What Are the SEO Basics for Insurance Agents?

Search engine optimization (SEO) for insurance agents can be one of the most critical parts of marketing. In today’s digital world, customers want to search online for essentially everything before they make a purchase. From searching for what to buy and comparing prices, to reading business reviews, customers want to be able to find what they’re looking for online. 

But what websites do customers actually visit when conducting these online searches? Generally, the higher a website appears on a search engine results page (SERP), the more clicks it will get from that search relative to other results. A study by Sistrix, an SEO tools company, finds that the first organic result receives 28.5% of all clicks. By the time you get to the 10^th result, only 2.5% click to visit that site.

So if an insurance agent has strong SEO, they can appear higher in search results, which typically leads to more website traffic. In turn, that traffic can yield more sales as both current and potential customers learn about your offerings. 

So how do you get to the point where customers easily find you online? It starts with learning the basics of SEO for insurance agents. Unfortunately, there are no exact formulas you can follow to gain a top spot in search results. Still, there are best practices you can apply to improve your odds of ranking high. 

SEO can drive visitors to your website. But once they land there, is your site set up to help you close deals? If not, we can help. Click the button below to learn more.

Using Keywords for Insurance SEO

One of the pillars of SEO for insurance agents is using keywords to attract traffic. If you can predict what customers will search for, you can incorporate those words onto the page you’re trying to rank highly for.

“The most basic signal that information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search query. If those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings or body of the text, the information is more likely to be relevant,” says Google.

Finding Keywords

The first step to using keywords effectively is figuring out what keywords to try to rank for. Even if you rank highly for certain keywords, if your audience isn’t searching for them, you’re not getting much out of your ranking.

Instead, use tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner. Even if you’re not planning to run ads, this tool will help you find information like how often people search for certain terms. You can also get ideas for related terms.

For example, you might think to try to rank for a keyword like “business insurance.” But because that’s such a broad term with so much competition, you might not have much luck ranking high. Perhaps a more specific term like “business insurance for landscapers” would be more practical to try to rank for. Conversely, a more specific term like “business insurance for independent bookstores” might not have enough search volume.

You can also focus on local SEO for insurance agents. In that case, you might be able to use keywords like “business insurance in San Diego” (or wherever you’re located). That way, local customers can easily find you online. This local connection could help with converting website views into actual policy purchases. 

Keep in mind that search trends change. It’s important to stay active with your keyword research. This includes continually researching search terms and refining your website and landing pages.

Incorporating Keywords

As you start to find keywords you want to rank for, you can begin adding those terms to your website. Places such as page titles, metadata (the title and description that show up in search results), page copy, and blog content can all be great places to incorporate keywords.

For example, if you’re trying to boost local SEO for insurance agents by using keywords like “business insurance in San Diego,” you could write on your About page something like: “Finding business insurance in San Diego can help your company mitigate risk. As an experienced agent, I offer business insurance in San Diego that helps you worry less and focus more on growing your company.”

You could also write a blog article about the top questions business owners have when searching for business insurance in San Diego. Doing so can allow insurance agents to naturally work in keywords for SEO. In general, aim for a keyword or string of keywords (i.e., keyphrase) to account for 1-3% of an article’s total words.

However, you don’t want to stuff keywords into your website copy in a way that feels jarring or unnatural to readers. Keywords are only one component of SEO, and if you overuse them to the point that no one wants to read your content, your SEO will likely suffer. SEO for insurance agents depends on providing valuable content that helps your potential clients, not tricking them into visiting your site.

“As long as you think about your users’ enjoyment when creating content, Google is likely to show you some love in return. Quality content that is relevant to your audience is the single most important element on your page.”

Wix, a website development platform. 

Building Links for Insurance SEO

Search engines want to display relevant information to users, so search algorithms try to get a clear sense of a webpage’s authority and trust. A webpage might have the most keywords on it, but the content itself might not be relevant for a search user. As such, other factors like gaining links to and from a website can help boost SEO for insurance agents.

Backlinks

One of the most important yet difficult ways to improve SEO for insurance agents is to gain links to your site from other sites. These are known as backlinks. 

“Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a [search results page],” says Moz, an SEO tools company. 

So how can insurance agents gain backlinks? One relatively easy idea is to create profiles on various sites, such as insurance industry groups. In many cases, you can link back to your own website from your profile, which could potentially help your SEO. 

Similarly, you could try guest blogging for another website if they allow you to include a link to your website in your bio. Or, you could reach out to other websites to ask them to link to your content. “You could create an amazing piece of content, and email them to tell them about it. In turn, if they find it valuable, they’ll reference it. You can also suggest where they could link to it,” explains Hubspot.

External Links

In addition to trying to gain backlinks to your site, insurance agents can try to boost SEO by linking out to other sites. For example, this article you’re currently reading links out to other sites that provide supporting information on SEO.

“Today’s savvy readers look for signals that your information is authoritative and trustworthy, and external links are examples of that,” explains Alexa, an internet analytics subsidiary of Amazon. “All other things being equal, a page linking out to related content could reasonably be expected to perform better than one with no external links.”

Internal Links

Another relatively straightforward way to improve SEO for insurance agents is to add links from one webpage to another within your website. Doing so can help search engines better understand what each page is about so they can deliver relevant results to search users.

For example, you could add links from one blog post to a few others in places where a reader might want more information. Suppose you had one blog post about startup costs, another about hiring employees and another about compliance. Within the startup costs blog, you might mention labor costs and legal fees. As such, you could link internally to the hiring and compliance articles. Hubspot advises using between two and four internal links for each article.

Optimizing Page Setup

Search engines also account for the usability of sites when determining rankings. So, to improve SEO, insurance agents should focus on some of the ways their websites and specific pages are set up. Although this can be more technical than areas like incorporating keywords, beginners can use tools like Yoast SEO for help. Some of the areas to optimize include:

Meta Tags

When publishing a blog article or another website page, you may have the option to customize the meta title and meta description, depending on your website development platform. Adding keywords to these fields, which are what a user sees when looking at search listings, can be a great way to improve SEO for insurance agents.

Header Tags

A search engine crawling your site reads code, rather than what’s displayed to website visitors. So, behind the scenes, webpage titles and subheads contain code known as header tags. The H1 tag, for example, is usually used for the headline web page visitors see.

To improve SEO for insurance agents, focus on including keywords in your headers. If you’re able to check the code or use an SEO tool, you might also be able to confirm whether the headers have the right tags. For instance, you wouldn’t want your headline to have an H2 tag instead of an H1.

Alt Text

Alt text adds information to images on your site, which can help with accessibility as well as boosting SEO for insurance agents. This information may not be visible to readers, but behind the scenes, it can help search engines deliver more accurate results to users.

“For example, if the page mentions poodles, labradors, and retrievers, then Google knows it’s about dog breeds,” explains Ahrefs, an SEO tools company. That page might also have images of dogs. “While Google can almost [certainly] tell that these are images of dogs without alt text, the specific breed may be less obvious—and that’s where alt text comes in.”

Mobile Appearance

If you want clients to find your site through search engines, you need a mobile-friendly site. Most Google searches come from a mobile device, says Google, and the mobile version of your site can affect your search rankings. On a non-optimized site, some webpages may be hard to view on small screens.

You can test whether your website is mobile-friendly via Google. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you may need to consult with a web developer who can help insurance agents create mobile-friendly, SEO-friendly sites.

What Does Your Insurance SEO Lead to?

Ultimately, search engines want to display sites relevant to what users search for. So, to improve SEO, insurance agents need to think about making their sites easy-to-use and relevant to visitors. Following these SEO basics for insurance agents can help, especially if improvements are made with your audience in mind, rather than trying to check a box to trick an algorithm.

Once visitors land on your page through search engines, you want to make sure your hard work improving SEO pays off. Make sure your site is easy to read, navigate and find information that can lead to sales. For example, using Wheelhouse, an InsurTech platform powered by Talage technology, visitors can quickly procure bindable quotes from your website. That can be significantly easier than finding your blog post through a search engine and then having to poke around your site for pricing information, only to find out they have to call for details.

Great SEO is only half the battle for insurance agents. SEO can deliver visitors to your website, and then it’s up to you to close deals.