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

View the search results for each:

Google
Yahoo
MSN Live

The following screenshots (Click on any image to enlarge) detail how each search engine displays their search results and paid search.

Organic Search – This area is reserved for normal searches, your insurance agency website will display here depending on how your site matches up with the search term and how well your site is optimized.

Paid Search – The paid search area is reserved for websites who have signed up for an advertising program. It will cost money to have your site added to these sections. The top “banner” section will cost more than the right “column” section.

Local Search - Local search, all three major search engines display local search information. Interestingly, the local search section is located above the organic search area on each site. This really goes to show how IMPORTANT it is that your insurance agency is listed locally. Information on local search: Google, Yahoo and MSN Live.

Google:

Yahoo:

MSN Live:

As you may have guessed, I will be playing around with paid adwords from Google, Yahoo and MSN for this blog and a couple select insurance agencies who are interested in testing the waters of online advertising. If you are interested in paid search for your insurance agency let me know.

My next posting will be Monday, September 1st, 2008.