Why add video to your insurance agency website, and why create a branded YouTube channel with videos? One important statistic to consider, is that your insurance prospects are 80% more likely to watch your video than read your content. Another is the impact of video on your insurance search engine optimization efforts. Google gives more weight to webpages that contain videos, and of course, they own YouTube. More video typically equates to better insurance SEO. And when your insurance agency video has a longer view time than other websites in the same search results, you receive an even greater SEO boost from Google. Furthermore, an insurance agency video provides producers with great collateral for their email marketing, a social media marketing efforts.

Professionally branded YouTube channels can be used to create featured videos and specific play lists. For example, you can offer playlists for P&C, Employee Benefits, High Net Worth Clients, and Personal Lines. Each play list should have at least 3 videos, preferably more. These can then be used for web marketing initiatives including email marketing and social media marketing.

Though prospects (and clients and partners) often prefer videos to written content, not all of these website visitors will watch your video in its entirety. Insurance website visitors want to know if the video pertains to them, and if they don’t see its benefit quickly they will leave your video and bounce to another site. To help improve stickiness, make sure you add captions and transcripts. Captions and transcripts will help improve the chance people will watch your entire video and boost your authority with Google. Captions and transcripts help by:

• Increasing view time (up to 80%)
• Improving deep linking with keywords in video
• Improving search results for keywords included in video

Take the time to create insurance videos, and leverage their benefits to the fullest. Including insurance marketing videos on your website and adding them to a branded YouTube channel will help your insurance search engine optimization efforts, increase website traffic and drive more insurance leads into your pipeline.

If you are looking for ways to improve your insurance agency website, produce high quality videos, and optimize your insurance agency SEO, and lack the internal time, tools or skills to do so, you can consider outsourcing this initiative to a proficient insurance marketing agency.

Source by Alan Blume

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The post Using Insurance Marketing Videos To Improve SEO & Extend Your Agency Reach appeared first on Business Directory SEO.

• Know Your Keyword Phrases

Keywords, which are technically keyword phrases, are short three to five word phrases your prospects might use when looking for insurance products and services. For example, Ohio business insurance, Charlotte employee benefits, and New Jersey truck insurance, are all keyword phrases potentially applicable to your agency. To create a list of these phrases, there are many free tools and techniques your agency can use. For example, Google AdWords and Keyword Planner will help you determine the number of searches, by phrase, for your preferred keyword phrases. It will also recommend similar phrases for you to consider. There are many other free and paid tools, including Moz Keyword Explorer and SEOBook Keyword Tool.

• Review Other Insurance Agency Websites

Many agencies and brokers don’t do a great job with insurance search engine optimization (insurance SEO). That said, it can be still helpful to investigate other insurance agency websites to see if your agency can glean keyword phrase ideas. To do this, simply navigate to another agency website in your state and View Page Source, and search (Ctrl F) for meta. Or you can install a free tool bar from Moz or SEOBook to make this process simpler.

• Social Bookmarking and Google URL Submission

Once your agency has optimized your website for SEO, make sure you submit any unranked pages to Google using the Google Webmaster Tool – Submit URL. And, to better ensure your pages will get ranked, add them to prominent social media platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.

• Keyword Phrases in Titles and Subtitles

Creating titles and subtitles on a web page that includes your preferred keywords will help search bots and human readers more readily scan your content. If they find relevant keywords in your subtitles, they are more likely to read the entire article.

• Alt Image Tags and Header Tags

The title for a page appears on the search engine results page. The main header will appear when viewers open the page, similar to a headline in a magazine or newspaper article. Focus each web page on a specific topic and keyword phrase. Your title and header will be indexed by the search engine and seen by prospects. It will increase the chance viewers will open your article instead of an alternate article. Make sure you limit each page to a maximum of three keyword phrases. Both your prospects and the search bots will be looking for well organized, focused content, so keep your content streamlined and relevant.

• Dynamic Content Not Duplicate Content

Search engine like to see new content as their search bots scan your insurance agency site. Adding dynamic content with a blog, video, and article publishing will help your insurance search engine optimization efforts. Make sure your website isn’t using boilerplate, duplicate content. If you purchased a site from a vendor that offers boilerplate content, rewrite all your content, as rapidly as possible, or your rankings will suffer the consequences.

• Word Density

When it comes to word density, you should repeat your phrase, a reasonable number of times. There are many opinions on word density, ranging from 4% to over 10%. In general, a simple rule should be, when reading your content, it should read well for your website visitors first, and search engines second. Beware of “keyword stuffing”. When writing a page, focus on the topic, not the keyword phrase. When following this process, I find my keyword density is usually in the 5% to 8% range. For example, if you are writing about Florida flood insurance, it’s fine to repeat that phrase 4 or 5 times in 150 words, but not 10 times. You should include the phrase in your page name, page title, description and as header tags as discussed prior.

• Boldface, Italics, Underline, Links

It’s good to boldface, italicize or underline your keyword phrases, but do so within a reasonable writing context on your pages. Links can also be helpful, linking to other pages within your website, or conversely, linking from other pages to your preferred pages. Don’t confuse this process with “link building” schemes. Many agencies were led astray with SEO link building scams, such as link farms. Any external links to your insurance agency site should come from high quality, relevant sites.

• Insurance Videos

Website visitors are 80% more likely to watch video then read your content, and search engines weight webpages that contain videos. And if your video has a longer view time than other websites in the same search results then your rankings cam improve even more.

• SEO Tracking

There are tons of tools available for tracking insurance search engine optimization. Many are free, most are inexpensive. From Moz, to SEOBook, to WebCEO, your agency can pick from dozens of highly functional choices. That said, you’ll need to learn the tool you select, and run and measure the reports on a consistent (monthly should suffice) basis. And it goes without saying, that every agency should have Google Analytics loaded on their website, to track general traffic, traffic patterns, search engine referrals, and social media referrals to their website.

Source by Alan Blume

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The post Top 10 Tips To Improve Insurance Agency SEO appeared first on Business Directory SEO.

Engines offer both organic and paid results, allowing users to select those responses they deem most germane to their query. What does this mean to the average insurance agency, broker or carrier? Insurance agents and brokers need to determine the long tail keyword phrases applicable to their organization and optimize their website for those phrases. Some insurance SEO long tail keyword examples include:

• New Mexico Truck Insurance
• Arizona Machine Shop Insurance
• New York Restaurant Insurance
• Professional Liability Insurance
• Florida Property and Commercial Insurance
• New York Coastal Condominium Insurance

The more keywords included in a phrase and the more specific the term, the narrower the results, and the less frequently that term is searched. Conversely, the shorter the phrase (auto insurance for example), the broader the results, and the greater the competition for the phrase. It’s important to note that the on page insurance SEO optimization is only part of the job. For effective insurance SEO, off page optimization is extremely important including news releases, social media marketing and ePublishing. Effective long tail research and optimization can and will result in improved insurance website traffic, and when combined with an up to date website and advanced insurance website tools, should translate into an increased book of business.

How does the Google Penguin and other algorithm shifts impact your insurance SEO and long tail keyword initiatives? These types of algorithm shifts were directed at websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The algorithm shifts account for greater emphasis on original content and social media than back link popularity. Further, insurance organizations which were focused heavily on backlink building, link swapping and directory submissions, often in pursuit of broader keyword phrases were adversely impacted by this shift. These algorithm shifts actually favor long tails keywords, as the content surrounding those keywords should be very specific, and thus very relevant to both users and search bots (search engine indexing engines). As Google, Bing and other search engines continue efforts to deliver more relevant content, quality content and focus on long tail keywords should be the mantra for an effective insurance SEO initiative.

Though organic insurance SEO and social media marketing is an important aspect of insurance marketing, insurance organizations seeking to rapidly build their pipeline will find the fastest path to B2B insurance lead generation remains insurance eMarketing and appointment setting calls. B2B insurance marketing often requires targeting a very specific niche, carrying a specific value proposition to a predetermined title or titles. For example, an insurance agency might want to discuss restaurant insurance or business interruption policies with dining and entertainment establishments. Though effective use of insurance SEO for this target market is important, agents and brokers should remember that insurance SEO initiatives are only one tool for insurance agency lead generation. Insurance SEO initiatives should be complemented with insurance eMarketing and appointment setting campaigns to ensure optimum lead generation attainment.

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