Insurance SEO: How to Use Content Marketing for Your Insurance Business

 

As someone who sells insurance, you have to work even harder to find potential customers.

You not only need a great reputation, but you need a solid marketing plan that focuses heavily on SEO.

Not sure why or how SEO can help your business?

No matter what regional market you service or what type of insurance you sell, here’s how SEO can help your insurance business succeed.

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Insurance Businesses Benefit From SEO

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

SEO is the part of your marketing strategy that helps you show up in search engines like Google when potential customers search for you.

Search engines use complex algorithms and ranking factors to determine which pages belong at the top of the list and which deserve to be buried deep, deep down.

SEO helps you rank higher in search results, and higher rankings help in many ways:

• Increase website traffic
• Improve brand awareness
• Bring in new customers
• Increase conversions
• Drive revenue
• Establish trust
• Position you as an authority in your niche
• Draw traffic to your social media pages
• Improve engagement

Type the word “insurance” into the Google search bar, and you’ll see more than 1.5 BILLION results.

That’s a massive search volume of results to sort through. If you want to draw traffic to your web pages, you’ll need to rank at the top of that list.

Businesses in every industry have made SEO a priority because it works. Until you make SEO a part of your overall marketing strategy, you’ll never get the visibility you deserve.

 

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How to Use SEO for Insurance Marketing

Some insurance policies, such as auto insurance, homeowner’s insurance, and renter’s insurance, are mandated by laws, loan lenders, and private landlords.

Potential clients often seek out insurance companies for these types of policies because they’re legally required. But selling optional insurance products, such as life insurance and disability insurance, can be much more difficult.

Here are four ways to build an SEO-focused marketing strategy that can help you grow your business, regardless of the type of insurance you sell.

1. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO consists of strategies that help search engines understand what your website is about. Imagine you’re driving on a cross-country road trip. On-Page SEO (or Relevancy) is the GPS that makes sure you’re taking the fastest route to get to your destination.

So how do you start with on-page SEO?

Create one landing page for each type of insurance product you sell. On that page, give an overview of the service.

For example, if you sell auto insurance, create a page detailing each of the different types of vehicle policies you offer:

• Car insurance
• Motorcycle insurance
• Boat insurance
• ATV insurance
• RV insurance

If you sell life insurance, create one landing page for each of your various life insurance options:

• Term life
• Whole life
• Universal life
• Variable life insurance

After creating individual category pages for each of your products, you can optimize every page with keywords that are relevant to the insurance product.

Assigning each page a meta title (title tag), and meta description, and header tags is also important. Titles will help search engines understand what your site is about so they can rank your site in relevant searches. Your meta description will grab readers’ attention on the search results page.

As an example, here’s our meta title and description for our own website:

We give an overview of additional initiatives to handle for those pages in our SEO foundation guide here.

2. Blogging for Insurance Businesses

If you’re looking for an insurance SEO strategy that can help you establish yourself as a trusted authority in your niche, it’s time to start blogging.

Blogs can improve lead generation, draw traffic to your website, and build brand awareness, all of which can make selling insurance much easier.

By writing and publishing blog posts that appeal to your target audience, you can bring customers to you without ever having to make a cold call, mail a flier, or do time-consuming outreach.

To create a blog that drives traffic, you’ll need to perform keyword research to identify topics.

When potential clients type a search query in Google, they’re typing key words that describe the topic or question they’re looking for an answer to. A successful blog will answer the question and give the searcher the information they’re seeking.

Insurance agencies can benefit from publishing different types of blogs. Three of the most important types are Awareness Content, Thought Leadership Content, and Sales Centric Content.

Awareness Content

Awareness Content is the best way to build visibility for your brand. Awareness Content consists of educational resources your customers consume when trying to learn more about specific types of insurance.

The primary goal of these articles it to serve as informative guides that rank in search engines for valuable phrases related to your business.

Awareness Content will generate minimal sales, but will bring potential customers to your site and enable you to funnel them to more valuable pages on your site.

Thought Leadership Content

Thought Leadership Content consists of opinions, unique processes, and more from industry experts.

Thought Leadership Content conveys your expertise in the insurance industry to your readers and earns you the reputation of being an insurance expert.

Funnel readers to these types of articles by linking to them in your Awareness Content.

Sales Centric Content

Sales Centric Content drives minimal traffic, but converts a large percentage of those readers into leads.

Sales Centric Content might consist of recommended insurance products for a specific audience (ex. life insurance for teachers) or a comparison of the best disability insurance providers.

We see the best results when linking to Sales Centric Content from our Awareness Content to drive more visibility and leads.

Strategically Build these into SEO Silos

To maximize the impact of these three types of content, we build out pillar pages for each primary content theme.

Pillar pages serve as the starting point for people looking to find information about a broad theme on your site. They help silo readers and search engines to understand the depth of content about a core theme of your site.

There are many approaches to defining the appropriate silo structure for your site. If your business provides multiple insurance products, you might create an SEO silo for each insurance product.

For example, we built out SEO silos for every insurance product that Physicians Thrive offered. We build one pillar page for financial planning and another for disability insurance.

Here’s how a pillar page works:

Let’s say you create a pillar page about life insurance. On that page, you can briefly discuss that you offer term life, variable life, and whole life policies. Within that page, you can link out to long form-blog posts on each of those different types of policies.

Pillar pages are another way to show your authority and expertise, but they also generate internal links on your website. These internal links will help Google to understand which pages on your site are the most important.

More on Link Building

Link building is an essential component of any SEO strategy. The more high-quality websites that link back to your site, the better.

Backlinks are links from external sites. Search engines see them as an indication that your content is valuable enough to be included in another blogger’s post.

Backlinks can happen naturally, and the higher you rank in search results, the more likely you are to get them. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation because you need them to become one of the top results, yet you’ll get more once you reach the top of the results page.

Don’t worry; there is a way around that:

Guest blogging.

Many websites accept posts from guest bloggers, as long as those posts contain high-quality content. When you write a guest blog, you can include a link back to your own website that will appear on the guest blogging site.

Voila! You’ve just created your own backlink and improved your search engine rankings.

Learn more about how to seek out guest blogging opportunities.

3. An Effective Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing is not dead.

As long as you provide your subscribers with relevant emails that contain useful information, they’ll continue to read them (or at least remain on your subscriber list).

As an insurance agent, your emails can include all kinds of content:

• Reminders to renew existing policies
• Offers to bundle policies or switch policies and save money
• Links to new blog posts

Depending on how your email newsletters perform and how many clicks they generate, you can send them as often as once a week or as little as once a month.

4. A Local SEO Strategy

You can increase revenue and drive traffic to your insurance website by adopting a local SEO strategy for customers in your regional market.

While many customers turn to nationally recognized insurance agencies for their policies, many rely on a local agent. That means that their search query in Google is likely to be a local search, such as “where to buy car insurance in [my town],” or “where to buy car insurance near me.”

You can take your SEO strategy up a notch by optimizing your on-site pages, meta titles, meta descriptions, and blog posts with the name of your locale.

Claim Your Google My Business Listing

When people search “insurance companies near me” or “insurance companies in [my town]”, the results that show come from your Google Business Profile. If you don’t already have one or haven’t yet claimed yours, do so now.

In your GMB listing, you’ll want to provide all of the most up-to-date information about your business:

• Phone number
• Physical address
• Email contact
• Website
• Services offered
• Office photos
• Operating hours

That way, customers will be able to contact you with ease.

Ask for Customer Reviews

One way to build your online profile is to encourage customers to leave honest reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, and other online review sites, as well as your company’s website.

Offering a small incentive or a future discount on services is a great way to entice and encourage customers to want to leave you a positive review.

Prospective customers often rely on reviews from existing customers to determine whether or not they should choose a particular insurance agent. The more local reviews you have, the more trust you’ll build with potential new customers.

Plus, positive testimonials from real customers are excellent marketing tools!

Testimonials also help with SEO because prospective customers can see that you’re engaging with your brand. The more engagement you have, the more likely it is that your website or Google My Business page will be pushed to the top of the search results.

 

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Insurance Companies Need to Analyze SEO Results

Whether you’re just starting a blog or are working to improve upon your existing marketing strategy, it’s important to analyze your results.

Every insurance company wants to drive more traffic to their agency’s website to generate more insurance leads and convert those leads into actual customers. The only way to know if you’re meeting that goal is to analyze your digital marketing results.

Analyzing the metrics of your SEO campaign will help you determine what type of content is performing and what type of content isn’t.

Is it your monthly newsletters that are generating all the results?

Are your thought leadership blogs helping you soar to the top of Google search results?

Are your guest blogs getting linked back to over and over again?

Having a content strategy in place isn’t enough — you also need to be fluid and willing to tweak that strategy at any given point in time.

The more you analyze your data, the easier it becomes to shift in the direction of what’s working and steer away from what’s not.

See how we helped one insurance and financial services firm to grow leads by 790%

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Make SEO One Part of Your Overall Content Marketing Strategy

Every business needs a content marketing plan, but when your sole focus is on selling insurance, it’s tough to devise your own.

Some insurance agents are incredible salespeople but don’t like writing. Some are skilled at in-person sales tactics but don’t know how to “sell” online. Some don’t have the time to add another task to their plate.

That’s okay — that’s what digital marketing agencies are for.

Digital marketing agencies can handle all of the specifics of your online marketing campaign. Doing it on your own will save you money and help to minimize your advertising budget, but if you don’t have the time or the experience to do it yourself, hiring a pro to handle it for you is well worth the investment.

A digital marketing agency can analyze your data and metrics, something that even the most skilled content marketing writers and content strategists may not be able to do on their own.

Related: Should you hire an outside agency or an in-house marketer?

 

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Whether you’re an insurance company, an independent agent selling insurance in a local market, or a licensed agent working for a nationally recognized company, you can benefit from SEO.

Ready to hire a digital marketing agency to drive organic traffic to your website? We’d love to chat!