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In our November article on establishing an online presence for your insurance business, we mentioned SEO—that’s Search Engine Optimization. This is an important topic for insurance agents, who get a lot of their business through online searches. The question is, who’s searching for you? And how do you make sure your site is easy to find online?
SEO is the process by which you can raise your rankings in search engines—especially Google—to increase the amount of online traffic you generate. For some people, the term “SEO” carries with it an association of shady dealings—and there are some “black hat” SEO’s who try to game the algorithms using techniques that make the user experience worse and break search engine rules and regulations.
But this is not the case for most SEO pros—and for the act of optimizing your website itself, it’s less about gaming the system and more about marketing and usability. The most effective way to rise in the ranks is to make sure your website is the type of site Google wants to show people. Here are a few ways to do that.
Update your website regularly. Search engine bots visit websites continually to see how often they’ve been updated. The websites that are updated more frequently are assumed to be more current and relevant—and these are given a higher ranking. This is essentially what blogs are for—they’re a tool to keep your online content fresh and current.
Be relevant and interesting. Another way Google decides who gets high ranks is by checking to see who’s linking to them. If your website content provides information people consider important and want to share, it’s likely some will link back to your post—and that will help your rankings. Again, this is a great reason to have a blog on your site.
Dominate local search. For many insurance agents, the majority of business is local. So you want people in your community to find you quickly and easily, and you want to be sure you come up in search results targeting the name of your town and region.
Google Places allows business owners to update their location info with Google, so they’re easier to find on Google Maps and other Google search functions. If you don’t already have an account with Google Places, open one.
Keywords are also important in your rankings and can determine how well you rank in both local and general search. Google assigns you some keywords based on the words others use to link to you on their website, and you will probably have little control over this. However, you can also do keyword research to target words and phrases people are using to find businesses like yours—use a free tool like Google’s Adwords tool.
SEOMoz has a great tutorial that will give you a solid introduction to the process of keyword research—how to choose the right keywords to target on your website based on search trends. Once you have your list of keywords, here’s an article by prominent SEO Bruce Clay on how to use them to best effect on your website.
SEO is a complicated process—but there are a few fairly easy steps any business owner can take to improve rankings over time. Know your target keywords, update your site often, and write strong, relevant content, and you should be able to improve your rankings over time. If you put the time in, you should see a noticeable increase in website traffic—and in customers.