For independent insurance agencies, standing out in a highly competitive digital space can be tough. SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the most lucrative ways to grow an online presence, whether your agency is a mom-and-pop startup or part of a larger conglomerate, like TrustedChoice.com. No matter the size of your agency, SEO is a must-have in today’s digital environment.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are always analyzing and indexing sites to determine their relevancy on SERPs (search engine results pages) to ensure agencies who know their business and clientele appear at the top of page one.
While there are several ways to boost your agency’s SEO standing—like backlinking, daily site crawling, and leveraging a larger site’s domain authority—another stand-out way to boost your online business is by being included in a sitemap.
But what is a sitemap, and how does it affect your agency’s SEO ranking?
The Independent Agent’s Guide to Sitemaps
What started as a user-friendly structure to help consumers navigate a website has become an SEO goldmine. A sitemap is essentially a blueprint of a website, indexing every page so that search engines have an easier time finding information relevant to a user’s search. When a valuable page is added to a sitemap, search engines like Google take notes and ranks accordingly. The more relevant your content is to a user’s search, the better your likelihood of ranking highly on search engines.
Sitemaps are valuable because they are regularly crawled by search engines, and even if your site’s pages don’t include links—another component site crawlers look for—visibility on a sitemap is a surefire way to be included in a crawl. Site crawlers use sitemaps to instantly locate relevant information to be served to users. For example, if your agency sitemap includes bakery insurance, Google will note it and be more likely to serve that information to commercial shoppers seeking bakery insurance in your area.
Sitemaps are typically more useful for larger or newer sites and need to be updated and optimized regularly.
How Does Inclusion in TrustedChoice.com’s Sitemap Boost My Agency?
Even if your agency site doesn’t have a sitemap, you can still get an SEO boost from being included in another site’s sitemap. At TrustedChoice.com, we include every Advantage agency profile in our sitemap from Advantage Profile SEO on up. Inclusion in our high authority sitemap guarantees that site crawlers will index and rank your agency profile to increase your likelihood of showing up on page one of SERPs (search engine results pages).
If your agency profile is not included in the sitemap, you could be missing out on daily visits from site crawlers, thus missing out on an automatic SEO boost. We regularly update our sitemap to ensure your agency profile can be found by site crawlers and, more than likely, found by online insurance shoppers.
Be visible online and get access to daily site crawling by upgrading to an Advantage subscription. Find all our Advantage profile options here or request a demo with a sales representative to get started today. Being seen online is only a site crawler away!
