StartUpSelling is a group of experts dedicated to enhancing the online visibility of insurance agencies. We specialize in insurance search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media marketing.
White Hat Insurance Agency SEO vs. Black Hat Insurance SEO Tactics
Posted on December 8th, 2011 by Alan Blume
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.
Insurance SEO Best Practices: Attain the Attainable
Posted on November 4th, 2011 by Andrew Blume
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.
Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing as a Tool for Insurance SEO
Posted on October 21st, 2011 by Andrew Blume
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.
Search Engine Optimization and the Nature of the Keyword
Posted on September 14th, 2011 by Andrew Blume
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.
SEO and Link Quality vs. Quantity
Posted on August 15th, 2011 by Alan Blume
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.
Keyword Effectiveness and Implementation for Insurance SEO
Posted on July 20th, 2011 by Andrew Blume
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:
- Is your site dynamic? Does the content change substantially and frequently?
- Do you have original content? Unique research, experiences, or insight that presents value to the reader?
- 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.
B2B Web Marketing vs. B2C Web Marketing
Posted on April 25th, 2011 by Andrew Blume
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.
Understanding Your Insurance SEO Keywords
Posted on April 15th, 2011 by Andrew Blume
Keywords, which are really keyphrases, come in many varieties. There are short, broad terms like “car insurance” and there are longtail keywords like “collector car insurance” or “Boston car insurance”. Car insurance differs in many ways from the other two – it will have many more searches every month. As such, people will see it much more often. This is only true, however, if your website appears as a result of the search query. This is where things become more nuanced and less obvious. Car insurance is a very common, broad term. Thus millions of other websites contend for that term, and achieving SEO success (appearing on the first page of Google, maybe page 2) presents an enormous challenge. It could take months of blogging, epublishing, on-page SEO optimization, encompassing dozens of hours of time, to rank for such a highly competitive keyword.
Collector car insurance, Boston car insurance, and keywords like them, will see fewer searches and therefore fewer viewers each months. Ranking for such keywords, however, presents a much more attainable goal. As such, one can achieve a high level of web visibility for these keywords with considerably less time and energy invested. It is also a matter of choosing appropriate keywords. Though ranking for the keyword “car insurance” may net a website more viewers, if the “car insurance” offered by the site is local, regional, or type-specific, most of the clickthroughs will prove nothing more than bounces. Accordingly, the more aptly a company targets its keywords, the less effort necessary to achieve positive results, and the lower the bounce rate. Insurance SEO has many other facets, which we’ll explore further in this blog, but understanding the importance of keyword selection is one of the most significant steps a company can take toward optimized web visibility.
Working Virtually
Posted on March 24th, 2011 by Andrew Blume
It may come as little surprise that an insurance agency SEO specialist would work virtually. It’s a high-tech field, and all the work performed is done by computer, so in-person interaction is never necessary. But it wasn’t that many years ago that I had a “traditional” job. Working as a supervisor in a coffee shop, my days were long, hard, unrewarding, and under-compensated. In addition to the underwhelming nature of the job itself, it was about 15 miles away, on the other side of the city. The commute could range from a modest 15 minutes to over 45 minutes, meaning I would often arrive quite early or a bit late. The commute was stressful, as was the job itself. The interaction with coworkers and customers was more laborious than gratifying. I consider myself a “people person”, but truth be told, I find that people (especially professionals) can accomplish much more with fewer distractions and a less stifling environment.
So I forged out, unto the virtual world (which expands perpetually). And lo! there was a job for me. Working virtually has imparted a great number of previously unattainable liberties. I am now able to work when I want. There are meetings I must attend and some business hours I must be available each day. But I can easily put in hours at night or on the weekend, and just as easily take off at 3pm to go skiing or play tennis. It is considerably easier to find time for friends and family, and I am readily able to diversify my day, taking breaks from work to clean the house, run errands, talk to friends, and accomplish other things. Reduced driving has led to superb savings in gas and maintenance, and the environment thanks me as well. I certainly hadn’t anticipated a few years ago that today I would be an insurance agency search engine marketing and insurance agency SEO specialist, but such is the nature of technology and the internet – to stand still is to get left behind. And though I believe that there are new and exciting occupations waiting for those who are interested, I posit that working virtually is readily adaptable to more traditional businesses – from accounting, to psychology, and yes, even insurance.
Insurance Web Marketing: An Age of Enlightenment
Posted on March 1st, 2011 by Andrew Blume
As time passes, all things change. Marketing, perhaps, changes more than most. Marketing has always been most successful when the message reaches the prospects. In the 21st century, successful marketing can only take place when truly reaching into the media of the times – twitter, facebook, youtube, stumbleupon, email, search engines, and more. In a cluttered world of digital noise, attempting to garner prospects through traditional methods of snail mail, yellow pages ads, and television, is like trying to make a grilled-cheese sandwich by raising cows and sowing wheat. It is expensive, slow, laborious, and… unreliable.
Reaching out to a digital world, however, is much more complex than marketing methods of old. Knowing what to say, where to say it, how frequently, and how to measure results to improve upon one’s marketing strategy can prove truly stupefying. Enter the web marketing gurus. In a capitalist society, where there is a profitable void, people will inevitably flock. The upside of these economics is that it is now entirely possible to outsource one’s marketing efforts for a fraction of the cost of in-house marketing, modernizing in the process.
These effects can certainly be seen in the field of insurance. StartUpSelling delivers web marketing services specifically developed for the insurance industry. Though marketing has become global, digital, or viral, the importance of the message content has persisted. And knowing where to find the prospects, and how to get them reading, has become an increased challenge in 2011, when fiscal deficits and attention deficits compete viciously with your marketing efforts. Insurance web marketing, or insurance emarketing, must have an intelligently targeted approach, delivering useful, engaging content to rise above the digital din. Only through an experiential, knowledge-based approach can a message be successfully delivered in the new world order of marketing.