Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

As we all ring in the New Year, I would like to wish you and your family the very best. We started this blog in late July 2008 to help our customers and all insurance agents learn ways to help promote their insurance agency website, prevent spam and technology in general. Since late July (a little over 5 months) we have had over 4,000 unique visitors and over 10,000 page hits.

We appreciate everyone’s support.

Have a great New Year!

Part 1 of a 2 part series about combating spam.

Fact: We all hate spam.
Fact: Spam will never disappear.
Fact: There are plenty of ways to protect your email from spam.

We all hate it, we all get it. It’s been around for years. Last week I discussed changing your out-of-office message to not include your email address. This is one of many ways to help combat spam for your insurance agency. There are other options as well.

Displaying Email on your Website

It only takes a few lines of code for a spammer to write a program that will scan your website for email addresses. (It’s actually fairly easy to do)

If you choose to display email on your website it is important to do one of three things:

Option A: Encode the email address or use javascript to print the email address. Although not 100% effective; it this option is better than just printing your email address.

Option B: Use CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.) CAPTCHA is a challenge response test where a user will have to enter characters that display in an image into a text box. Even though the largest companies have had their CAPTCHA hacked it is more effective than just encoding your email address.

Option C: Do not display your email address on your website, instead use a generic contact us box.

Any of the options above are better than taking no action. In my experience making it harder for spammers to scan your insurance agency website is the best defense. Spammers will just move on to another site if they are not having any luck with yours

Don’t give any website your email address.

Not giving out your email address isn’t really practical since most ecommerce sites require an email address to buy and sell and many sites require your email address to create an account. Every time you enter your email address on a website you are increasing your chance of spam.

Part 2 – How I am able to keep 99% of spam out of my inbox.

See Also: What Google Knows about Spam.

It is a pretty common practice for many of us use an out of office message to let people know that we are unavailable and will get back to them.

This is a good place to show some value in your website.

Ex: I will be out of the office from December 20th to January 2nd. For common questions please visit our website: http://demo.cfluent.com/faqs

What to always include:
A phone number for your agency
A link or two to your website
An alternative contact number

What not to do:
Provide emails for other people in your agency
Give a long detailed auto-reply of why you have to take a week off because your dog is sick.

Why should I not include an alternate email in my out of office?
Spammers will also receive your auto-reply email. Basically, they now know two things. One that your email is a legitimate email and secondly that you just gave them a couple more legitimate emails to spam.

Who is Matt Cutts?
Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. (Source)
Matt’s: Blog: http://www.mattcutts.com

He knows his stuff and put out a video earlier this year with some pretty good insight into website spam, SEO and Google.

Video Notes:

Lately, I have had several questions from agents regarding being contacted by companies who (for a fee) will go through their website and optimize it for search engines.

It is important not to fall into traps with companies who promise you top search listings. Let’s face it; if there was some secret way to guarantee your website top listings wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

SEO companies can play an important role in website development and marketing. They can also cost a pretty penny and leave you no better off than you were to begin with.

In November 2008 Washington State filed a lawsuit against a SEO company claiming they ripped off a handful of customers with unfulfilled promises.

What SEO companies should do:
Give you a complete analysis of your website, including broken links, top words used throughout your website, landing pages, Meta keywords, local search trends, determine how your website ranks among all major search engine, provide examples of ways to increase page rank,  etc.

Landing Pages:
Lately, “Landing pages” have been thrown around as the latest hip word to use in the SEO arena. A landing page is simply a page specific to one subject designed for search engines. For instance, if you sell crop insurance. On your website you should have a link for: example.com/crop-insurance this link would take you to a page specific for crop insurance.

Note for Confluency customers: Each of your product pages act as a landing page. Ex:
http://demo.cfluent.com/products/6/Boat

Cost Benefit Analysis:
The low end of SEO packages are usually around $30 to $60 per month. The average is probably about $200 a month. The high end could be upwards of $2,000 a month. (These numbers are solely taken from conversations I have had)

I’m not going to take into account the high end range; that is just crazy…

In my example I’m going to use $100 per month for a SEO package.

Annual fee: $1,200 – Benefit: (Unknown) Additional page hits: (Unknown)

What else can you do with $1,200 that will help your agency website?

Option 1: Pay me

Option 2: Pay-per-click advertisements: For $1,200 you can have a pretty steady marketing program that is guaranteed to increase the clicks to your website. (You will only have to pay when a click happens)

Using keywords that are not mainstream (Mainstream keywords or expensive keywords such as “Auto Insurance” or “Home Insurance”) you will spend about $0.20 to about $5.00 per click.

That’s 240 to 6,000 clicks to your website.

My conclusion:
Make sure you have gone through this blog especially the category “Search Engine Registration”

Pay for Yahoo or Google advertisements.

If you choose to entertain a SEO company, make sure you do the following:

• Ask for references, including phone/email addresses.
• Find out their “guarantee”
• Determine beforehand exactly what you are trying to achieve. Is it better page rank? More page hits