A Complete Guide to Local SEO for Insurance Agencies

Are you worried about not getting enough traffic on your insurance company’s website?

Many companies are facing the challenge of attracting new clients, and insurance agencies are no different. As a matter of fact, a lot of individuals are in need of what is commercial insurance packages is the best, and when they realize this, they run a Google search for suitable insurance policies.

Local Insurance SEO Process

Employing SEO best practices in your insurance agency’s website is a necessity if you want your company  information to be clearly recognizable to search engines. Without Local SEO, your pages may be poorly ranked and potential clients will have a hard time finding your agency’s website.

The importance of adopting local SEO for insurance agencies cannot be overemphasized. Although the process can be long and seemingly tedious, the results will put you one step ahead of your competitors.

Highlighted here, is the process you will have to follow in order to be in accordance with SEO best practics:

1. Premium Web Hosting

One of the first things an insurance SEO needs to do is to get premium web hosting. This is a good way of securing your presence while making your website fast and accessible. In addition, with premium web hosting, your website will not be hacked, bombarded with spam, or overloaded with traffic. However, poor quality hosting will result in the direct opposite. So if you have a cheap hosting plan, think about upgrading it in order to get better services.

2. Buy an SSL Certificate and Set It Up

SSL is an acronym that stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is the SSL that makes your website accessible at https://yourwebsite.com and not at https://yourwebsite.com. The ‘s’ in ‘https’ stands for “secure” and acts as an additional layer of security, also known as a Google Ranking Factor.

This additional level of security will make your website visitors feel more secure, which they will appreciate. As a reward, Google will increase your website rankings in search results to improve your visitor interaction.

3. Make Use of the Ubersuggest Keyword Tool to Do Research

A free tool such as Ubersuggest can help you analyze the keywords related to what your buyers are searching for online.

When you type a keyword, the Ubersuggest tool will produce various related keyword searches, while showing you the search volume for each one. Armed with this information, you will easily know which keywords to target and which to rank for.

4. Create Content and Optimize It

When preparing SEO for your website, you’d do well to create high-quality content and optimize it.

Review your website to ensure you have detailed information covering the topics mentioned in your content. Your website will not rank properly if your content is too thin or too short by Google’s standards. Ensure that your keywords are used naturally and that they flow appropriately throughout the content, and that the said content has value in meeting the searcher’s needs.

However, ensure that you do not over-optimize your page by increasing keyword density throughout your content; Google can penalize you for this.

5. Google Analytics Setup

As soon as you launch your website, install the Google Analytics tracking software. Setting up Google Analytics is free and will only take a couple of minutes.

The function of Google Analytics is to track where all your traffic is coming from. This tool will show you whether your site was accessed from a search engine, social media site, or another website. Tons of user data, behavioral data, and user location information can be tracked using this software, which can eventually be used for sales and marketing purposes for a wide range of audiences.

6. Add Users to Analyze the Google Analytics Data

You can add users to become viewers of your Google Analytics software. If you do not have enough time to review the data from your Google Analytics for improving your SEO, get someone to do it for you. Add a user to the Google Analytics account using their email address. Ensure they have “view only” access while they review your data so that you can retain control of the website.

7. Set Up Google Webmaster Tools

In order to obtain really good SEO results, it is important to set up Google Webmaster Tools. This will help you collect vital webmaster data from Google about your website. You can set it up in about 5 minutes.

8. Add a Sitemap

After setting up your website in Webmaster Tools, you can add a sitemap. With a sitemap, Google can regularly crawl through the site to get updates. There are some excellent WordPress plugins with which you can auto-generate a sitemap such as Google “XML Sitemaps.”

The sitemap you create will be on your website, usually at: www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.

9. Audit On-Page SEO

It can be difficult to try and keep up with trends in the SEO industry. Google’s algorithm changes periodically, thus impacting the effectiveness of many SEO techniques. This, in turn, creates an ever-changing environment in the SEO space.

From time to time, new link building techniques emerge, new types of  data to markup arise, or some new social channels develop that impact search results.

One vital SEO task you will have to continue with is to audit your website for on-page SEO opportunities as soon  as you update your website. When updating your site, and while Google is updating their algorithm, you will have to continually perform on-page SEO audits in order to obtain the best results from your search engine optimization.

10. Optimize Both Page and Meta Titles

Meta titles are used in snippets of search results to display links to users. When you include your brand name along with relevant keywords, you will rank better in search results. Also, make them enticing so that users can click on them and find answers to their search queries.

11. Optimize Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are positioned just under the Meta Title, and should also be optimized. Keep these descriptions at around 160 characters so that they do not become truncated in the search results for being too lengthy or inadequate.

12. Make Use of Page Headers

Ensure that you also incorporate H1-H3 tags into your content. These tags should also contain your keywords.

13. Audit Your Internal Links

Links are vital to search engine optimization and will add authority to your web page. Use your target keywords to link the internal related web pages in order to drive visibility.

14. Build Business Citations, Reviews, and NAP

You can create these business listings on directories, review sites, and local searches. Of the myriad of opportunities available for building local citations, Google My Business (GMB), Yahoo, Bing Places, and Yelp are the most vital.

When you create citations, you are increasing your online visibility and increasing the local search rankings of your website. This is crucial for every business, as online visibility is a significant factor in driving sales in this day and age.

If you want to increase your local search visibility, do not forget to claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing, review signals, check for valuable business citations, and ensure consistency in your Name Address Phone Number (NAP). You could purchase tools like MoxLocal or Yext to help you get the best sources for your business citations.

15. Earn Authoritative Links

Links matter for SEO and they remain a major ranking factor necessary for a successful SEO campaign. You’ll need backlinks in your SEO campaign as well because when Google analyzes your links on the web, it creates a backlink profile for each website.

Concentrate on having high-quality links – not just any random links. These links should be relevant to your business and should come from trustworthy websites. You could get penalized for using random spammy links.

16. Periodic SEO Reviews

It is important to audit your website periodically to check for technical issues, as well as the primary SEO factors you are optimizing. Always optimize your website using Webmaster and Google Analytics to track your progress and changes.

Also, try to optimize any of your competitors’ websites that are well ranked in Google. If they are using optimizations on their sites, use similar optimizations on yours.

Why Is Your Insurance Agency Website Not Getting Enough Traffic from Google?

If you are worried about why the traffic your insurance website receives from Google is not enough, it is possible that you are doing something wrong. We have highlighted some of the major challenges your insurance company could be facing, as well as the best way(s) in which to tackle them.

Challenge: Why am I not getting enough traffic to my website?

Issues:

1. No local Google My Business listing presence.

If you are not getting as much website traffic as you would like on Google, it is possible that you do not have any local Google listing presence. You could consider setting up Google Webmaster Tools in order to receive all the data pertaining to your website. This process does not usually take more than 5 minutes.

2. No blog

It is well-known that search engines require some content to increase the ranking of the website. It is their duty to read your content, analyze it, and then determine how the content can help a search query.

With good content like educational blogs, your insurance agency can maintain a solid online presence despite stiff competition.

Your website will rank better if you create high-quality blog posts on your website. The higher your rank, the more substantial your audience will be, leading to higher website traffic.

3. No SEO

Websites are not meant to be an extended, online form of your business card. Since most people spend up to half their time online and have made this a routine habit in their daily lives, it is a huge advantage for your website to sell to the online demographic.  As such, it is your duty to make sure people can find your website without much effort.

Whether you run a large company or a tiny one, you should not underestimate the value of optimizing your website for online searches. Unfortunately, SEO does not work immediately. It takes a lot of patience and commitment, but in due time, you will reap the rewards if you do it properly.

Challenge: Why am I getting poor quality traffic?

It is essential that you attract high volumes of traffic to your agency’s website. Your website needs visitors that will eventually become leads and then customers. In order to achieve this, you need to motivate your visitors to spend quality time on your website. This is the best way for them to learn more about your services.

Issue:

1. SEO is Poor

Just like your car, if you neglect to maintain your SEO, it will not work the way it is supposed to for you. You need to make sure your website is audited for anything that could hurt its performance, such as shady tactics. If you are unable to do this yourself, hire an expert to help you handle it.

Challenge: Why are visitors not converting even though I am generating traffic?

Your traffic is not useful if, after following SEO best practices, you continue to attract the wrong type of visitor. What should you do in such a case?

Issues:

1. The focus of your SEO is wrong

You need to point the focus of your SEO in the right direction. First, do some homework to find out how your insurance agency can address the what, the who, the why, the when, and the where. These targeted SEO techniques will make your agency stand out by appearing in search results.

Challenge: Why is my traffic dropping off suddenly?

What happens when your website was generating considerable traffic, which then suddenly stopped?

Issues:

1. Google has penalized your website

If you were enjoying a good amount of traffic for a period of time, just to see it drop suddenly, it is possible that Google has penalized you.

Google penalizes websites that make use of black hat or disreputable SEO tactics. The type of penalty enforced will determine how easily your website will recover.

Bad SEO practices have terrible consequences for any reputable optimizer, and as such, should be avoided for the sake of your business.

Top 5 Reasons to Invest in a Local SEO Campaign

It is becoming increasingly important for insurance agencies to invest in SEO. If you are still in doubt, here are 5 reasons you should:

1. It’s a time-consuming process

SEO optimization is a process that takes up a lot of time. Most insurance agencies cannot go through the processes involved in designing a website and keeping it functional. Most websites are designed and left to take care of themselves and a website cannot take care of itself!

If you want your insurance agency to stand out in this technological age, invest in local SEO. Local SEO done by expert hands will give your website the attention and dedication it needs to rank at the top of the Google search results list. It is their duty to regularly test and optimize the SEO of your website in order to keep it functional.

At the end of the day, you will have more traffic on your website, and more customers as well. With no website monitoring and operation to worry about, you can concentrate on attending to your customers’ needs.

2. It’s a process which requires an expert team/agency

SEO is not something that can be done without adequate training. One person may not be enough to handle the SEO of an insurance agency. The work is quite taxing and, in most cases, requires the insights and combined expertise of more than one person.

Hence, you will need to hire an expert team or agency to carry out your online work for you.

3. It’s a long-term investment

With SEO, you can generate sales and leads regularly and even more so – on a consistent basis. You will not have to depend on paying for ads or having a large advertising budget. If you can maintain a professional Local SEO, you will have a thriving long-term investment that will reap fruitful results for your agency in the future.

4. Constantly changing free traffic

Advertising is one of the most expensive aspects of all businesses. It is also rapidly changing. When you improve your Google rankings from search engine results, you will enjoy constantly changing free traffic. This will give you an opportunity to convert your website’s visitors to clients.

5. Faster results

When it comes to seeing improvements in Google rankings, small insurance agencies have more advantages than bigger companies. On average, multinational companies often wait between 6 months to one year before they see any improvement.

This is because as a small insurance agency, your primary competitors are other small agencies in your local market, while big companies like the multinationals have a whole range of competitors in varying capacities to compete with and stay ahead of – leaving you at a better advantage.

Due to all these factors mentioned above, it’s a long-haul game where winners never quit, and quitters never win.

My work here is done, the rest is up to you!

Local SEO will provide your insurance agency with targeted and niche specific online marketing that will allow your website to appear based on local search signals. Thus, Implementing effective $SEO$ strategies in insurance marketing can further enhance your online visibility and attract potential customers in your local area. If you want to enjoy all the benefits of Local SEO, it is important to hire a long-term expert SEO team that will take charge of your website.

The higher your website’s ranking, the more users it will receive and consequently,  the more sales you will be able to drive for your business. With quality content, you can convert these users into paying customers and beat your competitors in the marketplace.

Thank you so much for reading A Complete Guide to Local SEO for Insurance Agencies. We really appreciate it! If you have any questions about our article, or can suggest any other topics you think we should explore, feel free to let us know.

Be sure to sign-up for our newsletter to receive monthly emails on all of the latest trends and happenings in the digital marketing space. You will also receive our FREE E-Book with the Amazing Marketing Tools for Powerful Business Growth. Sign-up below!

Also, if you received some value out of this article, please share with your friends or colleagues, or leave a comment/question below. We really appreciate you reading our blog and every share/comment means the world to us and allows us to continue producing valuable tools to help you grow your business!