HomeSEO For Insurance Companies - PureLinq

An insurance company can be a great business and provide you a comfortable living – or it can be a constant struggle and headache.  If you are reading this, you are likely already in the business or are contemplating opening an insurance company.  

To help make sure your insurance business is an enjoyable and profitable experience, you are no doubt already familiar with some of the key areas insurance companies need to focus on to hit the ground running or to grow an existing business:

• A strong base of capital
• Access to or development of insurance products for your customers
• Enough office space
• Certifications and associations
• Decisions around revenue and expenses that affect profit and loss
• If you own the business, how much you will take out of it for yourself each year
• Unique value proposition and differentiation
• Marketing plans that attract customers

The good news is that you are motivated, educated and ready to go – the bad news is that you have a lot of competition all working to win the same pool of customers.  While insurance products are not exactly a commodity product, the average consumer may not understand the points of differentiation in the products and focus too much on price.  Of course, you could consider competing on price and underwriting more risky policies, but that is also fraught with danger.  

For an insurance company to successfully compete for customers in a fragmented business environment that is highly segmented by locality, and serviced by a massive number of similar products, a strong marketing plan is imperative.

Today more than ever, most of the customer journey for nearly any product or service happens online.  If you are not visible online, and more importantly, in the zip codes or states you serve, you are at a significant disadvantage to any of your competitors who are.

Your insurance company marketing plan must absolutely have an SEO component to help potential customers find your business during the online research and evaluation phase of their journey, as they make up their minds who they will work with before finalizing a purchase decision.

In this guide, we’ll explain the importance of SEO for insurance companies, as well as outline the basics of how an SEO strategy can work, as well as how to get started with a custom SEO or link building strategy of your own.

High-Level Overview of Search and Search Engine Optimization

The business purpose for search engines (like Google and Bing) to exist is to help people find the most helpful and complete answers to their queries and solutions to their problems. 

To do this, search engines send bots/spiders to crawl websites to capture text-based information, which is stored in their database (index), that is stack ranked against all other information on the same topic and retrieves it for anyone who is keyword searching for that content.  

The important phrase to pay attention to here is “text-based.”  Without text-based content, search engines have no context to judge your website by, and as a result, won’t be able to establish enough trust to give it a high priority in search results.

To generate “free” organic traffic from the search engines to your website, you must earn their trust.  While we will look at several things that go into a good SEO plan for insurance companies, the foundation starts with a continuous stream of high quality, keyword-relevant content on your pages.  

As that content is found and indexed, the search engines will decide on how trustworthy it is, largely by the number of backlinks acquired from other authoritative websites that have high domain authority. 

Think of a backlink from an authoritative website as a “reputable person” telling others that your idea is valid and should be given attention. Because of this “third-party endorsement,” in the form of a link, the search engines elevate you in the search results.

So, the bottom line – to generate results in SEO, you need to have quality long-form content that makes other sites want to link to your site.  

Why is SEO For Insurance Companies Difficult?

THERE ARE A FEW REASONS WHY SEO IS A CHALLENGE FOR INSURANCE COMPANIES:

1. The insurance business is highly competitive and fragmented.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of competitors in your space are competing for the same customers.  In terms of dollars spent to get visibility in SEO or pay per click (PPC), you are competing against other insurance companies and agencies, not to mention the biggest brands in the business.
2. It is not just the number of small and large competitors in the space, it is the fact that everyone is essentially competing for a similar keyword set.  While the largest brands, with the most resources, might have the best rankings for “head” keywords like “auto insurance,” or even “CA auto insurance,” small or mid-sized brands can rank well (and meaningfully) for longer “tail” phrases like “cheap NY auto insurance.”
3. With so many competitors chasing the marketplace and a mix of a few highly resourced big brands all trying to dominate in SEO, it can be a challenge to break through and keep content unique, meaningful, and at a cadence that keeps up with the pack.  

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How Does a Small or Mid-Size Insurance Company Win at SEO?

Though the SEO landscape in the insurance business is highly competitive, you can still achieve victory.  Two strategies include owning “your backyard” by being hyper-local and maximizing your influence.  

THERE ARE THREE DEGREES OF INFLUENCE WHEN IT COMES TO CONTENT:

1. What you say about yourself – the product pages and about us section of your website
2. What others say about you – social proof on social platforms and third-party review sites
3. What you demonstrate as local authority – long-form content (blog) that gains trust from backlinks from high authority sites

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Elements of SEO For Insurance Companies

Now that we have established the framework of a robust SEO plan for insurance companies, have outlined the challenges in the marketplace, and shared techniques to leverage influence to break through, we need to think about the critical elements that pull it together.  

This includes the platform to manage the SEO effort, website infrastructure issues that can affect the reader’s experience while on your website, on-page SEO, details around successful content creation, and off-page SEO / backlink acquisition.   

Platforms For a Successful Insurance SEO Program

A good program requires management and distribution tools, interfaces, analytics, and dashboards.  

GOOGLE PROVIDES MANY IMPORTANT TOOLS FREE OF CHARGE:

1. Google Analytics – web analytics service that lets you track and report website traffic
2. Google Search Console / Webmaster Tools – web service that allows you to check indexing status and optimize visibility of website
3. Google AdManager (Adwords) – hosted ad serving and ad management platform
4. Google My Business – tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across search and maps to help customers find your business and tell them your story
5. Social Platforms – the major social media companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and others) all have portals to manage, distribute, advertise content, as well as measure audience results

Get into our next round of client onboarding. Each month we onboard up to 5 clients only. Submit your site to reserve a spot in the next round of onboarding.

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Website Infrastructure

To provide their users with the best experience, the search engines also consider the relative “safety” of your site as well as making performance judgments about your pages that would affect the quality of the reader’s experience while they explore your content. 

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

SSL means your website will be accessible at https://www.yoursite.com vs http://www.yoursite.com. 

By deploying SSL and using the https designator, an additional layer of security is evidenced in the extra “s” of the website address.  This added layer of security is a Google Ranking Factor. 

By having it, visitors have a more secure experience, which in turn makes search engines, like Google, trust your site more.  This results in higher (trust) rankings and potentially more traffic.  

Savvy web surfers look for the “https” and recognize it as an additional layer of safety and trust.  As a result, your audience is less likely to bounce (leave) the site and will spend more time on your content – another positive signal to search engines.  

Technical Optimizations in Website Hosting (Site Speed and Performance)

Site speed, performance and other factors in website hosting are heavily weighted in the Google algorithm.  Premium hosting helps ensure that your site is accessible, fast and never overloaded with traffic.  Hosting is a bit of low hanging fruit that can help improve your website traffic without much additional investment. 

On-Page SEO Elements

While often considered “table stakes” in an SEO program, on-page SEO needs to be on point to help optimize your potential to rank high in search engines.  As competitive as the insurance industry is, don’t let lazy or outdated on-page SEO practices derail the rest of your efforts.

Technical SEO Audit

The SEO industry isn’t easy to keep up with. The periodic changes to search engine algorithms impact the effectiveness of different on-page and off-page SEO techniques, creating an ever-shifting landscape in the space.

Auditing your website for on-page SEO opportunities is always going to be an important task to wring the best results from your SEO efforts.

Keyword Research and List

Analyze what your buyers are searching for online so you know which keywords you should target.  Keyword research tools will give you tens, if not hundreds, of related keyword searches, indicate how competitive they are to rank for, and how much volume each term gets.

Page/Meta Titles

Include your keywords in the H1 Page Title and the page’s meta title.

Meta titles are captured by search engines and are displayed in result snippets with links to pages.

These are important for two reasons: 

1. They include your brand and keywords to help you rank better
2. If the snippet is enticing, it will help get users to click to the linked content

The page title is an H1 Header that is coded as the page’s title and appears in the actual content.

Google has stated that they value web pages with unique page and meta titles that are both optimized.

Meta Descriptions

Keywords should be included in meta descriptions.  These descriptions are used by search engines to display in search results.  These descriptions should be around 160 characters, as anything longer will become truncated and not show in the results.

Page Headers

Content should be broken up with H1-H5 tags that contain target keywords.  These headers not only help to break up content for your readers, that makes it easier to consume, but also provides signals to search engines on the relevance of content.

Internal Linking

Links are incredibly important in SEO since they help search engines crawl and assign authority to pages.  The authority of a page is known as page rank and it has great bearing on the ranking of a webpage.  The more authoritative links coming into a page, the more page rank it has.

It is important to link your pages accurately so that users and spiders can find and access your content. This will also help signal search engines which pages are most important to your site and rank them accordingly.

Off-Page SEO Elements – Linking

While content and on-page SEO are important factors of a holistic SEO program, it is critical that you have link building strategies and tactics. Link building for insurance companies makes use of links from external sites to enhance your pages’ (website’s) level of trust.  In other words, having a broad set of websites with strong authority linking back to your pages will enhance your performance in the search rankings. 

Search engines look at two core areas in determining how to rank pages – relevance and authority.  Relevance considers the page in question and contextually measures whether it matches the search query.  Authority is the perceived trustworthiness of a page, often measured in terms of domain authority (DA) or page authority (PA).  Google looks at the number and quality of backlinks to your site and then decides how various pages should rank.

The key, of course, is the quantity and quality of links.  A large quantity of low quality “spammy” links will not help you and the search engines will not count them as trustworthy. In fact, search engines may potentially penalize your authority and even de-index your website for using these tactics.  There are several ways to build a large link portfolio through natural linking of content, guest posts and public relations outreach to make others aware of your content and your openness to have links to it.

ELEMENTS TO A GOOD BACKLINK INCLUDE:

1. It is hosted on a page inside a site with strong domain authority
2. Embedded in a page of highly relevant, long-form content
3. The link and anchor text flow naturally with the context of the words on the page
4. Anchor text for the link is relevant

Get into our next round of client onboarding. Each month we onboard up to 5 clients only. Submit your site to reserve a spot in the next round of onboarding.

Yes! I Want Links

Critical Tactics For Insurance Company Link Building

Build a body of relevant, high-quality long-form content.

Develop onsite content that showcases your unique perspective and differentiation that is meaningful to challenges the reader is trying to solve.  Incorporate original data, research, and experienced-based thinking to differentiate your position.

Build relationships with publishers.

This is where you put on your public relations hat.  Guest post or have your content featured by relevant publishers by building relationships with editors and site owners.  Find sites that are authoritative (relevant) to your market segment or are in the local area. These properties are often open to guest content.  Remember, everyone is looking for smart, well written and thoughtful content – don’t be afraid to reach out!

Build your strategy around offsite content.

The best way to build links is by leveraging high-quality offsite posts by using publishing and syndication techniques.  Think about the customer demographics you are trying to target and where they spend their time looking for information and focus on those sites.

Continue to grow the level of interest in your content.

The larger the following you develop for your content means more potential for links and increased name recognition as an author and thought leader, which will boost you as a brand.  This momentum can help make it easier to get more and bigger opportunities in the future. 

SEO For Insurance Companies – Outsourcing vs In-House 

If you are ready to get serious about incorporating a link building program into a broader SEO strategy, you have a couple options available.  First, you can try to take the work in-house, either by bootstrapping the effort yourself or hiring a full-time individual to handle SEO. Or, you could use popular sites like Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelancer or contractor to work on a fractional basis.  

The better option for insurance companies is to work with a link building company.  Generally speaking, it isn’t difficult to find people who are skilled in on-page SEO and content creation in support of SEO, but it is a far different skill set to do deep technical SEO and audits to set a baseline for your site.  

Even harder is finding freelancers or non-agency personnel who have strong experience in white hat link building.  Link building companies specialize in on and off-page SEO, understanding the deeper technical aspects of domain and page authority, and have a full team of experts on staff, along with a variety of industry or proprietary tools, to work on your programs with their ecosystem of partners.  

Link building company programs can mix and match unique skills for different phases of a program, making it far more economical than trying to hire every skill you will need for a program, or relying on the past experience of a freelancer or contractor.  

In choosing the right link building and SEO partner, there are many things to consider.  First, “caveat emptor” – let the buyer beware. There are many fly-by-night companies or organizations that just aren’t that strong at the art and science of SEO.  

Some agencies use weakly written content, rely on black hat tactics, or link volume verse link quality.  If you are going to hire an agency, find one that is the right fit for your project and has a proven history of getting the job done.  

SOME IMPORTANT AGENCY TRAITS TO CONSIDER IN YOUR EVALUATION:

• Expertise and skillsets.  What does the company focus on – digital marketing, content, on-page SEO, link building, or all the above? With the search engine focus on the importance of quantity and quality of backlinks, it makes sense to work with an agency that has a lot of expertise in building quality linking programs.
• Reviews and reputation.  You will want to research a company’s online reputation across social media and review sites.  Get customer references and talk to those customers, ideally from your industry, to learn how their program with the agency went.
• Transparency / methods / process.  A quality link building company should be able to articulate how they will help you obtain your goals.  Are they honest and open or do they over-promise? Will they deliver a clear and understandable statement of work that clearly outlines costs?  If they promise to get you on the front page of Google for highly competitive “head” keyword(s) in under 90 days, we suggest you run as fast as you can in the other direction.
• Program Cost / investment. Your insurance company likely has a set budget for marketing.  As a word of caution, be careful of agencies that offer the lowest price.  You are likely to get what you pay for. Cheap programs are generally cheap for a reason whether you are getting less-experienced workers, weakly outsourced content creation or black hat practices.  

Get into our next round of client onboarding. Each month we onboard up to 5 clients only. Submit your site to reserve a spot in the next round of onboarding.

Yes! I Want Links

Parting Thoughts on Your Insurance Company SEO Program

The insurance business is highly competitive and getting above the noise to help prospective customers find you is a challenge.  But as we outlined in this article, with thoughtful planning and expert execution you can win in the markets you serve and use your online presence to propel your business forward.  

At Purelinq, we are a technology backed link building company that is focused on building contextual links at scale for our customers across a variety of industries.  With a database of 60,000 independent blogs, influencers, and publishers, our team can generate links in any category.