Marketing

What can your insurance agency accomplish with web site?

Can you make money off it?

Well clearly to make money off agency web site you need to bring traffic to the site. Then that traffic will translate into filled quote requests or phone calls.

The answer to the traffic question depends on many factors:

  • Site design
  • Investment in time i.e. your own effort
  • Investment in money
  • Competition number and budgets

Site design is something that we provide. We optimized our sites for SEO. We also provide tools and capabilities to help with link exchange (see below).

Competition is not something you can control.

So we below will concentrate on your own effort and then touch on Money Investment.

Your own effort

Sometimes people put an equality sign between marketing of your web site and SEO (search engine optimization). Those two indeed overlap but they are not the same. SEO is a significant part of insurance agency website marketing but not all of it.

Web site marketing consists primarily of three components:

  • SEO – making your site to come up often in Google or Yahoo search results
  • Link exchange – placing links to your site on other sites
  • Promotion via articles and blogs
  • Distributing your biz cards with email and web site addresses printed.

You can invest time and effort in all four of those components

Also the effort in Links and Articles will help with SEO.

We dedicate a lot of material on SEO in other parts of our site including precise game plan and instructions.

Link exchange

Link exchange is most important and rewording in terms of results – it both makes agency site appear more popular for search engines and also drives traffic.

There are lots of regional web sites in your area like county sites, various state sites, even city sites. Clearly they are mostly inexpensive or free. Take for example site like http://www.nhliving.com. It may not be a household name elsewhere but it has some traffic. You need to compile a list of such sites for you area (will take an hour or less) and start calling them.

Some will agree to banner exchange (and you can ask our CSR to configure banner of them) and they will point to you. You can dedicate a custom page sort of as community service or some local charity. Lots of variations are possible.

Some will ask for small fee for a listing. See more about fee based listing below.

Our sites have a special configurable Our Partners page as well. See here for example

It allows you (or our CSR on your behalf) to create a listing of businesses in your area. First it strengthens the relationship between you and your customers and thus increases retention. It even creates a small incentive for new customers. Second it allows you yet another way to exchange links from their sites to your site.

Promotion via articles and blogs

There are many online blog sites and trade magazines. We run one insurance articles site ourselves where our customers can submit articles with linkbacks to their sites. You can open a blog or two and post there some content like an article, discussion of some insurance or finance or law related story.

If you do it just once a month it will be active enough.

This last item falls more into SEO area but it all depends on the content you will be able to come up with. Remember today everybody is a journalist and everybody a publisher.

Distributing your biz cards

Old distribution channel for sure but surprisingly it may sound the web might give it a boost for those who can appreciate it. In the old times picking a b-card from a stack near the door in the pizza parlor meant implicit commitment to call. Many people resent the pressure. Web site printed on the card means a lee binding way of checking it out. With the web there is no that ritual of disengaging from the phone call. You don’t like it – just close your browser or point it to the sports site to relax.

Investment of money in web site advertisement/SEO

Google AdWords and paid business listings are the most viable options. Avoid (on SEO experts’ advise) paid links even on well promoted legitimate portals.

More later.

Summary

Internet marketing is fun and given certain amount of effort and time can bring exposure to your insurance agency business.