Insurance Agent Web Power

Insurance agents, especially when shopping for a new website provider, are right to ask a few questions regarding how their investment will pay off.  The number of site visitors you can expect isn’t the only question to ask, but it’s an obvious one.  The answer however, isn’t quite as straightforward as ’1,000 a month’ or some other objective number.  The number of visitors you can expect depends on a number of factors and many are within your agency’s control.  As often happens in these cases, the answer to ‘how much traffic can I expect’ is the standard ‘that depends’.  But rather than leave you hanging on that ambiguity, let me elaborate.

We tend break down website contributions to business results (i.e., income) in three areas:

Passive Web
Complimentary Web
Pure Web Contributions

There is some overlap between these categories so you can quibble about the arbitrary groupings, but this broad organization of traffic sources give us a disciplined way to think about the amount of website traffic you can expect, and equally important, the quality of traffic as measured by conversions of visits to income.

Passive Web refers to the tendency of consumers to look for you on a Google search, even though they hear about your agency offline and through no direct effort on your part (although direct efforts to manage a referral program indirectly influence this kind of traffic).  Studies performed over the last couple of years suggest turn to the web between 75% to 85% of the time after they learn about your agency.  This is generally very high quality traffic because visitors have taken the second step on the way to a purchase decision:  ‘I have heard about your insurance agency, now I am going to take a closer look.’  The amount of passive traffic you get is proportionally related to a couple of things:  The number of customers you have who have positive experiences (word of mouth); and How actively you promote referral programs (encouraged word of mouth).

Complimentary Web is a category of web visits pulled primarily by email push but also by direct mail and traditional advertising.  Email push can take the form of E-newsletters that contain links to your website and emails you may send as a standard part of your sales process.  But most likely the larger proportion of this type of traffic will be existing customers, assuming your agency has some type of e-newsletter program in place.  Direct mail supported by specific landing pages for mail recipients picks up more website traffic as well as higher conversion traffic  – additional detail and special calls to action can and should be part of the landing page.

Pure Web Contributions are visitors that start on the web and stay on the web.  Search engines, through SEO, is the source we most often think of for this type of traffic but even search engine traffic can be split into local search traffic and organic search.  Other sources for pure web traffic are inbound links that might come from insurance company or association agency locators, PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, links found on social media profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or even a link from the local chamber of commerce.

Website traffic quantity, and quality – the number of visitors who ‘convert’ – is influenced dramatically by which of the three sources predominate in site visits.  Let me illustrate that by looking at analytics screen shots for three different insurance agencies, viewed over a 30 day interval.

Example 1

This agency largely relies on the Passive Web approach but they do have active producers and the agency web address is part of all email signatures, business cards, and other agency print collateral (web promotion 101, circa 1995).  Top level visit counts aren’t that impressive but those visits are productive.  The number of pages per visit and average time on site is quite high, meaning that these visitors likely convert at a higher rate.  The bounce rate – the proportion of visitors who look at one page and leave – is distorted because Google can’t count visitors who launch a secure quote request form and those visitors who pick up the phone to call are also counted as a ‘bounce’.  But a lower relative bounce rate is good and this bounce rate is relatively low.  Also, a large proportion of visits are new viewers, meaning that the agency website most likely benefits the agency in new business activity rather than retention or account rounding.

Example 2

The agency in example 2 is more engaged in Pure Web tactics than most agencies but this agency is active in a variety of ways – they do push email to customers, they engage in PPC campaigns and banner advertising, they use print advertising and they also have a blog and Facebook page.  All that activity is translating to fairly high levels of website visits but all the conversion indicators are lower than in example one.  Is one agency’s situation better than the other?  That is hard to say, it depends on the kind of business being produced and is highly dependent on the individual agency’s acumen at rounding and retaining accounts.  The agency in example 2 is certainly putting more time, money and effort into traffic generating tactics and that might be the right thing for that agency, depending on their marketing budget and objectives.

Example 3

The agency in Example 3 falls somewhere in between the first two in terms of both top level traffic and conversion indicators.  They tend to rely on Complimentary Web tactics with a little Pure Web seasoning via local search.  This agency does periodic print and traditional media advertising as well as neighborhood focused direct mail campaigns.  The direct mail approach dovetails nicely with their attention to managing local search through Google’s Local Business Center.

So how much website traffic and conversions can your agency expect?  That depends on your objectives and tactics.  But hopefully these illustrations have given you some objective numbers to better inform your insurance agencies website development decisions and your tactical web traffic management plan.

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.

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.