Having access to the best SEO tips for insurance firms at your disposal is absolutely crucial. Think about it for a second. Every major insurance company that ranks in Google for its own name brand likely has the budget to launch national marketing and advertising campaigns any time they want. They have deep pockets. After all, it’s illegal to drive a car without insurance. Most reasonable employers have to offer insurance and benefits to their employees because the job market is so competitive. Those benefits often include life insurance, and anybody who isn’t covered through their work will want to buy life insurance to protect their loved ones should anything happen.

The moral of the story? Death and taxes aren’t the only guarantees in life. Buying insurance is something pretty much everyone is going to have to confront sooner or later. That’s why the SEO tips below are super important to answer.

Let’s not waste any more time. Here they are!

The First SEO Tip for Insurance Firms

The best chance you have to quickly rise through the ranks for keywords in the insurance industry is to go after long-tail keywords. A term like “car insurance”             can have hundreds of thousands of monthly searches. If you’re running a smaller firm, it’ll be impossible for you to rank for that keyword. However, a search naming a specific car and city with the word insurance, such as “Audi Insurance Toronto” might only come with a few hundred or thousand searches per month. That makes it much easier to rank for. To find long-tail keywords, use a free tool like Google’s keyword tool or another free tool called UberSuggest. The latter tool might give you a better idea of what the competition is like for a given keyword and will also come up with great suggestions.

Study the Competition’s Backlinks

What is a backlink? It’s a link from a third-party website back to page on your money site. Why is it important? Because Google values third-party credibility. Anybody can brag about and promote the content on their on website, but if a prominent news website like CNN or Fox News were to link to your website, it sends a signal to Google that you are clearly an authoritative and reliable source.

We know what you’re thinking. There’s no chance a mom and pop insurance firm in Toronto is getting on CNN. That was just an example. Many search engine optimization tools can help you figure out how authoritative a link from a given website is. Most of those tools like MozBar will rank websites from 0-100. The reality is while sites closer to 100 (like a CNN or Forbes) are most desirable, a good mix of authoritative links from both credible sources and authority sites in the insurance niche specifically will be great for your site and for ranking.

A Side Note on Buying Quality Links

In the world of SEO, getting links to your site can be seen as getting engaged with content marketing and public relations all in one. You’re ultimately looking to convince a website owner or media member that your content has enough value to warrant linking back to something you’ve created. There are two types of impressions in the media world. Earned vs. paid media. Earned media is when you get a story or an interview because you offered quality and someone in the media liked it enough to reach out. Paid media is when you simply pay for a commercial, infomercial or interview. Both have value, but the latter can be very expensive.

Links work the same way. You can earn them because you’ve built your website into a great hub for information that offers prospects value rather than just promoting plans and pricing, or you can pay for a link. If you choose to do that you can virtually pick the website you want your site to get a link from, and it can certainly boost traffic and your rankings for certain keyword. Be aware however that even if you’re willing to pay, you’ll still need valuable content. CNN won’t just link to a sales page, even if your budget for paying for the exposure is unlimited.

Speaking of unlimited budgets, be ready to pay big time for authoritative links if you choose to go that route. Links from top business sites (like Forbes, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com etc…) can cost more than $2,000 each. You also need to acquire links in a strategic way over time. Spending a hundred thousand dollars on links in a day isn’t going to skyrocket your rankings like you think. Google watches for strange patterns. You have to roll this out over a year or longer. The best way to get links is to earn them organically. This leads to our next point.

Master Content Marketing

Content marketing is how you earn media coverage and valuable backlinks. The whole point of content marketing is not just to impress third-party websites and media outlets. It allows you to build a relationship with your prospects before the make a decision to buy. Also, a great piece of content marketing is more than just lengthy, authoritative blog posts, and it’s not a sales pitch. It’s valuable information that may include blogging, but also includes:

• Video
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• E-books
• Templates
• Questionnaires
• Calculators
• A knowledgebase or glossary

Creating a robust marketing strategy should be a long-term goal, just like link building. Building a relationship in the insurance niche is especially paramount. People definitely want to be able to trust their insurance policies and the impetus is on you to build that trust. Especially if you’re a smaller insurance firm that’s competing against the bigger brand names that everybody knows.

Get to Know Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free and lets you get all kinds of data on users interacting with your website. You can find out where they click, how long they stay on and all kinds of other metrics. You can take a certification course for free directly through Google in order to learn the platform, just be aware that it takes a lot of work to master. Things can get very detailed. That’s why the best thing you can do is hire a digital marketing agency to handle it for you. Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, but it’s not so easy to master.

Getting Local Citations

Citations are mentions of your businesses’ name, address and phone number. You can technically have those mentions listed on any website and benefit indirectly. But citations are most powerful when your information is listed on major websites and insurance-related online directories as well as bigger local directories. Here’s a list of directory sites Canadian businesses should be on:

• Google My Business
• Apple Maps
• Bing Places
• Facebook
• Yellow Pages
• Yelp
• FourSquare
• 411.ca
• GoldBook.ca

There are many other local citation sites. The above list shows only some of them. This of course, doesn’t even include directories that are specific to insurance. Here are some of those:

• InsuranceJournal.com
• WalletHub.com
• Calculateme.com
• Kanetix.com
• Netquote.com
• Allfinancedirectory.com
• Insurancedirectory.ca
• Insuremyhome.com
• Search4insurance.com

Again, there are many more insurance sites you can look for online that will accept your citation. Many of these sites will let you list your information for free. Some of them will want you to pay for a listing. Paid listings can be very value. Citations after all, are a way of link building with a local focus.

Getting Customer Reviews

Google My Business and a lot of the other citation sites we’ve listed in the sections above will allow you to collect five-star ratings and positive comments from your customers. You want as many of those reviews as you can possibly get, and of course you want them to be good ones. Google specifically wants you to comment on reviews and reply to them. This shows you’re engaging with the platform.

Of course for you, the opportunity to reach out to customers is important for branding your insurance firm over the long term. It’s also a chance to turn negative reviews into positive ones.

Just like anything else in SEO, getting customer reviews that increase your brand awareness and SEO ranking takes time, especially for competitive businesses like insurance firms. Hopefully this blog post helps you out in competing against the top insurance companies in the country who have lots of money.

Rest assured the little guy can win, it just takes consistent effort.

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash.

Jack Choros

Jack has been in the internet marketing space for 10 years. He enjoys writing and watching the Toronto Raptors.