SEO Tools for Insurance Agents | The Complete Set
It’s no secret that every insurance agent is competing in a very competitive industry. There are thousands if not millions of independent, captive, commercial, etc. insurance agents out there trying to gain as much of the market that they can.
That is where a digital marketing plan comes into play, insurance agents rely on their digital marketing efforts to help grtheir great businesseat. But specifically, insurance agents need to be focusing on SEO (search engine optimization) getting to the top of their customers’ search results.
SEO Audit Tool
Before you begin doing any SEO for your website you need to have a better understanding of where your company is currently at. Use one of these tools to perform an SEO site audit:
Use any of these SEO tools for insurance agents and they will give you an in-depth look into what your site is doing good at and where it can improve.
You can see just one snapshot of what the site audit report will look like and some of the information it will show you.
It will give you a great look at the overall performance of your websites such as things like image size, site speed, page speed, or even image loading time. All of these may seem like small things but all put together they can greatly impact your SEO in either a good or bad way.
Site Security SEO Audit
Google wants to make sure that it is sending its users to safe sites that aren’t going to give them viruses or make it so they are vulnerable to being hacked. Before Google will ever rank you they need to make sure that you have what’s called an SSL Certificate and that you are using secure code.
Pay attention to this part of the audit because it may seem small but it’s a crucial element of your site’s ability to rank.
Mobile Usability SEO Tool
Here are some free tools that you can plug your website URL into and it will give you an idea of how well your website is optimized for mobile devices.
- Hubspot Website Grader
- Google search “mobile-friendly test“
Again, this may seem like a small thing but in the last couple of years, Google has taken great account of how well websites are optimized for mobile devices. It’s safe to say that the majority of users in almost every industry are doing their initial research if not all of it on a mobile device. Google wants to make sure it’s showing its users well-done websites that work on mobile. This is not a section to overlook so pay close attention to it.
Again there are a lot of things that these SEO audit tools can show you about what you are doing well but also where you could use some improvement. Make sure before you do anything in relation to SEO that you take a look at one of these reports.
Google Business Profile
This is a very underestimated tool in terms of developing your SEO, especially your local SEO. Having a properly optimized GBP (google business profile) is a great way to boost your local rankings.
How it works
The way that Google knows where you are is from your GBP, if Google sees that there is an insurance agent who is writing content about a certain area but doesn’t have a GBP then they aren’t going to rank them locally. Google will match the area that you have listed in your profile to the location you list on your website and begin to rank you accordingly in that geographic location.
If you are wanting to gain more local traffic or if your agency is only built around serving people within your geographic location then make sure you take advantage of setting this up and doing it correctly.
What to include
- Accurate name, address, & phone number that match your website
- Proper link to your website
- Images relating to what your business does
- Business hours
- A detailed description of what your business does
Also, make sure that you are constantly responding to reviews whether they or good or bad it doesn’t matter, Google wants to see that you are maintaining a good reputation.
Sitemap Generator SEO Tool
Submitting a sitemap to google isn’t something that we always think about doing when we are just starting our insurance agency website and doing the SEO. We tend to think more about content and how we are going to tag different elements.
For Google to be able to crawl/index your website correctly it needs to know where to go. That is why you HAVE to tell google where to go. Think about it as you are giving Google a map that they can follow along so they know how to crawl your website.
Use one of these tools to generate your free sitemap:
Once you have submitted your URL to one of the free SEO tools for insurance agents then you will submit your map to your account in Google Search Console.
It’s that simple, but it is something that you have to do if you want Google to view your website as an “authoritative source” and get you rankings. This is a very underestimated SEO tool for insurance agents and needs to be essential in your SEO efforts.
Insurance Agent Directories
A very popular SEO tool that can help boost your overall rankings as an agency is to be listed in as many relevant directories as possible.
When your customer searches things like “insurance agent near me” or “auto insurance near me” what will come up is a list of directories that will then hold a list of insurance agents. That’s why it’s so important to be listed in as many as possible so that way when people are searching in your area in turn it will increase your individual rankings.
SEO Content Writing – Free & Paid
One of the main components of SEO is the actual content that is on your website. This is what tells google what your whole website is all about. Beyond all of the back-end and technical aspects of SEO, you can’t forget about the content that your users are reading.
In the last couple of years, Google has begun to make a transition to rewarding websites that focus on users and write content that will be the most beneficial to the user. Google doesn’t want sites that are optimized for them, they want them to be optimized for the user.
Free vs. Paid
There are many ways to go about how you actually get the content that goes on your website but here are the two main ways.
Free:
You or your team can write the content yourself. Meaning that you sit down and figure out what content you want on your website and create it from scratch.
Pros:
- You can develop it exactly how you want
- Higher quality content because you know the material best
- It’s FREE!
Cons:
- Extremely time-consuming
- It’s not very scalable
Paid:
This is where you outsource your content writing needs to a third party who will write all the content you need. For most companies, you will pay per order and word count. (On average you could pay $60-80 for a 1,000-word blog)
Content writers:
Pros:
- You can get a lot of content really fast
- It’s easy to scale your business this way
- Good keyword placement
Cons:
- The content isn’t always exactly what you were looking for
- It can be very pricy over time
It’s important to figure out first what your company needs most when you are deciding how you want to get your content. A lot of times for newer and start-up insurance agents it’s easiest to write the content yourself when you can to save some money. For agents that already have some growth but want to scale even more outsourcing, your content is another great SEO tool for insurance agents.
Google Analytics SEO Tool
Google Analytics is one of the best SEO tools for insurance agents because it takes you through all aspects of your website and shows you its analytics of it. It can track what keywords are people visiting your site from most, how long people are staying on each page, and even what browser they use to access your website.
Important SEO Analytics
Google Analytics can be a bit complex at first and hard to understand. Here is what we found are some of the most important analytics your insurance agency can focus on with SEO:
- Impressions (how many users are seeing your website on the search results page)
- CTR (click-through rate is what percentage of users click on your website on a results page)
- Conversion Rate (the percentage of users who visit your website who actually convert into paying customers)
In simpler terms, you want to track how many people see you on Google, how many people visit your website, and how many people convert into actual clients.
There are thousands of other things this SEO tool can help you with and you should definitely explore, but these three analytics will give you a good starting point.
Schema Markup SEO Tool – Free
This is a more advanced portion of SEO but can be very beneficial for insurance agents if used correctly. Schema markup or structured data in simple terms is a way to tell google exactly where each bit of important information is and what the information is.
What this does is improves the way that your result looks on a search result page. It’s one thing to get your result to the top of the results page but the user is going to pick the one that is most appealing to the eye and that is what structured data is all about.
You can see that the top result has a lot more information in it and is much more appealing to the eye. When you see these two results on the search results page side by side the majority of users are going to want to click on the one that shows ratings, reviews, quick options, etc. Though both of the results may be ranked 1 & 2 it doesn’t matter because one looks a lot more trustworthy.
Now that you can see how important it is to use schema markup in your SEO work, how exactly do you implement it?
Schema markup is a type of code that you put on the back-end of the content. I know, anything involving code sounds very overwhelming but that is why you use these free tools that will build the code for you, and you just copy & paste it into the content.
It’s as simple as that, plug in the information for your insurance agency article or blog and it will generate your code. Copy, paste, and you are all done! A great SEO tool for insurance agents who want to do advanced optimizations easily and free.
Keyword Research SEO Tool – Free
The base of SEO is keywords and the search terms that you want your website to rank for. Figuring out what keywords to target for your insurance agency often isn’t an easy task and can be sort of confusing. Here are our top, free, keyword research SEO tools that you should use:
- WordStream Keyword Research
- Wordtracker Keyword Research
- Keyword Tools seobility
- SpyFu (this is a paid platform but it is very easy to use)
Use these tools to help figure out what will be the best keywords to go after for your insurance agency. Here are some things that we suggest agents focus on when picking keywords
- Search Volume (number of monthly searches the keyword has)
- KD – Keyword Difficulty (how hard it will be to rank for the given keyword)
- Clicks (how many times a user clicks on the keyword per month)
- Trend (how trendy the keyword search is)
Paid SEO Agent (Not PPC)
There are hundreds of different SEO tools for insurance agents out there that will help you improve your agency’s rankings. The bottom line is that most agents don’t want to sit down and try and use all these tools and improve their SEO when they could be selling insurance.
That is why outsourcing your SEO will be the best investment you can make as an insurance agent. You focus on selling your insurance and let a professional SEO agency handle your marketing. These professionals know what it takes to get your agency more business which will allow you more time to focus on actual insurance.
Although some of these agents will cost you, you will get way more results and business than by doing the SEO yourself. Here are some price points you can expect:
- $100-250 per year (basic on-site optimization, probably won’t yield many results)
- $750-1,500 per month (advanced SEO and content creation, this will be best for newer agents or businesses who want to really grow)
- $3,000+ (full sit optimization, backlinking strategy, industry content creation, and more)
These numbers to some may seem like a lot or do not understand why you would pay someone too much to do your SEO. In reality, you need to think of it as if you pay a professional SEO agency $1,000/month but then you gain an extra $3,500/month then that’s money that you wouldn’t have made without them.
You may first want to try and navigate these SEO tools but if you aren’t seeing the results that you are wanting it’s worth investing in a professional to help you out.
Another benefit to using a professional agency to do your marketing is for the most part not only will they do your SEO but they could also be a multichannel marketing solution for you as well. This means they could help you utilize a pay-per-click plan, email marketing, or even social media management.
Where to Start your SEO
If you only take away one piece of information from this article make sure you remember this; If you want to grow as an insurance agent you need to evaluate your current marketing efforts, utilize these SEO tools, and if that doesn’t work then let a professional help you grow!
