7 Ways You can Help Your Insurance Agency Website

To paraphrase a past U.S. President: "Ask not what your website can do for you, ask what you can do for your website."
The search optimization conversation has been about keywords, meta tags and backlinks for so long now that we tend to overlook the free, inexpensive and simple things we can do to get more website visibility, traffic and leads. Here are the top seven.

7 Ways You can Help Your Insurance Agency Website

1. Email: What is the number one way people share links and info on web pages? Email. Are you making it easy for your clients to share content and information? Web pages that are about one topic, like a blog post, are easy to share. Web pages that cram a lot of information about a lot of things onto one page are less likely to be shared (and less easily discerned by search bots). If you have information worth sharing with you clients, and we all do, share it via email. Nothing is easier than forwarding an email.
2. Mobility... are you there? It's been a year since Google changed it's algorithm to favor sites that look good on mobile devices. If you website isn't mobile optimized or responsive, you are losing out on an increasing amount of search traffic that is mobile (over 50% and growing) and an increasing amount of desktop search.
3. Local intent, local results. Several insurance searches, including generic ones like 'insurance agent', 'car insurance' and 'business insurance' have what Google calls local intent. Local search results are displayed for these types of searches and the algorithm Google uses to determine what to display is different from organic and paid results. A good starting point to make sure you show up here is claiming your insurance agency's Google profile and making sure your basic business information is present and accurate on the major online directories, local search engines and review websites. Of the top 25 major listings, insurance agencies data is missing altogether 21% of the time. Information shows up inaccurately in 44% of listings, on average.
4. Reputation matters...a lot. Insurance agencies with recent customer reviews on multiple review platforms, like Google Maps, Yelp and Facebook, get far more click-throughs and calls than agents with stale, poor or no reviews. You can't get a lead without a call or click-through. Getting your agency to show up in search results is one thing, getting a lead is another.
5. Social hooks - your social accounts are made for them. Many insurance agency websites include Information that is seasonally relevant or are updated with blog posts. Sharing a quick summary with links back to your website for the full story is an easy Facebook or LinkedIn post and gets your website involved in the game.
6. Insurance carrier directories (agency locators). On average, information in agency locators is inaccurate or missing 37% of the time. Website click-throughs from these locators (referrals in analytics speak) convert at an incredibly high rate.
7. YouTube is a search engine. If your agency hasn't set up a YouTube channel, this is a good time to start. YouTube is the second largest search engine behind its parent company, Google and YouTube videos show up in Google search results. As an added bonus, your agency videos can be shared via email and social media.