain about SEO, and probably not your best choice to move your agency to a top SEO ranking.
Keyword Density and Insurance Agency SEO
You can be pretty dense yet still understand the implications of keyword density for insurance agency SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Keyword density, according to Wikipedia, “is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. “ Some SEO specialists express this in an algebraic formula, but there is a much easier way to explain this concept. Let’s say your keyword was SEO, which was mentioned four (4) times on your home page, and your home page had 100 words. Your keyword density for SEO would be four percent. Expressing this same formula for a long tail keyword phrase might seem a little more complicated, but it’s really the same formula. If your preferred keyword phrase is “Insurance Agency Marketing” which was used four (4) times, and there are 400 words on your home page, the keyword density is actually 3%. This is calculated by dividing the number of words in the key word phrase (3) by the number of words on the page (400) and multiplying by the total number of times the phrase was used (4). For those of you reading this, who hated algebra, please ignore the next two sentences. The formula for word density is: Keyword Phrase / Words on Page X Times Used or Times Used X Words in Keyword Phrase / Words on Page. Algebraically they are actually the same (a/b X c or ac / b).
What’s an ideal keyword density to optimize your search engine rankings? There are many answers to this seemingly simple question. The range is typically from 1% to 8% though many concur that Google prefers 2% to 3% in natural language syntax (traditional writing style, not an overly repetitive use of your keywords). Yahoo and Microsoft are often described as preferring a 5% density. The algorithms used by search engines to rank your sites are trying to ensure their search results match the goals of those who are searching. For example, if someone is searching for “insurance agency seo”, Google’s goal would be to return organic results of sites that are trustworthy and address this specific topic. Google, Yahoo and Bing would want to filter out sites that repeated this keyword phrase ten or twenty times, in an apparent attempt to use keyword spamming.
The best advice for insurance agent marketers is to use long tail keyword phrases liberally but reasonably. Three percent on any give page is a reasonable goal, and should fit in well with your general copywriting goals. By the way, the long tail keyword used in this article had a word density of two percent (2.05%).
When is the Last Time You Read the US Constitution – Take the July 4th Quick Quiz
When was the last time you read this?
When is the last time you (or your children) read the US Constitution, or for that matter, the Declaration of Independence? With our national birthday just around the corner, thinking about the Constitution seems particularly relevant. It’s great to go watch a parade, but you might find it truly worthwhile to take a little time and read our Constitution. If memory serves me correctly, I read it back in my college days for a class I took on constitutional law. Recently, however, I read a great book on my Kindle, called The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. The Nine frequently referenced the articles and amendments of the US Constitution. So, after finishing The Nine, I decided to reread the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution. I came away with two surprises: 1. The Constitution is a surprisingly short document considering all that it represents – those framers were clearly a brilliant group. 2. Even with the formality of the language of the times, you can really sense the pent up anger in the Declaration of Independence.
The real question is, how much do you know about the Constitution? If you’re curious, take this quick quiz (answers are below):
- How many Articles are there?
- How many Amendments are there (last one was in 1992)?
- What is Article 1 about?
- What is Article 2 about?
- What is Article 3 about?
- How many Amendments are there in the Bill of Rights?
- When was the Bill of Rights ratified?
- Which Amendment abolished slavery?
- Where would you find the famous quote, “WE hold these Truths to be self evident?
- How many states were required to ratify the Constitution?
- Bonus question: What is the Fifth Amendment about?
Some of the language in the Constitution seems crystal clear to me, other language seems cryptic. After reading through it (twice), it seems abundantly clear why the judiciary has so many perspectives of Constitutional right and wrong and the myriad of interpretational perspectives on the document. This document represents one of the most important, guiding principles of our everyday lives. When is the last time you or your children read the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution? Answers to the quiz are below, if I made a layman’s error on these, I guess I’ll have to “plead the Fifth”. Feel free to send me comments, clarifications or corrections.
Answers: 1. (7) 2. (27) 3. (Legislative Branch) 4. (Executive Branch) 5. (Judicial Branch) 6. (10) 7. (1791) 8. (13th) 9. (Declaration of Independence) 10. (9) 11. (Shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself)
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