SEO (search engine optimization) helps to get your website higher up the search results page when a user types something into Google or Yahoo. It’s an essential part of modern business, and all forward-thinking insurance professionals should be performing regular SEO audits on their websites. As well as improving brand visibility and creating a better user experience, an SEO audit can also help to effectively communicate the most important messages on your site.
“It also gives you a benchmark, so you know where you are and which direction you need to go in,” explains
Becky Schroeder, Vice President of Marketing at Insurance Technologies Corporation (
ITC)
. “It gives you something to measure back against, so that if you do try to improve your SEO you know whether or not it’s working.”
The first steps of the audit involve typing your full agency name, city and state into Google and then hitting search. “If you find that you’re not in the local results, you need to edit your information,” says
Schroeder. “Go through the different parts of your website and make sure that your URLs contain keywords, are short and are structured correctly. Also, edit your page titles so that they’re less than 70 characters long and update your meta descriptions, that’ll help you gain backlinks from other websites.”
Schroeder believes that any insurance firm who is committed to doing an SEO audit twice a year can expect to see increased traffic to their website. “If you do an SEO audit properly, you should definitely feature more in local results, and that will be sure to help drive people to your site,” she says.
