Life insurance agencies are a crucial part of many people’s lives. To guarantee that the family of the policyholder receives crucial funds should the worst happen is a lifeline in many cases. However, like any other business, you must convince people that they need your service in order to thrive. In this article, we’ll be discussing an essential but often overlooked part of digital marketing: search engine optimization (SEO). Although it might not seem important, SEO can provide a business the means to truly set itself apart from its competitors. This technique utilizes the main way people find and research businesses, through search engines, and enhances your online visibility by placing you at the top of the search results.
Table of Contents
What Is SEO?
Before showing you how essential SEO is for your life insurance agency, there’s some explaining to do, such as: what is SEO? SEO is a series of techniques used through whatever ways you expose your business online. Usually, it seeks to make your website or social media presence more visible to people who are searching for related topics. If you haven’t already, make a website or start a social media presence! SEO’s function is to amplify your online visibility, not create it. If you don’t have any presence to begin with, SEO won’t be nearly as effective. If you’re having trouble with either making a website or establishing a social media presence, SEO Design Chicago can help.
Why Do I Need SEO for My Life Insurance Agency?
Now, assuming you already have an online presence, you might still be wondering if you need SEO for your business. The answer is unequivocally yes. To give some perspective on this, over 47% of people click on the first link they are presented with on the search results page. That’s a lot of potential customers lost simply because you weren’t first on the list.
How to Get Started With SEO
To get started with your SEO efforts, you need to look at your website’s metadata. This includes its text content, keywords, headings, and links. Keywords are terms that are often applied to the topics related to your business. When someone’s looking for life insurance agencies or policies, they will often use certain words and phrases. The search engine, most commonly Google, uses a user’s search terms to determine what they are shown and ranks the results according to their relevance.
Headings
Another feature of your website that needs careful attention is your use of headings. Headings are given special attention by the search engine to determine if the website has what the user is looking for. Be sure to use keywords in your headings as well as your normal text content, as this will do wonders for your search results rank. Your use of links on the page will also help boost your website’s visibility. To both human readers and the search engine, the use of links adds a sense of credibility over pages that feature no links. External links work great for providing this extra credibility, as they demonstrate a sense of research on your part. Internal links, which connect readers to other parts of your website or social media presence, are especially useful.
Mobile-Friendly Site
As a final tip, it is highly recommended that you make your website mobile-friendly. As more and more people obtain Internet-accessing mobile phones, this feature will only help your business look more professional and attract new customers. Considering that 88% of local business searches on mobile browsers see the customer visit their physical location the same day, you don’t want to forget about this.
What Is Local SEO?
Now that the general concept of SEO has been explained, we can get into local SEO for insurance agencies. Fortunately, local SEO is almost identical to regular SEO in many ways, except for some key differences that often work out in your favor. Local SEO simply refers to search engines’ use of location to determine their search result rankings. About 46% of Google searches are interested in local businesses, so such a feature is often necessary. This helps you for several reasons.
The first is, naturally, your pool of competitors becomes a lot smaller, as you are only competing against other businesses in a given area rather than the entire world. This makes it far easier to get to that top spot in the search results. Another benefit is insider knowledge. By inhabiting and studying the area that you are targeting, you can leverage your knowledge to better ingratiate yourself to your desired customer base. This is something that often isn’t possible with global, generalized campaigns and makes for effective marketing.
If you want to plant your roots into the community even further, you can and should become a figure in your target communities. This means things like sponsoring and participating in local events, giving to local charities, sponsorships, and hiring from that community. This is something that, again, a global campaign cannot compete with, so be sure to leverage your strengths!
Life Insurance Keywords
When looking for the right words to use as keywords, ask yourself one question: if I were looking for a life insurance policy online, what might I enter into the search bar? There are some obvious words and phrases, such as “cheap life insurance policies”, “life insurance agencies near me”, etc. Here are some more you might not have thought of:
- Term life insurance
- Universal life insurance
- Types of life insurance
- Burial insurance
- Critical illness cover
- Endowment plan
- Best life insurance for seniors
The above terms are common phrases and search queries used by potential customers. Using them on your website where relevant will help guide those people right to your virtual doorstep. If you want to find more keywords to use, you can try Google’s Keyword Planner for free. Additionally, you can also take a look at the websites of other local businesses, and borrow some of their language.
Insurance Agent SEO
SEO isn’t only useful for your insurance agency, it also aids the efforts of your individual agents as well. Your agents are often the ones handling your most direct local marketing efforts, whether through setting up public info sessions, sending out emails, or even online content creation. Local SEO is crucial not just for helping people find your website but also for helping people find your agents.
Agents, of course, specialize in getting people to buy in. The easier people can find them, the better for your business. One way you can help attract attention to them is by setting up a Google My Business account. This step is crucial for many reasons. Google My Business directly boosts your search ranking results, since making an account requires that you verify your business. This makes you seem more reliable, in addition to allowing you to mark your physical location on Google Maps and provide contact information. Through your account, you can direct people to meet with your agents through whatever means they prefer, greatly reducing the effort required to receive a quote. Make sure to use the internal linking mentioned earlier to guide people to your agents as well. The easier it is for people to get in touch, the more success you’ll have in the long run.
Marketing for Life Insurance
To successfully attract new customers requires a great deal of effort and time. But, when you’re selling something as popular as life insurance, it is certainly doable. Convincing prospective customers starts and ends with appealing to them feeling like you have their back. Most people would rather not have to think about life insurance, so try to make them feel like you have their best interests at heart. Remind them that the future is uncertain and that life insurance probably isn’t as expensive as they think it is. Talk about their families, and how devastating, both financially and emotionally, it would be to lose a source of income on top of paying funeral costs. Make sure to feature this messaging in your advertisements, as getting people to think about their future is how they wind up in an agent’s office.
SEO Design Chicago and Life Insurance Agency SEO
If you are struggling with anything that this article has discussed, SEO Design Chicago has personalized services just for you. We can help with any part of digital marketing, be it website design, social media marketing, developing an ad campaign, and SEO. We can even help with local SEO in many areas across the United States and Canada. Please do keep us in mind for any of your digital marketing needs.
FAQ:
- What is SEO?
- How do I know what words to use for my website’s SEO?
- What is the purpose of links on a website?
- Can local SEO help life insurance agents?
- What is local SEO?
Contact Us Today!