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.
A lot of insurnce agencies I talk to are uneasy about customer reviews that might show up on the public web. The fact is, most business owners are nervous about losing control over customer commentary, but I tend to talk mostly to insurance agents. The local search components of all the major search engines have a place for reviews, and services like Yelp exist pretty much for the purpose of sharing customer reviews. You don’t have to draw your customer’s attention to these review services; sooner or later, they will find them on their own.
Unscrupulous ‘web marketing’ service providers will sometimes post false, negative reviews (or positive reviews on a competitor site they are ‘optimizing’). You should be monitoring your insurance agency’s reviews on these services, as well as those of competitors. Search providers are generally responsive to dealing with false reviews, as long as they can be proven false (e.g., the same ‘reviewer’ providing essentially the same review, to multiple insurance providers across the country, and posting all the reviews around the same time). If reviews are legit, however, or if you cannot prove them to be false, they stay.
The best way to offset negative reviews is by out weighing them with positive reviews. Happily, the evidence seems to indicate that there are a lot more good reviews than bad. Geoff Donaker, COO at Yelp, noted that the ratio of positive to negative reviews is 6:1*. If your agency is delivering real value, let go a little and encourage your customers to spread the word.
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.
I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.
I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the ‘EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here’s the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:
Thank you for your purchase from Business Name Omitted.
We received note that your order has been delivered and would like to verify that you are satisfied with your purchase and our service.
Please reply to this email if there is anything that would keep you from giving us 5 stars on all ratings. We’ll do what it takes to make it right.
If you are satisfied we would highly appreciate it if you would leave us positive feedback with 5 stars on all ratings on eBay. Please use this link: Direct Link to eBay Rating for Seller Omitted.
We have already added positive feedback to your ebay profile. Your feedback can be viewed at:
Direct Link to my eBay Profile and Rating Omitted.
If you have any questions you can either reply to this email or call us at Phone Number Omitted.
Thank you for your business,
Business Name Omitted
Taking a cue from this approach and using a version of this email after every agency sale, renewal, or claim will deliver multiple benefits. First, you will be systematically probing to be sure your customers are happy and will be building stronger relationships (aka, less price sensitivity, more referrals). Second, you will far outstrip your competition in the number positive reviews your agency has at Google Maps (local search), Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc. All you have to do is insert the direct link for rating at those services into your standard email, similar to the example above.
