Are you struggling to build high-quality insurance backlinks to your website?
Insurance is a highly competitive market – everybody needs it! So, it all boils down to making your insurance agency stand out both online and offline.
In this day and age of the internet, it is commonplace for people seeking insurance to head to the internet to find trustworthy insurance agencies – so they have to be able to find your agency easily, quickly, and without putting in too much effort.
To this end, your insurance agency websites need to be optimized so that people searching how long does it take to get high for your services can find you, and once they do, they should be able to find relevant, helpful content as well.
The search engine optimization (SEO) industry is an ever-changing one, with insurance agencies evolving their strategies and shifting their focus on a yearly basis. Linking is a vital aspect of SEO, with backlinks remaining crucial to the performance of a website.
Backlinks (3-Party, Outbound Links) vs. Internal/Inner Links
Both internal links and backlinks are important if you want to grow your insurance business, your online search presence, as well as increase traffic to your website. However, you cannot truly appreciate the differences between backlinks and internal links until you know what internal links are and how they work.
What Are Internal/Inner Links?
When you use a link in your site that links to other content still on your site, this is referred to as inner or internal linking. You can use an internal link to link your posts together in a way that makes contextual sense.
Here are some ways internal links can be important:
- They can revitalize old content
- When done consistently, they can help you establish a de-facto page on a particular topic
- They relate with different pages or posts on your website
- They provide improved user experience
- They reduce bounce rate
- They provide site structure
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks, also known as “inbound links”, occur across the internet when a website mentions and links with another website. They are very important to SEO and connect using external websites. These links from other domains lead to pages on your domain.
Having backlinks is like getting a vote of confidence from a webpage. The more votes you can receive from other authoritative websites, the better your site’s visibility and ranking.
Google, through its sophisticated systems, can differentiate between SEO backlinks and natural backlinks in a bid to safeguard the quality of search results. It does this using the Penguin Update, which is a set of rules that evaluates the quality of backlinks.
Google devalues links from sites that people do not really visit or make use of. When you accumulate these links for your site, Google recognizes it as a sign that your website has useful content. After all, if your content wasn’t useful, other websites would not keep referencing you, would they?
So, one of the best ways to show to Google that your insurance website is a high-quality one is to ensure that it has a lot of very effective backlinks.
Summarily, backlinks do the following:
- Increase SEO impact
- Drive traffic
- Increase branding
Internal Links vs. Backlinks
From the above, here is a summary of the major differences between internal links and backlinks:
Backlinks point to your web content from another domain, while internal links point to your content within your domain. Both are valuable, but they play different roles. Backlinks will be bigger drives of online visibility.
Are all Backlinks Good?
How to Identify Relevant Backlinks?
Armed with the knowledge that in order to have a higher ranking on SERPs (search engine results placement), you have to focus on having quality backlinks, the pending questions will be “how can you identify high-authority and relevant backlinks?”
- They come from authoritative and trusted websites.
- They have anchor text with the target keyword in them.
- The website or page linking to your website is related to yours topically.
- It is a “dofollow” link.
- The link comes from a domain that has never linked to you before.
Backlinks, however, are not created equal. It goes far beyond the competition between different insurance agency websites. Google prioritizes links from some sites more than others. More so, one high-quality backlink is more powerful than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
When the Penguin algorithm discovers that your insurance website has many low-quality backlinks, it will take your website out of Google index or devalue the rankings for the website or for some pages of the website. By doing so, your website will lose Google’s trust as well as all its rankings.
Clearly, Google checks bad link building practices and imposes penalties when necessary. Therefore, you have to find these toxic links that point to your website either manually or using a link auditing tool like SEMrush.
After finding these harmful backlinks, you need to disavow them using the Disavow Tool on Google. This will go a long way to increase your site’s visibility. Some examples of websites that have been disavowed by webmasters include:
- blogspot.ca
- bluehost.com
- bravehournal.com
- foqe.net
- internetwebgallery.com
- linkspurt.com
- searchatlarge.com
- tech4on.com
- theglobe.org
- webs.com
Why Does Your Insurance Website Need Backlinks?
Basically, links are votes received from other sites. With each vote, search engines trust your work to have content that is credible, valuable, and useful.
Google algorithms use links in so many ways in order to determine how valuable a webpage is, and either increases or decreases the webpage’s visibility in search results.
Considering the way Google works, there are three major factors that will guarantee your website appearing in search results. These factors include your website’s design, the links to your website, and the content of your website.
Your insurance website needs this Google validation so that you can appear on the first page of search engines to offer your services to users who need them. If your insurance business must thrive, you need a good company to help you create SEO optimized content for your website.
How to Win Relevant and High-Authority Backlinks (While Avoiding Black Hat SEO Techniques)
Backlinks remain the major ranking factors in insurance SEO. If you are fortunate to have strong, authoritative backlinks from reputable websites, this could be one of the easiest and quickest ways of getting to the top position in SERPs.
1. Create an Affiliate Program
You can generate backlinks using affiliate or ambassador programs. This method is often underutilized but can generate new links to your website. For this to succeed, you need to do SEO work for the affiliate program keywords you are targeting.
Here’s how one insurance company does it:
You can arrange to pay referrals by click and/or lead.
2. Be Quotable
If you want to quote someone, it is always advisable to quote yourself. As an insurance agent with some experience in the insurance industry, you should have many strong opinions about the way the industry works. Say things that other insurance agents from other insurance agencies will consider worth quoting.
Most times, these insurance agents, bloggers, or journalists will likely link your quote back to your home page so people can verify the information
3. Get Testimonial Links
Include testimonials on your insurance website. Offer your clients testimonials. Give them the URL to your homepage, and kindly request that they give you a link to your site with your testimonial.
5. Citations
Also, you can show off some of your best reviews on your insurance website in order to build trust. You can get links from local business directories in order to boost your site in Google.
5. Get Local Sponsors
If you are (actively) involved in sponsoring local organizations, try contacting sponsors to ask if they can mention you and, if they have a website, link to your homepage/a relevant blog post on your site.
6. Guest Contributions or Posts
When you write blog posts for other companies’ online publications offering them insurance advice, include links in the content that will refer people to the content on your own website.
This tactic is an intermediate one that may be quite difficult compared to the other tactics. First, you should identify the websites that can meet your audience’s needs, then also accept contributions from guest authors.
Having done these, reach out to your guest authors, agree on one topic, create quality content, then include a link to your website in your content before publishing it on their site.
The concept of guest posting is quite simple but not quite easy to do when you need to build links quickly. This is because some editors may not let you as a guest contributor include links to your site in the article. However, some will allow you to have an Author Bio section where you can include your link.
7. Build Business Partnerships
A business partnership is basically the same everywhere. As an insurance agent, you get to meet all types of people from all walks of life. If these people have websites that they provide content for, you could link with each other for mutual benefit.
When you get these partners, you could go-ahead and create a page on your website and name it “Partner Page”. On this page, list all the local businesses you partner with to make it easier for you to keep in touch and build a successful business partnership.
8. Social Profiles
There are lots of social sites where you can create a profile for your brand. You can add links to your site on this profile and include other social profiles in order to boost your brand on Google.
9. Use HARO (Help A Reporter Out)
HARO is a service that helps to connect publishers with thought leaders to provide more insight for their content. If you can provide an acceptable quote as an insurance agent, you can get a mention with a link to your website.
It is quite easy to get backlinks from valuable outlets when you provide great pitches. The more pitches you send out, the more your likelihood of receiving backlinks.
10. Interviews
Another fantastic way you can generate backlinks and improve the quality of your content is by interviewing authoritative figures in the insurance industry. Converse with them on both audio and video and then share the interview with your audience. This will not only amplify your content but your agency too.
It is likely that these influential people will also link to your work as a reference. You can use insurance agents from all walks of life who have made a mark in the insurance industry.
Where Can Your Agency Build Insurance Backlinks?
There are quite a lot of links you could build your insurance backlinks on. Most of these links can be acquired for free, while others often come with options for an upgrade in order to access enhanced content as well as increased visibility on each social platform.
Here are some of them:
1. Citations
Creating your business accounts on the sites below will increase your search visibility, traffic, as well as leads. Ensure your business is listed on these sites and enter as much information about your business as possible. Include your business name, address, phone, keywords, and photos and ensure all the information you provide on each site is consistent.
These sites include:
- AgentReview
- AmericanTowns
- CrunchBase
- DexKnows
- Foursquare
- Google My Business
- HotFrog
- Yellow Pages
- Yelp
2. Social Profiles
There are lots of social media websites in use today. You can create your insurance business accounts on these websites using your Business Name as your username and also in your profile URL. Then, include a link from all your social media accounts to your website. By doing these, you will benefit extensively from your social profiles.
Here are some social media platforms you should have a profile on:
3. Other Opportunities for Building Your Insurance Links
You can also make a list of websites you are sure you can either earn from or build backlinks on. There are lots of ideas you can choose from in order to do this.
So, what’s the next step?
Clearly, building real and natural insurance backlinks for your website from authoritative sites is not that difficult. As you have read, backlinks will not just improve your credibility and traffic, they will also quickly raise your rankings on search engines which, in turn, will skyrocket the organic traffic on your insurance website. However, doing this takes a lot of time and you may not have it.
In your bid to place your website on the first page of search results, be aware of claims such as:
“Reach the first page of Google rankings in as few as 30 days!”
Thank you so much for reading The ABC’s of Generating Insurance Backlinks. 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.
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