What Is Insurance Search Engine Optimization? (Insurance SEO)
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. Insurance SEO is technically defined as the process of improving the visibility of a web page on search engines.
In layman’s terms, when someone types a specific keyword into Google, Yahoo, or Bing, the search engines attempt to provide the most relevant results to the end-user.
For example: Let’s assume for a moment that an investor owns a number of apartment buildings and one of the rental properties has now become vacant.
His current agent does not offer coverage for vacant properties and tells the investor to find an insurance company offering insurance for vacant homes or buildings.
The investor has no idea where to begin looking, so he decides to search on the internet and types the following keyword into the search engine: Vacant Home Insurance Cincinnati.
When this investor types that specific group of keywords into Google, Google will bring up a listing of websites that are most relevant for that term, Vacant Home Insurance Cincinnati.
Whichever website is most relevant for that term will show up in the first position. The website that is second most relevant will show up in the second position, and so forth and so on.
And what’s interesting about Insurance SEO is that your ranking can change every day due to various factors.
However for your website to be noticed by prospects, you have to be consistently on page one of the search engines for your various keyword terms.
There are hundreds of different keyword terms for insurance.
How Do You Get Your Insurance Website to Rank for a Keyword?
There are two specific steps that you need to take to rank keywords. The first step is On Page SEO and the second step is Off Page SEO. Off Page SEO is far more important to rank keywords compared to On Page SEO.
To rank a keyword is actually quite difficult and takes much time and effort.
Additionally if you take the wrong step you can get your website banned by Google! (Google calls this delisting.)
Back Linking is Off Page Insurance SEO.
Off Page Insurance SEO is the strategy of acquiring back links. A back link is the process of placing your website URL on another company’s website. For example this is the URL to my independent agency: http://www.Pathwayinsurance.net
Placing my agency link on this website gives me a “back link” to the Pathway Site. A Google “bot” searches this website and it detects the “back link” to a third-party website (Pathway Insurance Web site).
A Google “bot” is an automated robot that scans every searchable website on the planet. Each search engine has their own “bots” that are constantly scanning websites for ranking purposes.
After the scan is complete the Google “bot” places that “back link” in its database for ranking purposes and remembers that Pathway Insurance website received a back link from Web Insurance Network and gives it credit for that link.
Links are not all equal. Some links are far more powerful than other links. More information can be found on this subject by clicking on Off Page SEO.
The back linking process is actually far more complicated and difficult than what I have illustrated, but the most important step you must take to achieve ranking for a specific keyword is acquiring good back links.
Exercise Extreme Caution When Acquiring Back Links
For Insurance SEO
Due to recent changes in search engine algorithms with Google, many websites experienced significant drops in search engine results because they acquired “bad” back links! Google specifically calls this the bad neighborhood penalty!
If you acquire what Google terms “bad” back links, you will get slapped with the bad neighborhood penalty from Google!
That means your website will be penalized and you will lose ranking because you, theoretically entered a bad neighborhood.
You need to obtain the best back links to achieve the best results. Don’t be tempted to purchase link blasts because your links might land in Google’s bad neighborhood program!
Take time to research before you begin to acquire back links.
Would You like Us to Develop a Back Linking Strategy for Your Insurance Website?
If you are happy with your website but you need help in developing an effective insurance SEO strategy contact my insurance office at (513) 662-7000. You can hire us by the job, month, or if you need a brand-new website we can help you with that as well.
We do not build cheap insurance websites.
Every website is custom-designed to your specifications!