SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation for funneling organic, online traffic to a website. Organic traffic is crucial, long-term, and does not require financial backing, making appropriate SEO a must-have for any business—independent insurance agencies included.
To begin optimizing a website for SEO, you must first narrow down a list of target keywords, then incorporate them into your web content. In this article, we will introduce your agency to keyword research, how to build your list of high-impact keywords, and how to work it all together with online content for improved SEO ranking.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of narrowing down the terms online insurance buyers are searching for online. When a website or article includes the right keywords, search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, take note and rank them online according to their relevancy. For example, if buyers in your region are searching for “umbrella insurance” and your agency offers that insurance type, you should make it known both in your content and on your site. Otherwise, competitors already ranking for “umbrella insurance” will be listed higher on the SERP (search engine results page), making it more likely that buyers will click on their content.
Keyword research is the beginning of every great SEO project and should be the first step in creating new content for your site. Every piece of content should have a list of keywords in mind. But how do you go about building your list of high-impact keywords?
The Keyword Research Process
Before beginning your keyword research, you’ll want to land on a topic. This can be anything currently relevant and provided by your agency, but it must be something online users are actively on the hunt for. Once you have chosen your topic, ask yourself “what would I search if I were an online consumer?”
While you can opt to type search terms directly into a search engine, you’ll most likely want to choose a program which allows you to accurately track the performance of certain keywords in your area, like Conductor or Semrush. These programs allow you to view content gaps, or high-performing keywords you may not have present on your site and in your content.
Keywords can be virtually anything under the sun as long as they are relevant and worked correctly into your copy. You’ll want to avoid using short-tail keywords, or keywords that only consist of one word, like “insurance,” and put your focus on more specific, long-tail keywords, like “umbrella insurance Utah.”
When it comes to average monthly searches, you’ll want to aim for the lower average monthly searches (10, 70, 100, etc.) to more easily establish your business as an authority on the topic. The higher the number, the stiffer the competition, so it is a best practice to start low.
Every keyword must have an intent, and quality takes precedence over quantity in this case. You would think, “the more keywords, the better!”, but if search engine bots—also known as site crawlers—determine your content is not relevant and instead oversaturated with keywords, your site could be categorized as unreliable and spammy. As long as your content is relevant and informative, however, site crawlers will rank your agency site appropriately. Tackle one topic at a time, and if possible, choose one primary keyword to represent your content’s purpose. You’ll also want to work these keywords naturally into your copy.
Keywords and Your TrustedChoice.com Profile
With an Advantage subscription, you get a team of ‘round-the-clock SEO experts persistently updating web pages on TrustedChoice.com to maintain our relevance, thus upholding your agency’s relevance and helping your profile get crawled daily by site crawlers. You can also utilize keywords on your Advantage profile by working them into your About Us statement to give both search engines and online consumers the full scope of your insurance agency and improve your online ranking. TrustedChoice.com also gives you the ability to leverage our high domain authority score (20 points higher on average compared to other insurance sites) to offer agents a better likelihood of being recommended by search engines on the SERP.
While you’re busy optimizing your insurance agency site and content with keywords, we’ll tackle SEO for your profile. Get a leg-up online by finding the right subscription for your agency, and don’t miss out on the daily SEO boosts that keeps our independent agents ranking online. Talk to one of our experts or subscribe today for your agent Advantage.
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