Before we get too deep into this post, I want make one thing clear. I’ve tried to make this post as light and as succinct as possible. If we were to get into the “nitty gritty” of every situation, this post would extend to a multi-post series. If you have specific questions or concerns, pick up the phone and call me and I’ll be happy to help you with any questions you have about this post or issues you have with marketing your insurance agency locally.

Let’s get to it.

Are you a captive or independent agent/agency?

Whether you’re looking for an SEO firm, have an SEO firm or you’re doing your own SEO, it’s incumbent upon you or your current firm to know what the difference is and how this impacts your bottom line. If I had to name the number one issue that I have seen in failed local marketing campaigns for insurance agents, it’s a poor understanding of specific keywords that relate to the agency. As an SEO practitioner, it starts with understanding what the insurance agent does, what they sell and who they service.

Whether you’re an independent or captive agent, each scenario comes with its own unique challenges for marketing online. Does your current SEO firm know this? If they don’t know the difference, they could be wasting part of your marketing dollars.

Think about it logically. The way a Farmer’s Bureau agent markets herself online will be totally different than an agent that can write with over 10 different insurers/carriers. If your SEO firm doesn’t know the difference and they haven’t positioned you correctly online, you may have an issue. It’s starts with extensive keyword research as it relates to your locality and your business.

Do you want more preferred/standard business or non-standard business?

If you’re a captive agent with State Farm, you’re more than likely going to prefer targeting standard/preferred clientele online.

Some agents I speak with don’t care about what kind of customers they attract and some do. For example, if you’re writing for insurance companies that don’t have good rates for non-standard customers, you’re going to want to stay away from keywords that typify non-standard customers. There’s no point in speaking to the prospect if you have zero chance of writing the policy. Correct? Again, this is an issue I’ve seen many times on previously managed SEO campaigns that I’ve taken over. Some SEO firms simply use the “shotgun approach” and isolate high volume keyword terms that make no difference to the insurance agency’s bottom line.

We’re going to talk a little more about it later in the post but if you’re wanting more standard/preferred customers, you’re going to want to stay away from managed campaigns by Dex, Yellow Pages, Google AdWords and sources like NetQuotes.

What is your specialty in the insurance industry?

Do you sell more personal or commercial lines? Do you prefer to sell auto and home insurance? Depending on where you are, there are probably at least 5 other insurance agents that sell comparable products to what you sell. What separates you from them? Do you have or have you considered a marketing plan that isolates your abilities so you can dominate your local market?

What language does your customer speak?

One of the more overlooked factors that count for insurance agencies is understanding their local market and their current metrics. If 20% of your customer base is Hispanic and you’ve made no effort to market to them, doesn’t it makes sense to inquire and research the possibility of attracting more of these individuals from your community? A good SEO firm worth their salt should be able to find unique local opportunities that will put you in a position to attract more members of the local community. This is an overlooked factor in SEO that so many people get wrong.

Do Pay Per Click managed campaigns from Google Adwords, Yellow Pages, Dex Media and others work for local insurance agents?

The short answer is no. Are there exceptions? Yes but the exceptions usually distinguish themselves by investing a huge amount of time into their pay per click campaigns and most insurance agency owners I know don’t have the time or expertise for this.

In the image below, I’ve highlighted the paid sections in red and the organic sections in green. Generally speaking, your best bang for your buck is if you invest in getting your insurance agency to appear within the green section consistently.

The very customer that clicks the ads sections (red) are the very customers that are statistically more difficult to retain on a yearly basis. To generalize, these customers in many cases are impulse buyers that are easily distracted. Logically speaking, they responded to the loud ad that says “Hey I can save you money!” and that is the same customer that will respond to another advance by another agency that saves them $50 on a yearly auto insurance policy.

What Google Adwords and Yellow Pages don’t want you to know is that 88% of customers look farther down (in the green section) in the page results and prefer to click organic listings. The majority of these customers trust the results in the green section far more than the ads in the red section. So if I’m running your insurance SEO campaign, this is the area that I’m targeting for you.

Now there’s always exceptions to the rules but if I’m in the insurance business, I’m going to try to stay away from any sort of paid lead or paid click. The main reason is that words associated with the insurance industry are the most expensive keywords online. I’ve researched insurance keywords that cost upwards of $55 a click. On a local campaign level, you’re not going to have to pay these prices but it doesn’t change the fact it can be very costly to run a Google Adwords campaign on a local level for your insurance agency.

Does PPC (Pay Per Click) work? Absolutely it works. It’s my observation that it is not smart to spend lots of money on Google Adwords or any other PPC for local marketing as it relates to the insurance industry. Of course the scenario changes if you’re working on a corporate or national level. We’ll discuss that in another post. Statistically speaking, your best customers are going to come from clicking the organic results and those are the customers you’re more likely going to be able to retain, year in year out.

Yellow Pages managed campaigns for insurance agents

Probably the biggest complaint I hear from insurance agency owners is from the bad experiences they’ve had with paid Yellow Pages campaigns. Some of these programs start at $300 a month and can go into the thousands of dollars a month depending on the options you choose.

Listing all the reasons why Yellow Pages online management programs don’t work for 95% of insurance agents is a subject for another post but I’ll try and break down the main reasons:

- What your Yellow Pages rep probably isn’t going to tell you is that Yellow Pages has been a dying platform for many years. Because Yellow Pages isn’t able to generate enough traffic on their own, they’re forced to buy clicks from Google and advertise in the red section listed above. As I mentioned before, these aren’t the customers that will come with a very good retention rate for most insurance agencies.

- The rep that sold you your Yellow Pages marketing plan is not the same person that manages it. In most cases, the Yellow Pages rep doesn’t know or has not spoken to the person that runs your program.

- There’s a tendency for the campaign manager to group all insurance agents together regardless of various local factors. In others words, you’re getting a cookie cutter plan that probably won’t work for you. Are you exactly the same as every other insurance agent out there? If you’re not, why should you get the same plan that Yellow Pages offers every insurance agent?

- Because you’re paying Yellow Pages to run your campaign, you’re paying a hidden management fee that most Yellow Pages reps don’t speak about or may not know about. According to my math, Yellow Pages ad rates are anywhere from 250% to as high as 1500% higher than Google Adword pay per click rates. So not only are you paying for a campaign manger that doesn’t know you from any other insurance agency but you’re paying exorbitant rates to do it. Not a good deal.

- Some of the strangest and most obtuse questions I’ve ever heard asked at Adwords or pay per click seminars are by Yellow Pages campaign reps. You don’t want someone going to battle for you online that doesn’t know how to old a sword. Competency is crucial.

There’s a lot more to it than this

This is a small fraction of what needs to be considered while creating a local SEO program for an insurance agency. There are many many more factors than this.

Remember this; whoever you choose, make sure they understand you and what makes you different from the ten other insurance agents within 15 miles of you. When you consider that your prospects are evaluating your website and marketing plan in as little as 4 to 14 seconds, it’s important to have a firm that can define your unique selling proposition.

If you’re an insurance agent that would like to share your experiences with local SEO, please feel free to comment below. Thanks.

We’re going to get back to my series of posts on “7 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Bring You Business” but I wanted to talk about a really important issue that I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very fortunate to have a really good lead generation program that introduces me to business owners from every demographic every day.

My inspiration for this post comes from a really devoted business owner I spoke to early this morning, but this situation has come up many times before. The gentleman runs a small limousine service based out of Seattle, Washington.

What’s neat about this situation is that the gentleman has a desire to grow his business and he has reached out to me and two other SEO firms about quoting him on a monthly marketing plan that will help to get his website ranked on the first page.

Being the competitor that I am, I sent the owner my proposal yesterday and followed up with him today. To make a long story short, the owner really wasn’t excited about my prices. Not only was he not excited about my prices but he didn’t like the fact that the SEO process couldn’t be guaranteed in under 3 months.

Now don’t get me wrong, depending on the situation, it is possible to take certain keyword terms and get them on the first page in a relatively short period of time, but this is more the exception than the rule especially when you’re competing against similar businesses in a large city.

My firm doesn’t offer cookie cutter plans and generally speaking, there’s not much that we can do for any competitive industry with a budget below $450 a month.

Getting back to the limo guy; he had been quoted a price of around the $100 a month range and a guarantee that he’ll be on page one within 90 days! Wow! I should get that guy’s number!

The client is currently in position 42 or lower for most terms he’s trying to rank for, so any SEO firm that can get him to the front page in 3 months with a budget of a $100 is someone I want to get to know. Right? How about wrong.

If your keywords are competitive and or you live a city/region/county of over 3000 people (and this number can be much less depending on the industry ie: insurance agents) and are being promised first page rankings with a small budget, dollars to donuts you’re being offered a scam. What I told the gentleman this morning is what I’m going to tell you now; scammers are scammers because they tell you what you want to hear.

Local or national SEO (which can be much harder in many circumstances) is not like a light bulb, you simply can not turn it on and off at the flip of a switch. It doesn’t work that way. It is a process that requires a meticulous nature and a dedication to a planned approach. There’s no Houdini in this business and yelling out “hocus pocus” isn’t part of the process. Strong SEO campaigns are successful because they are consistent and executed properly.

Getting back to my prospect in Seattle, here is a list of his top 13 competitors:

If you look at the RDD (referring domains) column, you can see that most of his competitors have at least 100 referring domains and some have back-links (BLD) that number in the the thousands. There’s a heck of a lot more factors than these to get a website to rank well, but this gives you a small indication of the level of competitiveness this guy is going to be dealing with.

Looking at the prospect’s numbers below, it’s very unlikely that he’ll be on the first page in three months:

As an experienced SEO professional, the challenge of getting this client to rank well is easily attainable but it can’t be done with $100 a month plan in three months. No way.

Ultimately, good SEO practitioners have the ability to heavily influence the search engine rankings but we don’t control the rankings. The search engines do. So any SEO “professional” that meets you and guarantees you the number one ranking is someone that I would hang up on, kick out of my office, run away from or simply ignore because I guarantee you, you’re heading for trouble. Run away doubly fast if you’re being promised the number one spot for $100 to $150 a month when you’re in a competitive industry! That old adage, if it’s too good to be true, it usually is, pretty well applies to everything doesn’t it?

In an online world where most websites are confused and disjointed, your prospect is practically begging you to make a website that helps them accomplish their goals and call them to action. People need direction. This can be your local advantage.

What is a Call To Action?

Like all good sales people, your website must ask for the desired action that you want the person to perform. If I can take it further, your website should ask in different ways to get the desired result. Statistically, the best sales people ask for a sale at least twice when the time comes.

Let’s get right to it. Is your website designed to move your prospects along the sales process that ultimately benefits them and you? I’ve seen too many websites that are devoid of any call to action.

Ask them to buy something.
Ask them to directly call you on the phone.
Ask them to fill out your survey.

Your call to action must be on every page and ideally placed in a place where the visitor can view the request. More about that in a second.

I’ve taken a screen shot from the popular financial services website mint.com. The two red arrows clearly show their call to action.

They want you to sign up.

I love visiting websites like this because they’re organized and they’re to the point, they clearly have a goal and they ask for the next step essential to accomplishing the goal of the website.

It’s not ingenious, it’s just good marketing.

Are You Being Clear About Your Call To Action?

In the movie Glen Garry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin’s character proclaims that all good sales people should “always be closing.” Consider your website a sales person; your website should be asking every single person that visits your website if they want to buy or do business with you.

Before you close, you have to ask for the sale. The most essential part of the close is asking. Your website simply can not convert browsers into customers without asking the person to move forward in the process.

As the example illustrates, a good website should ask the browser to take action and it sure doesn’t hurt to ask for the next step in a number of different ways.

Your Call to Action Must be on Every Page

Over the last year our office has probably conducted over 72 A/B split and multivariate tests on call to actions. Without knowing your website, I would say that your best bet for placing a call to action is in the top, center of every page of the website where people typically focus when they first visit your website.

Compel Your Readers to Take Action

Make your call to action urgent. Make it so that they have to call you or respond to you right now. This could be with a special offer, this could be with a sign up bonus or this could be some sort of limited time offer. In almost all cases, your potential customers will respond much better to a gentle online push.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For The Business

If I had to isolate one factor that makes a difference to most clients I work with, it would be the implementation of a strong call to action combined with powerful copyrighting that directs the customer to perform the ideal action.

If your website is passively sitting around without asking people to take the next step; for all intents and purposes, your website is collecting digital dust. Your website shouldn’t be a trinket, it’s meant to be a powerful business tool.

If you have examples of great websites that follow these principals, feel free to link to them below in the comments section. Our next post is going to talk about how to get your website to close more sales and bring more business.

If this sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. I speak to hundreds of business owners on a monthly basis and the most common complaint they have about their website is that they don’t feel it’s helping them generate more revenue or leads. I probably hear this sentence at least 3 times a day, “My website really doesn’t help my business.”

If your website was your employee, you would fire it. The good news is that it’s probably a lot easier to turn around a bad website than it is to turn around a bad employee.

Let’s talk about some of the reasons why your website is not bringing you ideas and I’ll give you some ideas that will kick start your website and turn it into a contributing member of your business.

You don’t have a goal: It’s amazing to me how many managers and business owners have no real answer for me when I ask them “What is the goal of your website?”

I had a Vice President of a large cement mixing company tell me that SEO doesn’t work for his business because he spent large amounts of money on a campaign with all the “bells and whistles” and it never amounted to any new business. My question to him was pretty simple, “What was the goal of the campaign?” After a long pause, he changed the subject and started telling me again that SEO doesn’t work. When I pressed further about the goal, he simply changed the subject. So in other words, his SEO firm never had a goal for the campaign.

If you remember one thing from this post, remember this; your website will not and can not contribute to your business exploits without you or your website designer/seo practitioner having a clear understanding of what the ultimate goal of the website is. All good websites contribute to the company’s bottom line. Get your website involved people.

It’s nice to say that you want to sell more widgets or collect more leads but how exactly are you going to do that? Do you or your SEO professional have a vision of what has to happen so you can reach your goal? The goal holds everyone accountable; if we don’t reach the goal, how do we fix it? What’s the next step?

Let me give you an example. I was speaking to an insurance agent the other day that sells personal lines of insurance. The goal of his website was to have prospective customers fill in an online quote form. His SEO firm implemented the online quote system that was supposed to get him boat loads of new auto insurance quotes. The only problem was that the online form asked for no less than 16 pieces of information. At that point in the purchase process, it takes too much time and it requires that the person give too much personal information. Considering the prospects didn’t know him, this approach was a stretch. So I wasn’t surprised when the business owner told me that he’s only had 3 people fill in the form over the past 2 years.

The strategy hasn’t worked for two years but the online quote form is still on the business owner’s website. Why? The goal of getting boat loads of new auto insurance quotes has not happened. If it’s not working, if your website is not meeting your business goals, changes need to be made. With a properly articulated goal, any SEO firm worth their salt should have made changes to that campaign years ago.

With failure comes opportunity. The internet allows us to fail faster and cheaper than any other advertising medium. What I mean is, if you set a goal and your website is not achieving that goal, the internet allows you to see quickly that it’s not working and try something else to reach your goals. With traditional forms of advertising, radio, print or television advertising, you often don’t know how many people are actually seeing your ads and you can’t change your strategy mid-campaign, but with the internet everything is trackable. So set your goals and follow your analytics so you can tell right away what’s working and what needs to be changed. Use those failures as an inspiration and refocus your efforts on achieving your goals and don’t stop until you get to where you want to be.

Too many businesses settle on just being online and are confusing being online with actually making an effort to grab more business in their local market.

We’re going to get into some more specifics in this series of posts that will dramatically improve your engagement of online customers. This is the first in a seven part series that will help you create or change an existing website that will help your business to generate more targeted leads and sales. My next post is going to talk about an essential that every good website must have; a call to action.

See you soon and feel free to comment below with any suggestions or experiences you have that relate to this post.

Siri is a digitally voice commanded virtual personal assistant with numerous abilities. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to talk about the features that will have a direct effect on your business being found by your prospective customer now and in the future. Keep in mind that Android (Google’s mobile operating system for smart phones) and Windows mobile operating systems already have abilities that are inferior but similar in some ways to what Siri has and are planning even more advanced capabilities. In the long run, Siri represents a capability that will be ubiquitous to all smart phones within the next couple of years.

Siri (and similar future platforms) will affect your business in the following ways:

- Local Search Marketing: If you don’t have a plan that allows your business to be found online locally, applications like Siri will make it even more difficult for prospective buyers to find your business. It’s absolutely crucial that you have a local search marketing plan that allows your prospects to consider you within a 30 to 60 mile radius; services like Siri will further underscore the importance of having a plan that gets your company noticed online. In part, Siri’s high satisfaction rate is due to the fact that the app can find businesses and services that are conveniently close to your potential customer.

- Siri does not always use popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing: With a 66% search market share, it’s fair to say that Google will be the dominant search engine for many years to come. With that in mind, it’s becoming apparent that local and vertical search engines will eventually eat away at Google’s market share. Using a different search engine for a specific task will be no more difficult than speaking into your phone or tablet. Depending on the search task, your device may side step the major search engines and use a service that you may not be aware of. At Business Listing Center we emphasize that it’s important to be listed in as many useful local directories as possible (which is why we list you in over 190 local search directories specific to your area) services like Siri only reinforce that belief further.

- Fragmentation of the Search Market: To expand on the point above, there are literally hundreds of local search directories that your company can be listed in. None of them come close to the search volume that Google handles but many can and are very useful to helping customers find you. Yelp is such a good directory that Siri in certain circumstances uses the search engine to provide search results to a person that is trying to find a local product or service.

Whether you’ve heard of Yelp or not, tens of millions of people are using the service (some unknowingly because their search app uses Yelp as a source) on a monthly basis. According to Yelp’s latest metrics, close to 40% of their web traffic is mobile. Siri and similar voice controlled apps now and in the future will continue to introduce customers to vertical search engines that they probably would not have have found without the assistance of these mobile apps.

- Trust Transference: As I’m sure you’re aware, people trust the results from Google so much that they often don’t look past the first or second page of the results. Taking this to the mobile world, I believe it’s fair to assume that if Siri and other comparable services recommend an Italian restaurant close by; that recommendation is going to be good enough for a lot of potential customers. Consider the fact that iOS (Apple’s mobile operating system) and Android are two very capable platforms that most consumers are reasonably satisfied with.

- Siri will do an “end around” your Pay Per Click ads: If you’re operating a business that relies heavily on PPC campaigns, now would be a great time to start the process of diversifying your online marketing plan. For example, if you ask Siri “what is the closest Chinese restaurant?” Siri will present results from Yelp for this query. The money you’re spending on your Google PPC program can’t help you if Siri chooses to use Yelp for the search query.

Ultimately what this means to you is that if you’re in business, it is of utmost importance to have an online local marketing plan that makes it easy for local customers to find you regardless of the platform, type of phone or search engine they use. If you haven’t started, now is as good a time as any to start working on this. If you’re already marketing your business online, don’t be complacent. Googling your business online and being satisfied with seeing your name in the results is no longer close to being enough.

With my marketing expertise and your dedication and passion, we can take your business to the next level and beyond. I can help your business achieve the success that puts cash in the bank. Whether your enterprise is a brick-and-mortar establishment, an online entity, or both – I have the expertise you require to raise your public profile and get those customers and clients coming through your door.

This blog is about growing your business using strategies that really work. It’s about getting more people to see your website and getting more people buy your product or service. Because in the end, that’s what really matters.