Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

All of this talk about search engines started making me think about search functionality inside of agency websites. How useful are they? Come to find out they are VERY USEFUL. I did a survey on insurance agency websites and a couple other non insurance sites and found that 30% of users went straight for the search box vs. trying to navigate for what they trying to find.

Some of the top searches included “Auto Quote”, “Business Insurance” & “Homeowners”

You could spend a lifetime analyzing search traffic only to find out that you pulled out all of your hair before you learned something worthwhile.

Interestingly, users who searched for “Homeowners” were not always looking for homeowners quotes. Many of the users were looking for homeowner FAQs such as “Do I have enough coverage for my possessions (Coverage C)”

Example Search for Homeowners:

http://demo.cfluent.com/search.php?search=homeowners

This goes to show that insurance agency websites need to be more than just quote forms. They need to have information for the user.

Building a search engine for a website is not easy. There are however, a couple free search engine APIs that you can install on your website that will work. The disadvantage of these free search engine APIs is they usually come with some type of advertising. (Hey there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch, right?)

Google’s Search API: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Yahoo’s Site Search (Requires your site to be hosted through Yahoo)
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/addons/psearch/psearch-02.html

Ask.com Search API: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/add_search_to_site.shtml