SEO is the process of improving your website and content so it can be better seen in search engines. The two types of SEO, onsite and offsite, help lead potential prospects and clients to your insurance agency website.
You may have heard the acronym SEO floating around when doing research for your insurance agency website marketing. But what is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website and your content so it can be better seen in search engines like Google. The higher your website ranks in search engine results, the easier it is for potential prospects and clients to find you.
The two types of SEO
There are two types of SEO: onsite SEO and offsite SEO.
Onsite SEO, or on-page SEO, deals with optimizing your website and content with items like:
- Keywords: General ideas that define what your content is about.
- Keyword research: Finding keywords your target market uses when conducting a web search.
- Image alt text: Also known as alt attributes, alt descriptions, or alt tags; alt text describes the image for web accessibility purposes.
- Title tags: Displayed on search engine page results as a clickable link for a given result.
- Metadescriptions: Displayed on search engine page results as a summary of the page.
- Page structure: How a website page is laid out and structured for easy reading.
Offsite SEO, or off-page SEO, involves building your website’s reputation through items like:
- Quality backlinks: Also called inbound links or incoming links. Backlinks are when one website links to another.
- Domain authority: Search engine ranking score that predicts how likely your site will rank on search engines (for the insurance industry, the industry domain authority is between 60-70).
- Local SEO: Increasing search visibility for agencies that serve clients face-to-face through things like online reviews.
- Social media shares of your website and content.
Why is SEO important for your insurance agency?
When search engines crawl the web and index—or store—your website, they look for three factors when it comes to ranking:
- Authority
- Relevancy
- Trust
Billions of websites exist on the Internet, and millions of insurance agency websites. When a potential prospect or client conducts a search, search engine algorithms direct them to the most relevant results.
Use a combination of both onsite and offsite SEO best practices to get the best search results. You can reinforce your agency’s authority, relevancy, and trust to position your insurance agency’s website as your potential clients’ top result.