Your insurance agency should focus on search terms that yield thousands of results each month, or just a handful. This question is dependent on your business goals, budget, and expertise. The following questions will help you determine this:
1. Are you unsure if Insurance Agency SEO is an important component of your agency’s marketing plan? If you are an insurance company, or any other type of insurance entity you have to decide if your Insurance Agency SEO will be a key part of your 2011 marketing plan.
2. How much do you plan to invest in Agency SEO?
3. Do you plan to use SEO or PPC for organic Insurance?
4. Are you sure you have the internal resources necessary to accomplish this task (if you assume your technical resources are sufficient, this could be incorrect).
5. Are you planning to outsource the campaign?
6. If you don’t have the resources to do it yourself or are looking for an external provider, how did you establish a budget?
7. How do you measure campaign effectiveness? Are you going to target lower volume keywords phrases or dominate longer-tail phrases that are less competitive?
8. How do you convert between the two approaches?
9. What is the time it will take to reach Google page one rankings (currently, that’s about 70% of the market so the use of that particular search engine name)?
10. How much traffic are you requiring?
11. What are the expected price point, margin, and conversion rates?
12. Do you want to drive large numbers of visitors to your site using a shotgun approach? Or do you prefer a sniper approach that targets specific types of traffic to your website?
13. What landing pages will you design to support specific Insurance SEO initiatives?
14. Are you ready to leverage SEO for your insurance agency website? Is it current and professional with relevant, compelling content?
15. Is your agency primarily focused on B2B or do you also target B2C? Are there reciprocally-beneficial campaign opportunities in either case?
16. Are you aware of the fact that search engine results on page two and three generate virtually no traffic when people talk about them?
17. Is there a clear call-to-action on your agency’s website? Your website must capture web traffic even if it is significantly increased.
18. Are all prospects of insurance agencies able to see your call to actions? Examples of call to action: Click here for our newsletter, Click here for our workshop registration; Click Here to contact us to view our case studies for insurance agencies.
19. Website visitors will be able to immediately understand your unique value proposition.
20. Have you considered seperating off-page and on-page SEO efforts? Both are different and require a separate web marketing plan.
Ask these questions before you embark on an SEO campaign. These questions will help you decide if your goal is to target less competitive keywords and if you want to focus on more highly competitive keywords. Your agency may wish to outsource SEO services. Make sure they can answer all your questions with verified results. It is important to have clear expectations in any new industry, such as search engine optimization. Before you start your campaign, make sure you know the expected results, budget and timeframe. Most agencies expect to be on page one in search engine results within 60 to 90 days.
