SEO for Insurance Agencies
A simple (but effective) step-by-step guide to build a targeted SEO insurance agency marketing strategy.
What is SEO for Insurance Agencies?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website or web page to improve its visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO is a critical factor for any insurance agency looking to attract more clients. The higher your website ranks on Google, the greater the chance potential customers will click through to learn about your services.
Think of it as the “policy maintenance” for your website.
Just as maintaining insurance policies ensures clients are covered when they need it most, SEO ensures your website is ‘healthy’—optimized to be easily found by search engines. This means more traffic to your site and more opportunities to connect with clients seeking coverage.
Did you know?
- 99% of people use the internet to search for local businesses. (Source: BrightLocal)
- Consumer use of Google to evaluate local businesses has leapt from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. (Source: BrightLocal)
- Mobile devices are used for over 50% of all online searches. (Source: Statista)
A person searching for an insurance agency on Google may use a search query like “insurance agency near me” or “best insurance broker in [city name]”.
They may search for specific services such as “home insurance quotes” or “affordable car insurance”. Or they may even include their provider or policy type in the search query, such as “State Farm agent in [city name]” or “business liability insurance in [city name]”.
In order to benefit from SEO, you want your website to rank for these kind of searches.
Why is insurance agency SEO important?
Here are some of the benefits of using SEO for your insurance agency:
- Increased visibility: SEO increases the visibility of your agency’s website on search engines, making it easier for potential clients to find you when searching for insurance products or services.
- Cost-effective: Compared to traditional advertising methods like print or TV, SEO is a cost-effective way to attract new clients, ensuring your marketing budget delivers long-term results.
- Targeted audience: SEO allows you to focus on specific keywords and phrases related to the types of insurance you offer, ensuring you’re reaching people actively searching for your services.
- Local SEO: Local SEO helps improve your website’s visibility for people searching within a specific geographic location. This is especially valuable for insurance agencies looking to connect with clients in their local area.
- Building trust: By creating high-quality, relevant content, SEO helps establish your agency as a trusted authority. This builds credibility with search engines and potential clients, attracting more leads and reinforcing your reputation in the community.
Don’t forget!
Insurance agencies must comply with various regulations, such as state insurance laws, GDPR (if applicable), and FTC guidelines. These regulations govern operations, data handling, and marketing practices. Therefore, it’s critical that SEO strategies and tactics used by insurance agencies align with these compliance requirements.
By adhering to these standards, insurance agencies can maintain compliance while effectively reaching their target audiences through SEO and digital marketing strategies.
How do search engines work?
Search engines work by crawling billions of webpages with their own web crawlers, known as search engine bots or spiders. These are then stored and saved in an index.
Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines)
The Google Search Essentials define the actions that webmasters can take to make their websites better indexable or crawlable.
Read them here: Official Google Guidelines
The guidelines are based on three central aspects:
- Crawling – webmasters should support Google in finding websites.
- Indexing – webmasters should help Google to classify and “recognize” the content.
- Usability and user experience – webmasters should support the users of the websites in their use (usability and user experience).
Essentially, according to these Google guidelines, a website should support the search engine in crawling and indexing and ensure a good user experience.
Before you get started with SEO, there are a few prerequisites you want to check off first:
SEO Basics
At a bare minimum, you want to make sure you cover these basic standards before embarking on doing SEO:
- Website Speed – Have a fast loading site so potential customers don’t get tired of waiting for things to load.
- Mobile Friendliness – Make sure your site works on mobile as over 50% of users browse on mobile devices
- Analytics – Setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console & so you can understand what is and isn’t working.
- XML Sitemap – search engines use this to get your site’s URLs
- Robots.txt – tells search engine crawlers where they can (and where they can’t go) on your site.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of making website and server optimizations to help search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively (and therefore help to improve organic rankings).
Technical errors can hurt a website’s ability to rank. There are potentially a lot of errors, but here are some of the most common that will have the biggest impact when fixed:
- 404 errors
- Broken backlinks
- Poor URL structure
- Duplicate/thin content
- Poor internal linking
- Poor website architecture
- Missing metadata (page titles & meta descriptions)
- Missing H1 tags
Reach more clients with insurance agency SEO services
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people use when searching for specific products or services:
Once you understand the keywords your target audience is using, you can optimize your website to appear for these in search results.
Think of it like a risk assessment for your website. Just as a risk assessment helps an insurance agent understand potential risks for a client, keyword research helps you understand what people are searching for online when they need insurance services.
For example, if you specialize in auto insurance, keyword research might reveal that terms like “affordable auto insurance,” “best car insurance near me,” or “quick car insurance quotes” are popular searches. This information can be used to optimize your website, ensuring it ranks higher in search results for these terms. By doing so, you can attract more clients actively seeking the insurance services you provide.
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research is important for insurance agencies because it helps to:
- understand what people are searching for when they are looking for insurance services, and to optimize their website accordingly.
- identify the specific needs and pain points of their target audience, which can inform the content they create and services they offer, ultimately leading to more conversion and better client experience.
- identify the competition in the local area and understand what they are doing, so they can create a more effective SEO strategy.
What keywords are best to target?
Understand that there’s no “best” keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic.
The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on:
- The level of competition you’re up against.
- Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what’s currently ranking.
Short tail keywords are broad, general keywords that are made up of one or two words:
- Insurance
- Coverage
- Auto insurance
- Health insurance
- Home insurance
Whereas long tail keywords are more specific and longer phrases that are made up of multiple words:
- Affordable auto insurance quotes online
- Best home insurance providers near me
- Health insurance plans for families
- Life insurance policies with no medical exam
- Small business liability insurance coverage options
How to do keyword research for your insurance agency
To start keyword research: put yourself in your customers shoes.
What words, phrases and terms might they use in order to find solutions to these problems? These are the keywords you want to find and target.
Here is a simple process to follow:
Step 1) Make a list of broad topics
Create a list of general topics related to your business. These might correspond to product categories, services or anything you believe your target audience would be interested in.
For example, broad topics like:
- Auto Insurance
- Health Insurance
- Life Insurance
- Homeowners Insurance
- Business Insurance
Step 2) Expand topics into a list of phrases
Now you want to take those topics and expand them into a list of related phrases to target.
Imagine yourself as a buyer looking for your product or service and ask yourself: what would I type into Google?
Whilst keyword research tools are useful here, you can do this for free by Googling your keyword.
For example, Google “home insurance” and you’ll get a list of related questions people ask (which you can answer with blog content).
As well as related searches which may uncover other keywords to target:
Step 3) Analyze your keywords
Once you have a list of potential keywords, you need to gauge which terms are worth targeting.
You’ll need to use a keyword research tool here to pay attention to the following keyword metrics:
- Search volume
- Trends
- Search value over time
- Difficulty
- CPC
- SERP features
But most importantly, you want to consider relevancy and search intent:
Relevant keywords:
For relevancy, you want to ask yourself:
- Are these keywords relevant to my business?
- Do I have a chance of ranking for these terms based on the competition?
- Is ranking for these keywords going to have a positive ROI?
If you can answer YES to the above questions, chances are you have picked a relevant keyword
Search intent:
Search intent is the goal and purpose of a search query in Google. When someone searches for something, they are typically looking for more information before performing an action.
Search intent falls in four buckets:
- Informational – Searchers looking for information, they’ll use words like: how, what, why, when etc.
- Navigational – Searchers trying to find a specific site, they’ll use words relating to the service/product/brand
- Transactional – Searchers looking to purchase, they’ll use words like: buy, cost, pricing, cheap etc.
- Commercial investigation – Searchers researching prior to making a purchase, they’ll use words like: best, review, comparison etc
Not only is it important to select good keywords, but also to pick keywords you have a chance of ranking for.
For example, if you want to rank for the keyword: “Car Insurance Coverage Options” but your page doesn’t provide detailed information on different coverage types, you are not meeting a searcher’s intent and may struggle to rank for it.
Find profitable insurance agency keywords
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO describes specific elements of the pages on your website that you control, such as:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags
- Internal linking
- Images
- Content
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is crucial for insurance agencies because it ensures that their website is easily found and understood by search engines. This increases visibility and drives more traffic to the site, ultimately attracting more potential clients.
For example, if an agency offers “Cyber Liability Insurance” but doesn’t mention it on their website or fails to highlight it prominently, the site is less likely to appear in search results when someone searches for “Cyber Liability Insurance” or related terms. On the other hand, if the website is optimized with “Cyber Liability Insurance” as a focus keyword, it becomes more likely to rank in search results, attracting clients specifically looking for that service.
Additionally, on-page optimization improves the overall user experience. For instance, having a well-organized, easy-to-navigate website with clear calls to action like “Get a Free Quote” or “Contact Us for Coverage Options” encourages visitors to engage and convert into clients. By ensuring both search engine and user-friendly design, on-page SEO helps insurance agencies maximize their online presence and client acquisition.
On-Page SEO Checklist
- Use short & descriptive URLs – this helps people searching to understand what your page is about in Google.
- Write a good title tag & meta description – these show up in Google and help searchers understand what your page is about.
- Linking to relevant resources – this helps users to navigate your website.
- Optimize your images – give them a descriptive filename and alt text.
- Add schema markup – this helps search engines to understand your content
- Add internal links – these help Google understand what your page is about and to navigate your website.
Get actionable insights into your insurance agency SEO
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to specific actions done outside of your website, such as getting backlinks from other websites or social media.
What is link building?
Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving SEO. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building and guest posts.
Why is link building important?
Link building is important for insurance agencies because it helps to increase the visibility of a website on search engines. Google, for example, use links to a website as a way to determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website.
The more high-quality links that point to a website, the more likely it is to be considered an authority in its field and be given higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results page).
This increased visibility can drive more traffic to a website, which can lead to more clients for the insurance agency.
Link Building Tactics:
- Guest posts (either DIY it or use a done-for-you guest post service)
- Buying backlinks (like authority links)
- Content marketing (like linkable assets or editorial links)
- Tried and tested SEO methods (like blogger outreach, broken link building
- Using what you’ve got (link reclamation and brand mentions)
Link building is a valuable strategy for insurance agencies because it helps establish them as reputable and trustworthy providers of insurance services. High-quality links from authoritative websites within the insurance or financial industry signal to potential clients that the agency is respected and credible in its field.
Link building also increases referral traffic, directing visitors to an agency’s website through links on other websites. For example, a feature or partnership with a trusted financial advice blog or local business association website can introduce the agency to new audiences who might not have otherwise discovered it.
In summary, link building is crucial for insurance agencies as it enhances visibility, builds reputation and trust, and drives referral traffic to their website—ultimately helping to attract more clients and expand their reach.
Get high quality backlinks
Insurance Agency SEO Best Practices (+ 4 Tips)
- Use HTTPs (SSL certificates)
- Make sure your web site pages load fast
- Target a relevant topic that has traffic potential
- Meet search intent
- Target a topic you can compete for
- Use your target keyword in your page title, H1 tag and URL
- Use a short (but descriptive) URL
- Write a good title tag and meta description
- Optimize your images
- Write good content
- Add internal links
- Get more quality backlinks
4 Actionable Insurance SEO Tips
Here are some things your agency can do to begin the process of developing a good insurance agency marketing strategy.
- Add relevant keywords
- Optimize for local searches
- Start blogging
- Earn links
1. Add relevant keywords to your website
People seeking insurance services often look for specific coverage types or details like home insurance, auto insurance, or renters insurance. Long-tail searches, while having lower search volume, often attract highly targeted traffic that is more likely to convert into actual customers.
For example, instead of only focusing on optimizing your website for general terms like “insurance” or “insurance services,” you could incorporate more specific keywords like “car insurance in [your city],” “homeowners insurance in [your area],” or “affordable life insurance in [your state]” to better reach those ready to make a purchase.
2. Optimize your site for local searches
If your SEO plan doesn’t use local SEO to target specific areas, you’ll likely miss out on some great leads. Adding the name of your town and nearby towns to your website copy is the easiest way to get better results.
But don’t forget about things on your site besides writing copy. You should also add places to the titles and URLs of your pages.
Also, make sure that your business is listed on Google Maps and local directory sites. This will help your business show up more in local searches.
3. Start writing useful content
The main goal of insurance agency SEO is to get more clients by making your website more visible in Google.
One effective strategy is to write a blog. By creating content with helpful tips on topics like choosing the right insurance, understanding coverage options, or saving on premiums, you can attract interested readers who may eventually become clients. As your traffic increases, so will your search rankings, and people looking for insurance services in your area will begin to see you as a trusted and reliable resource.
4. Earn quality links
How high your site ranks in search results for keywords and phrases related to your business depends on how many and how good the links are to it. This means that you need to get good links if you want to keep your rankings.
You can do this by making good content and reaching out to bloggers and leaders in your field to ask them to share it. This will not only help you move up in search results, but it will also make your insurance agency look like a leader in the field.
Backlinks are a very important part of SEO for insurance companies. They are like a vote of confidence for the content you put out. Because of this, links are one of the most important ways that search engines like Google decide how to rank pages.
- Not doing enough keyword research
- Not matching user/search intent
- Targeting keywords that are far too difficult
- Not building enough quality backlinks
- Breaking Google’s Terms of Service when building backlinks
- Missing out on internal link opportunities
- Not allowing Google crawl your content
- Not allowing Google index your content
- Having a very slow site
- Treating SEO as a one-time thing
How does insurance agency SEO work?
SEO for insurance means making sure that your website is optimized for both search engines and users. This makes your website more visible in relevant and organic search results.
Optimizations include:
- on-page SEO
- link building
- technical SEO review
- content audit
- local citation audit
Why do insurance agencies need marketing?
It helps you stand out in a competitive market.
Your clients are your customers. A well-crafted marketing plan not only helps you identify your target market but also communicates to potential clients why they should choose your insurance agency over others.
A strong insurance marketing strategy should attract new clients, retain the ones you already have, and increase awareness of your services. The ultimate goal is to encourage potential clients to reach out for a quote or schedule a consultation with you online.
How long does insurance agency SEO take?
Typically, insurance agency SEO takes at least six months to deliver results.
In some cases, agencies may start to see results like increased traffic, phone calls, and appointments, in faster time frame than this.
Although typically 6 months is a good benchmark as SEO is a long-term strategy vs. a short-term strategy like PPC.
How much does SEO for insurance agencies cost?
Prices for insurance agency website SEO depend on multiple factors, but the average cost for insurance SEO is $1500 – $5000 per month.
If you’re looking to partner with a consultant or insurance agency SEO expert, the average rate is $100 – $300 per hour.
What’s Next?
Guest Posts
We do guest posts better than anyone else with complete transparency. You get to approve all placements before they’re made and even the exact anchor text that’s going to be used. Site owners themselves will produce your content to guarantee its a perfect match.
Content
Crafting the right message isn’t just a matter of choosing the right words. We develop site content and blogs using the latest tools to determine the right keywords and balance of terms to build high-performing content.
Managed SEO
Sometimes, it takes more than just one service to make a difference. Multiple services working in concert can amplify the effect and create the growth that’s evaded you in the past. Talk to us about managed SEO campaigns built around any of your goals.
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