Marketing Sherpa recently posted a chart illustrating the growing importance of local search. As noted here before, most insurance agencies have not
caught on to this business source. And those insurance agents who have not taken the simple step of claiming and optimizing their local listings in Google, Yahoo and Bing, are losing money because of that. And that lost income may be substantial. In the last two days I have had an interesting phone call with a Midwestern insurance agent and reviewed local search results for 41 established insurance agencies.
My Midwest agent mentioned that she had recently picked up a $60,000 commercial lines account. When she asked the client how they found her agency he said he did a web search and chose the agency with the most professional web site. Moral of the story: if you can’t be found, even an astonishing website won’t help you.
The 41 agencies I reviewed are all well established agencies; most have more than 10 employees and are located in a variety of communities: urban, suburban and rural. I should note that these insurance agencies are regarded as top quality by their competitors and are highly sought after by insurance companies seeking representation. All of them have aggressive commercial lines growth objectives. I did a Google search to see how visible these agencies might be to business insurance prospects in their market areas. I gave each agency an unfair advantage by using the zip code of the agency location as take from an insurance company agency locator*. Here’s how these agencies ranked for a search on ‘business insurance zip code’.
Only 7 of the 41 agencies had claimed their listing in the Google Local Business Center; of those, four had a number 1 ranking in the local listing, and two ranked in the top 10, just outside the 7 pack. 34 agencies had not claimed their local listing at all so the information Google ranked on and displayed was derived from third party sources like Info USA. Two of those 34, who were located in small towns, fortuitously showed up in the 7 pack and another rural agent made the top 10.
Even the agencies that claimed their listing in the Google Local Business Center could have taken greater advantage of the details Google allows businesses to provide, like company representation, key products and insurance coverage provided, photos and video. But the most striking thing about this graphic is that 73% of the agencies just don’t show up (see the red and yellow regions).
Even quality insurance agencies could be competing a lot more effectively for new business and local search is possibly the most budget-friendly item missing from agency marketing repertories.
Insurance agencies can learn more about local search through a free webinar offered by Confluency Solutions.
*Insurance agencies who are providing P. O. box zip codes to directories and agency locators are often not doing themselves any favors with local search.
What is it that makes Apple’s iPhone, iMac, iTunes, and other products so wildly successful and easy to use. One suggestion, quoted in a recent NY Times article, is that they are ‘disease’ free; that is, none of these devices is afflicted with ‘featuritis’.
“A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consultant in Silicon Valley…They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.
We see insurance agents struggling under the weight of management system features; independent agents have the freedom to represent any insurance company that will sign a contract; to launch a facebook page or twitter feed; agents can build and manage their own websites without worrying about restrictions imposed by one mother-ship product supplier. But does all this freedom of choice lead to featuritis? What is the minimum feature set delivering maximum benefit for independent insurance agents? What do they need from the companies they represent, the marketing programs they choose, website solution and social media options…what is that minimum set of features that is super simple to use and provides the most important set of benefits in such a way that it would make Apple wish they had come up with the answer?
About 18 months ago, Google published a survey that showed that about 70% of the time, consumers finding the name of a business in a print medium next went to the web to learn more about that businesses’ products or services. These consumers turn out to be highly motivated, with nearly 70% purchasing a product or service – from someone. Also about 70% of the time (nice symmetry: 70:70:70), those consumers consummate the sale, not online, but over the phone or in person.
Just this week, Wells Fargo published some survey results about their insurance customers and the findings were similar: customers, particularly those in their 30′s, research insurance online before purchasing. For simple insurance products, like renters insurance, those consumers are willing to buy online. But for more complicated insurance, like car insurance, people want to talk to someone before buying. Spokesperson Melanie Donaghy noted, “when it comes to purchasing, people want an agent to talk to before making the final buy..if auto were as easy as renters insurance we would see more purchases online…”
There are a few obvious take-aways for independent insurance agents:
1. Lack of a quality website will impair sales (a finding also corroborated by PIA studies)
2. You should not use your agency website as a barrier between your people and the prospective customer; that is, don’t make them fill out on line forms – give them a choice
3. You should make it clear on your website that you welcome calls
4. If you want to measure the sales contribution made by your website, you have to ask call in prospects how they found you or if they visited your website before they called
A new blog can be set up in a snap. You can add a Facebook page for your insurance agency in just a few minutes. Your insurance agency can prove it is in the know by setting up a Twitter profile. Starting a social media account is easy. Keeping up your shiny new blog or Facebook profile takes time, so much time, that most blogs quickly fall silent; in 2008 Technorati – the blog devoted to blogs – found that of the over 130 million blogs they tracked, only 5% had been updated in the last five months.
Deriving real business benefit from social media takes even more effort, and likely some cost, despite all the pundits who extol the virtues of this fee medium. There is no doubt that blogging and Tweeting can add first stage SEO benefits for your insurance agency if you put the time and effort into these communication tools. But what about the benefit of attracting a legion of loyal friends and fans to your social media space? This may be most difficult of all for an insurance agency.
This week, Marketing Sherpa published a chart showing why consumers become fans of businesses. While all of the reasons people friend businesses can be leveraged by insurance agencies, the top two, “Learn about new products and features” and “Learn about specials and sales” can probably be ruled out.
Why Consumers Become Fans of Businesses
( Note: Max Connectors are defined as people with over 500 ‘connections’)
Insurance regulation prohibits discounts and sales, so unless you can be really creative, you are going to be hard pressed to post any content in this category that will attract a consumer following. There is plenty of product innovation taking place in the insurance industry, as those of us working in the business know, but new product features and services tend to hold interest only to industry insiders. That new coverage provision just can’t mesmerize the populace the way the newest iPhone, Windows operating system, or hybrid sports car can.
The remaining two content categories – “Company Culture” and “Entertainment” are probably rich enough to provide a thematic basis for your insurance agency social media content, but regularly posting this type of compelling content isn’t something most of us have been prepared to do.
I’m not suggesting that leveraging social media for the business benefit of your agency isn’t a strategy you should consider. But I am saying that Facebook and blogging are not money-for-nothing, get-rich-quick schemes. Social media takes as much time, effort, and expense as other business development options, so weigh your expectations and commitment accordingly.
If you want to show up in the top of search rankings for the keyword ‘insurance’, be sure to empty your wallet, hit up all your relatives for loans, and let your kids know they will have to turn in their cell phones and find their own way to pay for college. Here’s a run down of the companies with pages in the top 10 search results for ‘insurance’: State Farm, Allstate, GEICO, Progressive, Insurance.com, esurance, AAA, Farmers, and Liberty Mutual. How does your insurance agency SEO budget stack up against those companies?
But don’t despair, there are alternatives for going head to head against the Goliaths of the insurance industry; the trick is to define the insurance SEO game in terms you can win.
I’m going to explore several options in upcoming blog posts, and I want to start with long tail search. Long tail search terms, not to be confused with long tail insurance claims, are longer keyword phrases. Often, competition is much lower for long tail keywords, and the big competitors are not paying nearly as much attention to them.
Consider that, of the 200 million queries that Google processed in 2004, as much as half were unique. Add to that Google’s 2007 admission that 20% – 25% of all searches were completely new to Google.* What that suggests is an opportunity to capitalize on keyword phrases that will be searched, but that are often missed by the keyword research tools used by big budget on line marketing departments.
There are three simple tactics that insurance agents can use to identify, and benefit from, long tail insurance keywords: 1. Using your staff as a sounding board for new website FAQs; 2. Create keyword ‘demand’ through traditional advertising campaigns; and 3. Use paid search to test out potential long tail search winners. I’m going to tackle the paid search tactic here, and deal with the other two in future blog posts.
Long Tail Search Dressed for Halloween
Paid search can be expensive if you are bidding on common keyword phrases like ‘insurance’, ‘auto insurance’, or ‘business insurance’. The more specific you get, the less expensive the cost-per-click, and likewise, the less competition for those same specific keywords in organic search. Low competition is good, but low competition with zero searches is useless. The trick is to identify long tail keywords that others aren’t competing for, but which also get some search traffic.
Here’s an example. Google’s Keyword tool doesn’t show any data for search results on the phrase, ‘what is uninsured-underinsured motorist coverage?’ But any consumer performing a search using this keyword phrase is clearly looking for some education, and would likely be a high conversion website visitor. The question that has to be asked is whether anyone at all will perform a search using that phrase. A simple way to find out is to use paid search (in the case of Google, paid search is their AdWords program).
Investing a few hundred dollars over the course of a month or two and bidding on potential long-tail search terms like ‘what is uninsured-underinsured motorist coverage?’ will tell you very quickly if you can get some productive search traffic by optimizing for these terms. If the search term turns out to be ineffective, your AdWords account will not charge you, and you are free to use your budget to test other keyword phrases. If you get some click-throughs then you will learn that it may be worthwhile to optimize a few web pages for ‘free’ organic search.
*Excerpted from Aaron Wall’s excellent 50 Kick Ass Keyword Strategies. Check it out for a quick, easy to understand approach to learning what do with keywords.
There is ample evidence that suggest too many options delay decisions and increase dissatisfaction with the choices we make (See Barry Schwartz’s excellent book on the topic: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less). Enter a new definition of quality, posited in a Wired Magazine article: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. The article leads with discussion of the cheap, and easy to use Flip Ultra camcorder. Despite the lack of features, the camera has sold like hot cakes, grabbing a 17% share of the camcorder market in just two years.
Other ‘good enough to get on with it’ products and services cited in the article include gmail and Zoho Writer, a Microsoft Word substitute with fewer bells and whistles (but most of the features you are actually likely to use). Oh yeah, and what about the advantages of a (relatively) unsophisticated, unmanned Predator aircraft vs. a $45 million F-16 (options, including pilot, may cost extra)?
Wired isn’t alone in noticing that cheap and simple solutions are often the best ones. In the upcoming sequel to Freakonomics – called Super Freakonomics – Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner have included a chapter chapter entitled The Fix Is In – And It’s Cheap and Simple.
I think this movement toward ‘good enough is more than effective’ is good news for agency manager perfectionists. Instead of wrestling with decisions about which expensive and complex software or web service to work with, just go with what works, and can be had for little or no money. Here’s a few favorites that insurance agency managers should be thinking about:
For video calls, and free long distance, try Skype. Depending on features you may wish to add (a traditional phone number, the ability to call out to land line or cell phones, e.g.), you may pay a few dollars a month.
And speaking of YouTube, there is no simpler way to get your video converted for streaming and to add it to your website. We have been using YouTube for a variety of purposes at Confluency Solutions, and set up our own channel a little over a year ago. Use YouTube videos to explain insurance coverage, the claim process, or to highlight safety issues. Oh, and the cost – free.
Video email can be free, or you could pay as much as (gasp!) $99 a year. Eyejot is our service of choice. At Confluency, we use it for proposal deliveries, conference/trade show follow ups, and to set up renewal reviews.
Email management, CAN SPAM compliance, and newsletter sign ups can be facilitated by several services. MailChimp is free, as long as your ‘subscription’ list is $500 or less. After 500, the monthly fees are low. (Your insurance agency might have 2,000 customers, but how many email addresses do you have?)
For web conferencing, including document and screen sharing, try DimDim. The service is reliable, easy to use, and free for up to 20 attendees in a session.
The list could go on and on, but in my experience, these are good places for most insurance agencies to start.
Marketing Sherpa posted survey results about how businesses in general think social media (SM) fits into the marketing tool box. Basically, most businesses see SM as a complementary, but not a replacement tactic. However, most businesses view SM as important enough to warrant its own budget line item and staff. What does your insurance agency think about social media like Facebook? Take a poll and me know.
I read an enewsletter this morning, and the article started a chain of events that lead me to post here. The chain of events goes like this: I click on a link in the newsletter that leads me to an excellent blog post about the evolution of businesses using social media for marketing. That blog post compels me to look at a funny YouTube Video and check out Xerox’s corporate website. Finally, here I’ve come full circle, doing exactly the same thing the enewsletter did: summarizing and commenting on the blog post and Xerox’s social media campaign.
The blog post I read was from Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer blog and it is worth reading in its entirety. Here is the readers digest version of the post, points that should be considered by any insurance agent on the precipice of jumping into Facebook or some other social media venture.
Social media is about relationships and social media works for businesses when people have something they can be passionate about. In the case at hand, passion takes the form of amusement over a video (more on that in a minute). It’s hard to get anyone to be passionate about insurance as a product, but let me reproduce a quote from Jason’s blog post here that is instructive:
I polled folks on Twitter Saturday, asking what compels them to talk about brands. Almost to a person, the answer was something along the lines of, “When I have an exceptionally good or exceptionally bad experience.”
So customer experiences, as well as humor are candidates for Facebook content. But for heaven’s sake, leave the insurance products out.
Social media campaigns are generally about branding, and the bottom line results are going to be hard to measure, just as with any other brand building initiative. What that means is that you better have some patience with your campaign, and you will need to find some other way to measure success besides new insurance policies written.
Everyone has jumped on the social media bandwagon by now, so standing out is going to take more time and effort than the early days when only a few businesses were using YouTube or keeping a Facebook group or page. Success, however you measure it, might require more of your money or time. To get a feel for the level of competition, take a look at the craft that went into Xerox’s Information Overload Syndrom video.
I’m not suggesting you throw in the towel, just that as a a small local insurance agency, you have to be realistic about social media competition , how you need to use social media, and the kind of results you can expect.
As a final note, let me point out that social media campaigns do work. If that weren’t the case, you wouldn’t be reading this post. Because you have, the brand awareness meter for Xerox, and for that matter Jason Falls, have been nudged a couple of notches.
The atmospheric noise about website search engine optimization and search ranking has increased significantly in the last year or so. Insurance agencies are just as caught up in the chatter as other businesses. Search optimization (SEO) and rank are complex topics, with signficant business implicaitons, so much so that our company, Confluency Solutions, has set aside at least six separate segments of an upcoming best practice series to deal with that single topic. At the risk of over-simplifying the matter, I’m going to try and deal with the fundemental issues in this one post. I’m going to do that in three parts by discussing SEO budgeting, metrics to measure website effectiveness, and evaluating a blandishment fom a company offering to provide SEO services.
I don’t know if the economy is behind this or not (snake oil salesmen seem to multiply when times are tough), but the insurance agencies we support at Confluency Solutions seem to be hearing from more and more individuals and companies that can ‘get you higher search rankings’. There are legitimate providers of search optimization services (SEO), of course, and I don’t mean to besmirch the reputation of the several companies that deliver top notch optimization services. I’m just musing on our willingness to listen to money-for-nothing pitches when we are casting about for ways to replace lost income.
The role of SEO for an agency website is complicated because quality of traffic has such a bearing on insurance agency profitability. Most retail businesses, for instance, do not share this challange. If someone arrives at www.widgets.com, places an order for a widget in exhange for a few dollars, the costs and profit associated with that transaction are pretty much known right then and there.
When someone requests a quote via the www.mostexcellentinsuranceagent.com site, cost and profitability may not be known for sometime, and sometimes not at all. Here are a few traffic quality questions that insurance agencies need to concern themselves with:
How many quotes will I have to provide for each sale? Will my conversion rate be too low?
If I spend too much time quoting the wrong kind of business, or quoting prospects that don’t convert, how much other income have I forgone from other sources (opportunity cost)?
How long will I keep that new customer? How much service burden will they place on my staff?
First of all, let me try and address the question of how much you should budget for SEO. I’m skipping right past the question of whether you should optimimize at all – you should. Let me fram the budget issue in terms familiar to an insurance agency.
Suppose a personal insurance customer pays $4,000 a year to insure a home, cars, and a certain level of life and disability coverage. If that customer skipped on insurance coverage altogether, they would save $4,000 certain. If that same customer was involved in a car accident and was sued for $100,000, they would be out a lot of cash in the absence of insurance. Going in the other direction, that same customer could purchase the most fabulous insurance possible – the highest limits, the lowest deductibles, and buy back all the policy exclusions and limitations – and spend perhaps $20,000 a year in premium.
The right answer for that customer is somewhere between $0 and $20,000 in premium and is a question of balance between cost and risk (and the answer may be $4,000). For your agency, the $0 in premium is analagous to having no website at all – no money spent, no website traffic. $20,000 a year might get you a lot of traffic (but not necessarily good quality); so, just with the insurance customer, the right SEO budget answer for your agencyis somewhere in the middle.
Your insurance agency website is an investment in a business tool, and if the investment pays off (ROI), your agency should realize additional commission income in some multiple of the costs associated with the website and SEO. New income sourced from an agency website is often masked because sales influenced by the website but consummated by phone, for instance. I’m not going to cover measuring ROI here, but I think it is important to stop and consider there is a level of complexitity to teasing out reliable ROI. What I am going to cover here are leading edge indicators that will tell you if you are on the right track to acheiving good ROI. Those indicators are Page Rank, Traffic Counts, and Traffic Quality (I’m going to discuss these in an insurance agency context; for a discussion in a more generalized business context, SEOMoz has an excellent whiteboard on SEO consulting that also addresses these metrics, and I’ve included that video at the end of this post).
Page Rank
This is the easiest measure to latch onto because we all see it when we do Google searches. It’s also the one measure that is least indicative of SEO success. Just because one of your web pages ranks in the top 10 in an organic search listing (vs. paid search or local search) doesn’t mean you get site traffic, let alone revenue. Moreover, you would have to ask what ‘ranks’ and ranks for ‘what’? Search listings return web pages, not ‘websites’, although search engine algorithms score website quality when performing page ranking. Individual website pages will rank differently for different search inquiries (that’s the ranks for ‘what’ question). For instance, searches for these plausible search terms will all display different top 10 lists: insurance; auto insurance; insurance Asheville NC, Travelers Insurance Asheville NC. And traffic originating from search on different terms will vary in quality, as we discuss below.
Traffic
This is a better lead edge indicator than page rank because when web searchers click through to your insurance agency website something can actually happen. That web surfer can come back for another visit, sign up for a newsletter, use an interactive tool, or - the holy grail – complete an online form or pick up the phone and request a quote. Without traffic, nothing happens, and since you can have search rank without traffic, traffic numbers are a better measure of SEO effectiveness than search rank.
Traffic Quality
The concept of conversion is not new to insurance agents (e.g., quotes per policy written), and as with quote activity, high conversion website traffic is also better quality. Not all website visits will result in quotes and commission income on the first go-round, but might produce income later. Because of that, the definition of conversion should be expanded. Here are some possibilities:
Average Time on Site; Average Number of Pages Visited; Number of Visits to a Certain Page (like a video, or interactive tool), phone call or email inquiries.
Whatever your definition for ‘conversion’, those measures, like the ones suggested above, should be harbingers of higher future quote and new income activity. Traffic from e-newsletter mailings and from local search will exhibit better quality characteristics than organic search traffic, and visitors arriving via organic search, but using different search terms, will also exhibit differing quality characteristics.
Finally, on the last topic, evaluating an offer to perform SEO. Here are some high level considerations that will allow you to dismiss many offers at a glance:
Did the offer come in an email that resembles spam? Why would the sender use a gmail or hotmail email address instead of an email domain that matches a company website address?
If the sender email domain matches a company address, see if you can find a website for that company using that address. If not, again, why would the sender want to hide?
If you can find a website for the company, and they are offering SEO for a fee, see how well they rank for a term likely to be used by a company searching for a provider like ‘search optimiztion consultants’ or ‘SEO services’; many spam emails will suggest the term you should search on, and it may not be one that would actually be used by a company seeking SEO help.
Does the offer guarentee to get you top listings? Nobody can guarentee that because of all the dynamic elements that go into SEO.
Is the email offer confined to improving your ‘website rank’? As noted above, search engines ‘find’ web pages, not websites, and search rank by itself is a weak measure of future ROI.
At the outset I said this was a complext topic, but I hope this post helps your insurance agency evaluate how to fit SEO into your marketing mix. If not, (this is the shameless self-promotion part of this post), sign up for the Confluency Solutions newsletter and find out when the best practice series (including a robust treatment of SEO) kicks off.
One of the nice folks at Kirby Insurance in Baltimore was recently approached by a company called Leapfish and was offered ownership of a keyword relevant to the insurance agency business.
Who is Leapfish and what do they do? Leapfish is a new entrant into what is known as meta search – basically aggregated results from other search engines and databases in one place. They were founded in November of 2008.
What’s the reason for launching what appears to be yet another search engine? A short answer can be found in the words of Leapfish founder Ben Behrouzi, from an intereview with Betanews, “The Internet has grown so much, and there’s so much information, yet most people don’t go past the first page of Google and Yahoo in their searches. Tons of stuff is getting lost.”
Leapfish has introduced a twist on keyword advertising, allowing you to purchase and ‘own’ keywords for an up front registration fee and a renewal fee of about 5% of the up front fee. Ownership of the keyword will guarentee placement in Leapfish paid search listings, and keyword owners can resell their keywords at a later date. MediaPost reported these prices for various keyword sales: keyword “diet” sold for nearly $8,000 while “Viagra” sold for $7,000 and “annuity” for $2,000. Leapfish uses a proprietary algorithm to determine keyword value.
What to do if approached by Leapfish (or another untested company) and asked if you would like to spend a little money with them? As far as Leapfish goes, there is a lot of good press, and a lot of people, like TechNewsWorld, seem genuinely sanguine about their prospects for success. There are also some other sources who have adopted a skeptical posture, such as MediaPost and TechCrunch.
In a sense, ‘owning’ a keyword is a little like owning a piece of Leapfish. Will they elbow their way into a crowded search field? Maybe, but they have to hip-check their way past behemoth Google first. The fact is that purchasing a keyword with Leapfish right now is more like investing in a start up than budgeting for an ad placement. Your investment may prove to be worthless, but it may also pay off handsomely in the future. The risk is wrapped up in the success of Leapfish.
If your objective is push traffic to your website and write business today, then Leapfish is probably not for you. On the other hand, if you have a little money to put at risk on an investment, then Leapfish may be worth a longer look.
Only 7 of the 41 agencies had claimed their listing in the Google Local Business Center; of those, four had a number 1 ranking in the local listing, and two ranked in the top 10, just outside the 7 pack. 34 agencies had not claimed their local listing at all so the information Google ranked on and displayed was derived from third party sources like Info USA. Two of those 34, who were located in small towns, fortuitously showed up in the 7 pack and another rural agent made the top 10.
