Building an Insurance Search Engine Optimization Strategy That Delivers

Insurance companies face scores of challenges these days, not least of which is economic uncertainty and digital transformation — making it increasingly difficult to sell potential clients on policies. However, other, more controllable aspects of an insurance company’s digital marketing strategy can be tailored to help them reach the right people.

A lot of the challenges that today’s insurers face can be remedied with a little search engine optimization (SEO). Let’s talk about a few of the most prevalent — yet manageable — hurdles that insurance companies can use to be seen, drive engagement and, most importantly, increase brand trust in the modern day.

Market Challenges Facing the Insurance Industry

Three of the foremost hindrances for insurers today can actually be ameliorated with a little SEO and content marketing elbow grease: lack of trust from a potential customer, which leads to low lead generation — and it’s all perpetuated by changing demographics.

Here’s how each of those directly affect each other:

Changing Demographics

While I’m not in the business of selling insurance, the rumbling from my research while writing this blog is that millennials are notoriously difficult to sell insurance to. Historically, (and we’re talking, like, 2017), 80% of millennials said they simply had other expenses to worry about. However, more recent research conveys that, today, more and more millennials are becoming interested in buying life insurance. In fact, half of that demographic say that they need it — and if they already have it, they require more.

Trends similar to this one are not unique, and the increasing interest in insurance means that it’s the perfect opportunity for insurers to step up and inform this generation about the importance of insurance, the different policies available to them, the benefits they provide and more. A lack of this type of authoritative and informative content in the industry will only drive a wedge between an insurance provider and customers.

Lack of Trust

These days, a positive customer experience (CX) is critical for business success. However, the global insurance industry is behind the curve when it comes to user-friendliness. There are a number of factors that contribute to distrust from customers, a couple of which include:

The good news is that a pointed and intentional SEO effort can help solve these problems for insurers while simultaneously breaking down other barriers.

Low Lead Generation

Optional insurance products, like life and health policies, are in a bit of a weird place. People are altogether unlikely to show interest in these products — especially if they haven’t been educated about them.

This results in low lead generation across the board. But, this is where insurers can put their expertise to work and funnel it into a content marketing strategy that helps drive leads.

Understanding Today’s Digital Insurance Customer

Insurance customers today are aligned with customers of most other services and products: they want a good customer experience. In fact, millennials are more likely than Gen Zers to switch to a competitor after just one bad experience with a company — insurers included.

It stands to reason that it’s time insurance companies upgrade their legacy practices to ones that appeal to the modern consumer. Of course, this goes beyond just exceptional SEO; however, starting with your website is a great first step to success.

The Benefits of SEO for the Modern Insurer

Insurance companies are in a unique position when it comes to SEO. Sure, every industry can benefit from increased organic website traffic and higher search result rankings. However, insurers have incredibly high subject matter expertise (SME) in their field. Not everyone is cut from an insurer’s cloth (or a math cloth or an investing cloth, for that matter).

The average consumer may often find insurance and all of its nuances complicated to understand. Not everyone knows exactly how different types of insurance work or what options are best suited for their specific case — but most people do need it.

Insurers can leverage their SME to build authoritative content that informs and educates the general populace about the importance of insurance, the different types of insurance and other critical information to help build credibility. Through this, insurers can establish themselves as an expert worthy of trust, which can provide a competitive advantage over competitors in the industry.

The best part? Building this type of insightful content is sweet, sweet nectar to Google. Your proficiency in all things insurance, when translated into the right content, can do wonders for both your potential and existing customers and your search engine rankings.

Here are a handful of benefits that insurers can expect when implementing a robust SEO strategy:

Increase Organic Website Traffic

The more comprehensive your insurance marketing strategy, the better it can help drive organic traffic to your website.

Generate Quality Leads

More traffic often results in more quality leads. And while not every visitor will convert, the data you can collect as part of your strategy is invaluable.

Improve Credibility and Brand Awareness

Particularly important to the insurance industry, building credibility helps convert leads. Being a credible presence in the insurance sector also does wonders for building brand trust — something we highlighted as a main challenge for an insurance business.

Drive Local SEO to Generate Regional Interest

Insurers often plant roots within a city or town with the intention of selling to people who live there. More often than not, customers interested in buying a policy — especially older folks — may want to speak with their insurance professional in person. The good news is that instead of relying solely on legacy local marketing tactics like radio and TV ads to reach a regional audience, an insurance agency can take advantage of local SEO.

For a strategy like this, it’s all about playing to Google’s algorithms while leveraging localized keywords and setting up business profiles. For starters:

Now that you know just how significant a difference content marketing and SEO can make for your insurance practice, let’s talk about how to develop a winning strategy.

Developing Your Insurance SEO Strategy

If your website is outdated, hard to navigate and lacking content, those are all great places to start when developing an SEO strategy. But first things first, it’s imperative that you know your audience so that you can tailor your SEO efforts to them.

Know Your Target Audience

Let’s use millennials as an example. We know they’ve gone through a change in perspective and behavior from not caring about insurance to becoming more interested in purchasing it. So, what caused that shift? When it comes to buying insurance, what are some of the most important considerations for this audience?

One of those factors is price. A survey revealed that 8 in 10 millennials overestimate the cost of life insurance. Using that as an example, insurers can strive to bring more transparency and clarity to insurance pricing.

On-Page SEO

Starting with on-page SEO can help insurers get their footing — especially when overhauling an outdated website. This might include developing landing pages for each type of insurance you sell, for example:

From there, let’s use life insurance as an example, creating subsequent pages about each policy variation:

You get the picture. Each of these pages can be further optimized for a chosen keyword that’s related to that specific page and topic, which will help boost your rankings and, hopefully, get you on page 1 of Google for that term. That way, more users will find your business and be introduced to your brand.

After that, you can support that flow of traffic with blog content that ranks for your chosen keywords.

Another great thing you can do is work on internal links. By adding internal links — that’s, links to your own webpages on the same website — you’ll create a web between your pages that will help Google’s crawlers make better sense of your website and the information on it. When done correctly, internal links can help you rank higher.

Optimizing Your Insurance Company’s SEO Strategy

Optimizing your content is what will get you noticed by Google and seen by users. However, augmenting the strategy itself can help you increase awareness, engagement and authority tenfold. Here are a few ways to enhance your insurance SEO strategy for better results.

Technical SEO

Your insurance agency website itself plays a major role in organic search. After all of the on-page SEO, optimizing the technical side of things will help Google’s crawlers (and users) navigate your website better.

Technical SEO refers to any optimization that you can make to the website itself, including UX, page speed, mobile responsiveness and more. Anything you can do to improve these aspects of your website design and its servers will be worthwhile for generating more organic website traffic.

Take Advantage of Email Marketing

Digital marketing, no matter how much it has evolved, will never forget good ‘ole email. And, it’s maybe more effective than ever. Click-through rates of all kinds of emails, such as informative messages, advice, service offerings and more, are higher across the board in 2023 compared to 2021.

Use Social Media

When you think of social media, you may not immediately consider an insurance agency to be worthy of following. After all, how engaging and interesting can their content really be? Well, the people who think that are wrong.

For an insurance agent, social media can supplement the rest of their insurance marketing strategy. Platforms like LinkedIn are great for the more professional and bureaucratic crowd that wants to learn from and engage with experts.

Getting Started

While insurance agencies may be behind the curve of digital transformation, hope is never lost. Search engine optimization can help you get to where you need to be to appeal to Google and potential customers alike.