Insurance Agent Web Power

This Marketing Sherpa Chart of the Week provides an interesting context through which to view your insurance agency website analytics and lead management results.  Not all website inquiries turn into leads, but this chart suggests  that a healthy proportion could, and probably should.  If you are getting a lot of traffic but little sales activity, then some page redesign may be in order.  Of course, you have to be able to track lead sources first, especially since a significant proportion of web-sourced quote opportunities ultimately arrive by phone.

What this chart suggests is that, if you get 100 new visitors to your insurance agency website, 38 of them would graduate to sales-ready lead status; indicators of this might be signing up for a newsletter, staying on  your website more than two minutes, viewing 4 or more pages, or visiting a specific page to view a video or use an interactive tool.  All of this can be measured through site analytics.  Generally, you would define someone as a prospect when you have a chance to quote.  If the chart above is representative of your agency then of the original 100 web inquiries, you would have a chance to quote on about 15 (100 times 38% times 39%); again, these quotes might happen by phone or they might come through the website.  Ultimately, for every 100 new visitors, assuming site design helps people graduate to lead status, you would write about 4 new customers.

Not all visits are new, but if we assume that site visits breas down in a 60% customer visits, 40% new consumers visits ratio, then 500 unique visitors to your website in a month should beget between 8 and 9 new customers.  Additionally, some of your customer traffic should result in new sales as well, particularly if you are directing customers to website insurance resources through links in monthly e-mail newsletters.  We consistently hear from agents that about 1 new policy is written each month from e-newsletter campaigns for each 100 emails.

So, what would a modestly promoted website do for an small agency sending out 500 emails each month?  If 1.5 policies are written for each new customer and that number is added to the customer development policies sales resulting from just the e-newsletters, monthly totals would stack up like this:

14 policies per month from new customers
5 policies per month from existing customers
19 new policies each month purely from web sources

That’s 228 new insurance policies a year; not enough to turn your independent agency into a e-marketing phenom, but generally enough to feed one of your carrier commitments for the year, and the extra $35,000 – $75,000 in commission revenue (recurring, by the way) is a nice addition to the bottom line.

One more thought before I go:  independent surveys performed by comScore and Google all suggest that between 70% and 80% of consumers will go to the web after seeing an ad for insurance.  The more traditional advertising and direct mail you do, the more site visits you should see – if your campaign is effective.  What happens to those inquiries, that is, how many convert to leads and prospects, has a lot to do with landing page design.  So if you are going to spend a significant amount of money on an ad campaign, it makes sense to put a little time into designing and testing a landing page for that campaign.  If you do, you can maintain or improve upon the inquiry –> sales conversion rates shown in the chart and achieve a much higher ROI for a traditional advertising campaign.

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.

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.

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

Blogging remains a foreign concept to many insurance agents and many larger businesses as well: only 12% of Fortune 500 Companies are using blogs in their communication mix. But smaller companies have caught on to the business benefits of blogs. A recent estimate put the number of business related blogs at over 850,000. Unless your insurance agency has an active blog (or two), you are missing on an effective and virtually free way to get more customers, quality control information you provide to consumers,and increase website content and generate more site traffic (i.e., even more new customers).

One tool, one tactic, and a multiplicity of benefits. What are you waiting for? The trick is to find a way to take a concept unfamiliar to many insurance agents (blogging) and embed that concept in your agency practices in a way that quickly breeds familiarity.

Here is how a blog might fit into an agency ecosystem:

1. Blog set up with all producers and CSRs with ‘author’ permission (that is, everyone can post to the blog).
2. Your insurance agency web administrator monitors your blog weekly

Scenario:

• Customer calls or emails CSR or producer with a question.
• CSR or producer determines if question is account or customer specific, or applicable to a broad cross section of customers or prospects.
• If the question is account specific, the CSR or producer can answer the question via email or on the phone.
• If the question and answer have broader applicability, the CSR or producer post the Q and A to the agency blog, then email the blog post linkto the customer.
• Agency website admin reviews blog posts weekly; content is edited for accuracy, etc. Some content, with small modifications, can be moved to the agency website as an FAQ or article.

In the above scenario, the blog posts substitute for email content, and they present little extra effort. Responsibility for blog content is distributed across all staff vs. becoming a burden for one person; and by extension, responsibility for website content refresh is also shared. The blog would be a resource first for individual customers and insurance agency staff, and later, a resource for a wider audience, either as blog posts or edited posts migrated to agency website content.

Someone in the agency will have to review content for quality periodically; this is probably not being done now (with emails and phone conversations), and would constitute an additional task. But quality reviews are a good practice for a number of reasons. Using a blog as outlined above makes quality control possible in a way that would be far more difficult to manage with emails and phone conversations alone.

I can see some objections to inserting a blog into daily communications, but all objections will basically boil down to this consideration: Blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are routinely used by other businesses, and growing number of consumers – especially Generation Y. Is your agency willing to adapt to new communication tools to improve agency service and acquire new customers, or are you satisfied with the status quo? If capturing new customers and improving the quantity and quality your agency can deliver for basically no cost are objectives for your agency, then there is really no valid objection to blogging.