SEO for insurance companies: What you need to know

Today’s insurance industry is predominately online and that means your potential customers are too. Whether your insurance business operates nationally or globally, it can be challenging to attract new customers in a competitive market. Having a strong organic presence and driving direct website traffic is critical if you want to compete with industry giants and aggregators such as Compare The Market and Go Compare.

When done effectively, SEO for insurance services can help you do just this, supporting your business growth by:

• Increasing your online visibility
• Achieving higher rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Building trust with your audience
• Increasing traffic to your website
• Growing your conversions

And that’s just the start. Insurance companies require a niche approach to SEO. Sitting within a Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) industry it should be a number one priority to provide valuable, transparent and relevant support to your customers to win their trust and their loyalty.

SEO for insurance: 6 parts to your strategy

1) Understanding the competition

Gaining an understanding of the wider landscape is a good place to start when it comes to improving your organic online presence. When we work with new clients, competitor analysis is the first task we complete as it allows us to take stock of where you are in the market versus where you want to be.

Knowing exactly who your competitors are and where they are ranking is effective insight for supporting business growth. Our SEO specialists created an exclusive, in-house SEO competitor analysis tool that provides insight into:

• Your website’s performance in comparison to your competitors including page indexing, site speed and Google crawling
• Your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses to spot growth opportunities
• Understand where you sit in the market
• Specific pages that need optimisation to create quick SEO wins

2) The importance of keyword research

After you’ve delved into your competition, you’ll be in a good position to get started with your keyword strategy. A well-considered keyword strategy will help to drive relevant organic traffic to your website. As part of the larger SEO puzzle, keyword research focuses SEO efforts by examining the opportunity, competitiveness and relevance of certain keywords and phrases to your business.

This process forms the foundations of your SEO strategy, allowing you to strategically target phrases with the highest-ranking potential to grow your visibility. Here are some pointers when creating your keyword strategy:

1. 1
   Focus areas: Create a list of focus areas you want to target to help you define the most relevant target landing pages to target and provide focus to your SEO campaign.
2. 2
   Keyword research: Consider what keywords you want to target on these landing pages through keyword research. The focus of this will heavily depend on what you are targeting and will likely benefit from longtail, niche phrases.
3. 3
   Keyword list: Build your keyword list using tools like SEMRush, Keyword Planner and Moz to help you keep track of your focus words and map them to dedicated landing pages. Remember, a short yet well-researched list can be just as successful in delivering against your objectives as a longer, more extensive one.

With a keyword strategy in place, you can benchmark your current organic performance, make informed strategic decisions, monitor progress against your goals and gain valuable insight into the competition.

3) Write high performing content

Content plays a critical role in your SEO success. It allows you to target desirable terms that your audience use to search for your services. This increases the likeliness of your website appearing in the SERPs and therefore, can bring more valuable business your way.

But content has evolved significantly over the past five to 10 years. Today, it’s important to avoid tactics such as keyword stuffing, writing thin content or providing false information as this can result in your website being penalised by Google. This is never more important than when writing content for YMYL sectors, like insurance.

Google’s core algorithm update in 2018 – known as the Medic update or EAT - had a significant impact on the performance of YMYL sites. As part of Google’s mission to deliver the best experience to their users, a strong emphasis is still heavily placed on producing high-quality content. Insurance businesses offer products across a range of different sectors such as automotive, construction, housing and travel. As such, the content provided by your business needs to be balanced, accurate and of sufficient depth to satisfy a user’s search intent. Alongside this, it’s also important to:

• Invest time into understanding the product and your audience
• Be meticulous with your research – this includes your keywords, your competitors and your audience
• Write with a logical structure
• Demonstrate transparency to build trust
• Use clear, concise language and avoid jargon unless necessary
• Include authors and testimonials from experts throughout content
  
  

It’s also worth noting that the sign-off time for getting content live in insurance companies can take longer than others. This is due to the content often having to go through multiple stages of approval such as the marketing team, the director and a compliance offer. Bear this in mind as to how it could impact your SEO campaign if content is delayed.

If you want to learn more about writing content for the insurance sector, read our extensive blog on the topic: How to write engaging content for your insurance website.

4) Publishing long-form content

As EAT content is designed for depth and relevance with the intention of being a trusted source, it’s likely to have a longer word count. This is expected and, in many cases, can be beneficial to your organic performance for a number of reasons:

• Better optimisation opportunities: A longer article body allows you to place your focus keyword phrases naturally. It also gives more opportunity for better readability such as including multiple headings to break down content, internal and external links and related imagery.
• Generate brand authority: In-depth content gives you the chance to share your insight and know-how with your audience. The value you can provide will help you stand out against competitors and help your readers find the information they’re looking for.
• Raise brand awareness: Research shows that articles with more than 3,000 words receive an average of 77 percent more backlinks than shorter articles. This provides a greater opportunity to build your brand and improve your domain authority too.

When it comes to creating content, we’re driven by the data using it to make strategic decisions backed by solid justification. One way we use data for content is through our exclusive Content Quality Score metric. The Content Quality Score metric is an objective measure between one and 100 of how good a piece of content is. Determined against the ranking factors Google uses, it allows you to benchmark against other websites to support further improvements to performance.

5) Creating a logical website structure

Every website has some sort of structure. It will hopefully be well organised and streamlined or it could be disorganised and confusing. Being intentional with your site structure can significantly benefit your website as a whole and also drive better organic performance.

A good website architecture doesn’t just help your users navigate your website, but search engines too. Search engines can crawl your site, find new pages and changes to existing pages faster. If Google can’t crawl your website, it will struggle to index it. An accurate site structure can create a more enjoyable user experience and reduce bounce rate, both of which will help to improve rankings.

Alongside site structure, your website as a whole is becoming more and more integral to ranking position. This is reflected in Google’s 2021 update known as Core Web Vitals. These are a set of metrics used to measure a site’s loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability. The metrics will be used by Google to guide brands on the essential ranking signals for delivering a positive user experience which is likely to increase click-through rate.

6) Grow your domain authority

The three pillars of SEO – site, content and authority – underpin our approach to boosting organic rankings and online presence. In short, these topics relate to:

• Site: This refers to creating a logical navigation, site structure and meta structure which are all crucial to helping search engines find and map your pages.
• Content: The content of your pages must be high quality and targeted to place your website in the search engine results pages.
• Authority: Through the acquisition of brand citations and quality links on notable websites, you can show search engines that you are a trusted business with authority and expertise in your sector.

In this section, we’re discussing authority which means we need to talk about links. Links are extremely valuable to Google, forming part of the search engine’s algorithm that ranks your website. Google uses links as trust signals to understand how authoritative your website is. Although domain authority (DA) is not an SEO ranking factor, it can still indirectly influence your rankings.

This is where digital PR and outreach can really support your SEO efforts. While different in nature, these tactics go hand in hand, working alongside one another to drive quality links at volume and brand citations. These ‘offline SEO’ tactics are valuable to your organic presence and should form part of your SEO strategy.

SEO and your insurance business

While these pointers aren’t completely unique to the insurance industry, they are extremely important to your SEO efforts. If you choose to work with an SEO agency, it’s worthwhile finding one that has experience of improving the organic presence of other insurance businesses.

We have experience working with a number of YMYL industries including legal, insurance and financial services to name but a few. Backed by in-house SEO specialists and exclusive tools, uncover insight to make informed decisions that will see your organic performance rise above the competition. Take a look at the work we have done for others; the results speak for themselves:

• Gallagher: 340% increase in organic visibility YOY
• Withers Worldwide: 117% increase in organic traffic YOY

If you want to find out more about what we do and how we can support you in achieving organic success, don’t hesitate to get in touch.