In my last post, I talked about three of the most important things s a successful insurance website must have: calls to action, content and testimonials. Here are the other three:
- Positioning or mission statement. This is also called the “About Us” page. Getting this right goes beyond what you say on your website. Your entire marketing plan should stem from your positioning or mission statement. You need to tell people clearly and simply on your home page why they should do business with you. Of course you’ve got to mention your excellent customer service and stress your professionalism, your knowledgeable staff and years of experience and so on. But the crux of your positioning statement is what makes your firm unique. Your agency has been serving truckers for 30 years. You specialize in hard-to-insure health risks. Your firm is dedicated to providing insurance and risk management services to design professionals.
- Quote forms. I already covered these in the calls to action section. But I want to focus specifically on quote forms here because I think too often agents lose potential customers by putting quote engines or lengthy quote forms on their sites . Agents tell me that more often than not visitors who start filling out forms for an automated quote engine leave them incomplete. Many people just don’t feel comfortable providing a lot of personal information online to a business they don’t know well. Other people just feel that you’re asking too many questions, while others don’t want to spend the time then.
- Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO not only helps those who know about your agency find you on the Internet, but also those who are looking for an agent—any agent—to find you. To rank high on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo, your website needs good search engine optimization. How does this work? Search engines send virtual “spiders” out to troll the Internet looking for keywords, which determine how your website is ranked. Using the right keywords in the right areas can make all the difference in your site’s search rankings.
There’s got to be something you do that few others are doing, at least in your geographical area. It’s okay if you want your positioning statement to be broad — most larger agencies will want this — but try to say something about your firm that’s truly unique instead reciting the usual bromides about service and the superior companies you represent.
The perfect solution is a quote request form that asks minimal contact information. This lets you call prospects on the phone to provide the personal contact that makes them comfortable enough to provide you with the information you need to develop the quote. That way you give them what they want and start to build a relationship, which should be your long-term goal anyway. You don’t want to sell one product, you want to create a lifetime customer.
SEO is a big subject, so I’m not going to cover it much here. But, for example, one of the most important keywords is the name of your website. I discussed this in a recent blog post which you can click here to read.
A website name that reflects function and location, like AutoInsuranceSanMateo.com, is well optimized because someone looking for auto insurance in San Mateo, Calif., is quite apt to type something like that in as a search term. By the way, it’s not a coincidence that if your website has good SEO, you’ve probably got a clearly articulated marketing plan and positioning statement.
Focus on these six characteristics and you will have a successful insurance agency website.