I see an increasing number of companies specializing in websites for insurance agents that claim to provide search engine optimization (SEO) with their service.  But almost none of them are really are.  More website providers, maybe most at this point, include what is called a content management system (CMS).  CMS allow regular business users, with limited to no technical expertise, to manage and update their own websites.  Using a CMS, you can add content like images and video, add or edit web pages, and importantly you can control key page elements that search ranking algorithms use to determine page rank relevance.

And while there are differences between the various CMS options out there, most all of them remind you to include those key page elements by providing blanks for page title, meta description, meta keywords, and so on.  But including reminders through a CMS is not the same thing as delivering SEO.  In fact, it’s not even close.  To give you an analogy, think about what it takes to fulfill your tax obligations with the IRS, and at the same time, minimize your tax burden.  It’s easy enough to go online and download a Form 1040, and all the blanks are there.  But possessing a blank tax form does not automatically fulfill your tax obligation, the same way having a CMS with all the web page elements for you to fill in does not mean you have search optimized your website.

Obviously, there are advantageous ways to legally complete your tax forms.  But it requires a bit of knowledge about what is both legal and advantageous to complete your tax forms in such a way as to minimize your tax burden.  And the same is true for your CMS:  a bit of knowledge (and fore planning) are required to fill in your page elements in such a way that your web pages get ranked by Google and the other search engines.

Does it matter which CMS you select?  That question can best be answered by a quote from a recent Marketing Sherpa article, “Overwhelmingly, good search engine optimization with a CMS is really more about how you implement the CMS and not necessarily which CMS you select.”  So, in order to make the leap from CMS to SEO requires a plan and effective implementation of that plan.  A good CMS can be tremendously helpful in implementing many SEO plan elements, but CMS without a plan is no more useful than a blank tax form.

The answer is because no local agencies have optimized their local listing in the Google Local Business Center.  Most haven’t even claimed their free listing.  I have seen local SERPs with attorneys, body shops and even Wal-Mart’s Vision Center better positioned than local insurance agents.  An individual searching on the word insurance is far more likely to be seeking an insurance provider than eye or medical care – and Google would like to provide options that fit a searcher’s objectives.  But even Google needs a little help from time-to-time.  This oversight committed by most insurance agents provides a golden opportunity for others.  Confluency Solutions is conducting a free webinar for insurance agents on April 22.  If you want to boost your agency’s search visibility, and write more new business,  you might want to think about signing up and sitting in.

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.

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.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Do You Need SEO Consulting? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo