Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

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