Search Engine Optimization: Definitions

There are a lot of terms, or jargon, used in the field of search engine optimization. To fully leverage the important marketing tool that is SEO, one must understand the terminology and it’s significance. Over the next several weeks, we’ll review a number of critical concepts and terms that are used frequently in the SEO community. Let’s begin with keywords.

KEI, or keyword effectiveness index, is the measure of keyword effectiveness in simple terms of supply and demand. How many prospects are searching a given keyword? How many companies and/or sites are competing for that keyword? The higher the demand, the better the KEI. The higher the supply, the lower the KEI.

TKV or CKV stands for total keyword visibility or composite keyword visibility. This is a simple way to distill basic performance trends for SEO. The visibility refers to how highly ranked your site appears in search engine results. The higher-ranked a keyword becomes, the more heavily it is weighted in the index. Ten words on page 2 or 3 are worth little more than a single word appearing above the fold on page 1. Understanding the nuances of which keywords are ranked where can assist you in making progress, but this index provides the basis for a simple conveyance of the overall progress a domain is making for a given search engine.

 

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Popular SEO Blogs

We’ve been blogging about insurance agency seo and insurance agency sem for a while now at StartUpSelling, and it’s time to look back at some of our most popular search engine optimization blogs. Here are a few of the favorites, and don’t forget to check back next week as we begin to decode the terminology and jargon of the SEO business.

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SEO and the Importance of Web Analytics

Search engine optimization, being the process of increasing a website’s rankings in search engine results, can contribute to website traffic and visibility in a dramatic way. But fully understanding, appreciating, and leveraging this new web traffic, and increasing the quality of the web traffic, is the purview of web analytics. SEO analysis will indicate the performance of a given site on a given search engine. Analytics, however, will show how many prospects visit the site, when, and for how long. Further, it can identify which pages are stickier, which calls to action are more effective, and which referring sites provide the most traffic.

There are a number of tools for web analytics that are inexpensive or free. The challenge, however, is knowing how to use them – how to generate reports, interpret the data, and act upon it to make the process worthwhile. Some analytics tools are relatively unobtrusive (like Google Analytics), while some function as an entire CMS, or content management system (like Hubspot). Not every analytics package is right for every business. And any analytics suite is capable of providing information overload. Whether in-house or outsourced, analytics expertise is necessary to avoid analysis paralysis and distill the essence of the strengths and opportunities of your website. Ultimately, the effectiveness of both SEO and social media are marginalized when not implemented in conjunction with some form of analytics.

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White Hat Insurance Agency SEO vs. Black Hat Insurance SEO Tactics

White Hat and Black Hat SEO?

Assuming that your insurance agency is now familiar with terms like insurance agency SEO, insurance agency search engine optimization and insurance agency search engine marketing, you’re aware that this is the process in which agents seek to place their websites at top of Google or Bing’s search engine results pages (SERP). There are two basic approaches to accomplish improved search engine rankings, White Hat SEO (think of the good guys in the old Western’s) and Black Hat SEO (the bad guys in the same genre).

Long Tail Keyword Phrases and Keyword Density

Insurance Agency Search Engine Optimization begins by creating a list of preferred insurance keyword phrases, often referred to as trophy words. Examples of this may include: New York Liability Insurance, New England Business Insurance, New Jersey Truck Insurance or Professional Liability Insurance. These phrases are known as long tail keywords and should appear on insurance agency websites in a variety of ways. Once your agency has determined the best keyword phrases (after reviewing them in Google AdWords or other keyword analytics tool), your agency should populate your website using your preferred keywords. This needs to be accomplished with your metadata (description, meta keywords, page title, etc.) and on the actual content which appears on your web page. Your agency should also measure “on page” keyword density. Each page should be optimized for one to three phrases. Experts and empirical data varies on this, but many consider 5% to 6% to be optimum density for the major search engines. Proper keyword density, meta best practices, quality inbound links to your insurance agency website and a robust social media marketing initiative will yield positive results for your insurance agency SEO web marketing plans.

Black Hat SEO and Link Farms

This brings us to our first black hat watch out tip revolving around keyword density also known as keyword stuffing. Continuously repeating your keyword phrase (Texas Business Insurance for example) resulting in abnormally high density is keyword stuffing, is a black hat SEO tactic. Search engines will ultimately take note of this, resulting in marginalization of that website page, which in turn will cause inferior rankings. Other black hat SEO approaches include Link Farms, Hidden Content and Gateway Pages. Let’s review each of these. Link farms are little more than a listing of companies and their website links. If you’re contacted by an organization that boasts they can provide “10,000 inbound links” to your website, you must carefully assess the type and quality of these links (and the company which is contacting you) to ensure there are no black hat tactics being employed. These days, Google and Bing are trending toward quality over quantity, and discount link farms in their complex ranking algorithms.

Gateway Pages and Hidden (invisible) Content

Hidden content is another black hat SEO tactic. A good example of this is using both text and background that are the same color, allowing agencies to stuff “invisible keywords” on your website without taking up prime real estate. Search engines, however, are looking for this tactic, and if discovered, your website can again be penalized. Gateway pages should not be confused with legitimate landing pages. A landing page is appropriately optimized for your specific solution. For example, you can create a landing page for Professional Liability Insurance, featuring relevant content and appropriate keyword density exclusively for your PLI products and services. One could argue that Gateway Pages (sometimes referred to as Doorway Pages) originally had the same intent, but are now being abused by some companies, as they can be computer generated in the hundreds or even thousands. This refers back to the Link Farming or Link Building black hat tactic because the thousands of generated pages can include a “follow” link back to a designated website. This tactic was purportedly used by a major retailer over the last holiday season, which resulted in their website being removed by Google from Google Page One results.

Conclusion

Once your agency has researched and selected your trophy words (your targeted long tail keyword phrases), you should begin by creating relevant content with optimized meta, meta tags and keyword density, then supplementing these efforts with blogging, ePublishing, YouTube Videos and other Social Media Marketing campaigns. Make sure you or your marketing agency are not leveraging any black hat tactics and you will see your insurance agency SEO results consistently improve. And remember, no matter how impressive or relevant that big photo or image happens to be on your insurance agency website, these do nothing to help your SEO efforts.  For more information visit the StartUpSelling Insurance Agency SEO page.

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Insurance SEO Best Practices: Attain the Attainable

In search engine optimization, as in all things, our attention to detail, complexities, and nuances can cloud our perspective – we can’t see the forest for the trees. A common manner in which this SEO vexation manifests is through keyword rank tunnel-vision. In a previous blog, we explored the nature of the keyword – what makes a keyword a good or bad pick. Now we must reexamine our keywords to determine performance, efficacy, and attainability.

Performance manifests itself in the simplest, most easily tracked manner. Has the ranking of your site for a given keyword gone up or down on a given search engine in the last month (monthly assessments are best)? If your rank has improved, then your site is likely performing well. If you were on page 3 and you are now on page 2, that is a very good start. If you were on page 3 and you are now higher on page 3, that is a modest gain that must be improved upon. Inevitably, your site’s rank for some keywords will stay flat or go down. Simple enough.

Efficacy is easy to understand, but more difficult to track. A closed-loop integrated marketing and sales approach, usually bolstered by a CMS (client management system or content management system), is required to make such determinations. The question is not how your rankings have changed, but how many prospects have resulted from the rank changes, and how strong is your conversion ratio for this prospect pool. Once we understand these finer aspects of inbound marketing, we gain a greater appreciation for the value of our SEO rank gains.

Attainability is the elusive aspect of SEO that can cause us to miss the forest for the trees. While efficacy is similarly important, it is more often appreciated and understood. Attainability is the ability of your SEO team to make effective gains on your site’s ranking for a given keyword on a given search engine. Though Web CEO, Google AdWords, HubSpot, or other services may inform you that the competition for a given keyword is a specific numerical value (or numerical approximation), the actual competitiveness can vary dramatically. Beyond this, the far-reaching effects of Google’s panda algorithm can play differently with various keywords. In the end, nothing beats experience and observation in determining the attainability of your keywords. If you are targeting a pool of ten keywords that all have a similar keyword effectiveness index, and 3 go way up, 4 go up a  little, 2 stay flat, and 1 goes down, you should intelligently examine the possible explanations for this, and try again. Once you have been targeting these keywords for 3 to 4 months, however, you should be able to determine which keywords are ripe for the picking, and which are simply immovable. It is important to let these keywords go. In this regard search engine optimization is much like sales – a Yes is good, a No is bad, but it’s the Maybe’s that will kill you. Identify the winners, ditch the losers, and pursue a new batch. See the forest for the trees.

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Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing as a Tool for Insurance SEO

Social Media Marketing is one of the hottest topics in the marketing community, and the business community as a whole. Everyone wants to harness the power of the web’s hive-mind. And for many B2C operations, Social Media Marketing in and of itself can present a massive opportunity for lead generation and conversion. For largely B2B endeavors (the majority of revenue for most insurance agencies), the best bet to generate leads is by driving traffic to your site. “But wait”, you say, “isn’t that what Search Engine Optimization is for?” This is quite true, but an underutilized and under-appreciated aspect of Insurance SEO is SMM – Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing.

Though few people may read your tweets and other social media sharing, search engines pay attention – close attention. Social media outlets have increased in search engine prominence with each algorithm shift. Information that is shared is deemed more current and relevant, and therefore lends increased importance and authority to a domain. Leveraging Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing as a component of Insurance SEO in 2011 and beyond isn’t just a good idea, it’s imperative.

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Search Engine Optimization and the Nature of the Keyword

One of the most important principles of SEO is the keyword. What we colloquially call a keyword is actually a keyword phrase (unless it is only one word). Keyword phrases consisting of only one word, and often those consisting of two words, are considered short-tail keyword phrases. This means that they reside in the short (and thus thick) part of the tail, where many vie for their attention. Some two word keyword phrases, and nearly all keyword phrases of three words or longer, are considered long-tail – they reside in the long (and thus thin) part of the tail. Fewer people search for these terms, but fewer sites compete for them.

But there is more to the art of keywords than selecting the most effective ones. Every word (or any word) is a keyword, in a manner of speaking. The only thing that makes your keywords special is that they are the words you write that you are paying attention to – the words you care about (and expect others to care about). Keywords will only leap off your webpage if they are used appropriately. This means they must be used early, frequently, and prominently, without compromising legibility, integrity, or logic. Search engines in 2011 are very smart, and are looking for those who would arbitrarily “stuff” their webpage, tweet, blog, etc. with high-priority words. Herein lies the art component of the art and science of SEO. It takes a skilled writer and a fair understanding of lingual syntax to write intelligently and intelligibly while emphasizing a specific set of words. The takeaway: don’t focus on too many keywords per page, don’t stuff any pages with keywords, and… write like you mean it.

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SEO and Link Quality vs. Quantity

There are many nuances to insurance SEO, and search engine optimization in general. An excellent example of this is the importance of off-page optimization. Off-page primarily refers to link development. For many years there was an arms race to achieve superior link quantity. In the last few years, however, search engines have wizened to this behavior, and adjusted their algorithms accordingly.

Link quantity still enhances a page’s web visibility, but no longer to a large extent. The single greatest factor, on-page or off-page, is creating high-quality links to your site. These links emanate from content-rich, relevant sources, ideally with high pageranks. It is also crucial that these links be unidirectional (nonreciprocal). Reciprocal links do not impress search engines. They will not harm a site’s ranking, and can prove valuable for visitors. As such, they should be considered part of a website’s usability and utility, but not a part of its SEO.

The greatest challenge to building an array of high-quality links to your site is that this involves creation of novel, engaging content. In this sense, search engines have greatly improved the quality of results. The idea is that the pages ranked highest are the ones with something interesting to say. Thus an agency must speak to its strengths – if your agency focuses on PLI, workers comp, or trucking, writing intelligent and substantial content on said vertical is your surest way to bolster your web visibility and search engine rankings. The takeaway: the key to off-page optimization for insurance SEO lies in leveraging your expertise.

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Keyword Effectiveness and Implementation for Insurance SEO

Not all keywords are created equal. Some are highly desirable and therefore highly competitive. Some are quite esoteric and undesirable. These, of course, are not so competitive. But there are a great many keywords an agency might deem valuable that have surprisingly little competition. And there are many keywords an agency might not think terribly important, that are highly competitive. Finding the keywords that are frequently searched, relevant to your agency, and have a modest amount of competition is the surest path to SEO success and thus dramatically improved web visibility. There are many formulae for assessing the effectiveness index of a keyword, though they all center around the relationship between the amount of GMS (global monthly searches) and the competitiveness (number of websites using the chosen keyword).

Beyond keyword effectiveness is the equally important task of implementation. Keywords cannot just be strewn about a web page. Search engines have wised up considerably, and are capable of discerning high-quality and high-legibility content from low-quality and low-legibility content. Further, search engines now seek three crucial elements of content on a site when ascertaining its “relevance” or worthiness to appear on page 1. These are:

  1. Is your site dynamic? Does the content change substantially and frequently?
  2. Do you have original content? Unique research, experiences, or insight that presents value to the reader?
  3. Who cares? Is your site being shared or discussed by users on twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.?

Substantial insurance agency SEO results culminating in page 1 rankings for numerous longtail keywords stems from understanding the basic, and usually the nuances, of these various keyword-centric criteria.

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B2B Web Marketing vs. B2C Web Marketing

When it comes to marketing, there are two deeply divided clientele – the B2B client and the B2C client. B2B companies almost invariably focus on larger accounts and transactions, requiring fewer leads and fewer transactions than a B2C company. If a B2B company closes 100 deals in a year for 10,000 dollars each, a B2C company might close 25,000 deals for 40 dollars each. Both strategies have proven effective with a sound value proposition, yet they require completely different marketing approaches. Insurance web marketing and insurance SEO can certainly relate to this. Insurance brokers generally offer B2B services like group health, employment practices liability insurance, workers comp, or underwriting for smaller independent agencies. The smaller, independent agencies usually offer personal health, auto, homeowners, and other individual coverages. Thus insurance agency marketing and insurance agency web marketing strategies must similarly reflect the business model and value proposition of each individual firm.

B2B companies will generally find much greater benefit to leveraging professional networking sites like LinkedIn, while B2C companies will find the volume they need on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Leveraging these sites requires very different techniques and approaches. With LinkedIn, joining and creating groups can be crucial to making relevant connections, while on Facebook, having a gutsy, intriguing profile with dynamic content is what pulls in the crowds. Yet in the case of SEO, and especially insurance agency SEO, there are numerous strategies that can positively affect the vast majority of business models. This is because SEO is an unconventional form of marketing. It is almost entirely based upon the notion that visibility is critical to success in online business. SEO does not sell a product or service, it allows a company to be seen when it would never have been before. It is the most tangible way to garner online attention in a given market segment. By appearing on Google, Bing, or Yahoo page 1, a company will be seen and heard. Without appearing on a search engine, it can be incredibly difficult to direct traffic to your site. There are other search engine marketing techniques that will be explored in this blog, but suffice it to say that SEO is perhaps the most broadly applicable marketing strategy for companies in the 21st century.

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