Online Marketing for Agents: Part One
February 6th, 2007 by Megan Mahan
As some of you may know, I’ve been writing articles for The Automated Agency Report (henceforth, the TAAR Report) for a couple months now. In fact, I just submitted my third article to Steve Anderson last week and my gears are already turning for a fourth.
Some of you may well have a subscription to the TAAR Report…but then some of you may not. To help spread the idea virus to our Agent Blog community, I’ll be writing a series of posts recapping my TAAR articles. (Or, as Jeb likes to call them [and me too], the “TAarticles.”)
So, without further ado, I present you with part one of Online Marketing: Why the Insurance Industry Should Take Advantage.
The insurance industry is looked upon a bit as the red-headed stepchild as far as web standards are concerned. In fact, the latest Internet Standards Assessment Report (ISAR) found the insurance industry consistently “underperforms” online, mostly due to the conservative nature and general lack of innovation in the industry.
While the ISAR findings aren’t exactly music to the industry’s ear, the truth is that insurance is heating up online. New technologies are making it easier than ever before for insurance professionals to use the web to target prospects and build their client base.
How? Search Engine Marketing.
The Proof is in the Percentages
According to Forrester’s 2005 Consumer Technographics North American Benchmark Study, 22 percent of auto insurance applicants applied for coverage online. Of those 22 percent, 86 percent used the web to research information, with 72 percent using only the web to find information. And with an estimated three in five people using the internet to find information in general, those in the insurance industry have much to gain by building a web presence and attracting consumers who are looking for insurance information, quotes and more.
Search Engine ABC’s
To understand how to use the web to find and attract insurance leads, it’s important to learn the anatomy of a search engine, as well as the results pages we use every day.
Popular search applications like Google and Yahoo are called “crawler-based” search engines. When a consumer enters a request for, say, “health insurance quotes,” crawler-based search engines operate as follows:
- A search engine “spider” “crawls” though the internet, searching for pages that match the user’s request.
- The spider determines a page’s relevancy by studying the content of the web site, and following all the links to other pages within the site.
- The spider selects all relevant pages and files them into a Web Rolodex of sorts, which stores all the pages the spider has read.
- The search engine software then sifts though the Rolodex and ranks all the pages therein using a complex–and top secret–algorithm.
- The search engine presents search results to the user via the natural listings and sponsored listings. All in a matter of seconds.
Natural listings, also know as organic listings, are commonly found on the left-hand side of a results page and are ranked by the search engine based on the relevancy of a search term.
Conversely, sponsored listings, which are commonly found at the top and on the right-hand side of a results page, (marked in red in the screen shot seen here) are web advertisements that a marketer has paid the search engine to display. These ads are often targeted based on the user’s search query–increasing the chances that an interested shopper will find them.
Enter pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and the world of search marketing.
Stay tuned for part two of this article, detailing the benefits of PPC advertising.
