Insurance companies face scores of challenges these days, not least of which are economic uncertainty and digital transformation — making it increasingly difficult to sell potential clients on policies. However, aspects of an insurance company’s digital marketing strategy can be tailored to help them reach the right people.
A lot of the challenges that today’s insurers face can be remedied with a little search engine optimization (SEO). By leveraging tailored SEO strategies and working with SEO experts, insurance companies can enhance their online presence.
Let’s talk about a few of the most prevalent — yet manageable — hurdles that insurance companies can overcome using SEO services that can help them be seen, drive engagement and, most importantly, increase brand trust in the modern day.
Market Challenges Facing the Insurance Industry
The insurance industry, from major insurance companies to independent insurance brokers, is navigating a complex landscape. Three of the foremost hindrances for insurers today can actually be ameliorated with a little SEO and content marketing elbow grease: lack of trust from a potential customer, which leads to low lead generation — and it’s all perpetuated by changing demographics.
Here’s how these directly affect each other:
Changing Demographics
While I’m not in the business of selling insurance, the rumbling from my research while writing this blog is that millennials are notoriously difficult to sell insurance to. Historically — we’re talking, like, 2017 — 80% of millennials said they simply had other expenses to worry about. However, more recent research conveys that today more and more millennials are becoming interested in buying life insurance. In fact, half of that demographic says that they need it — and if they already have it, they require more.
Trends similar to this one are not unique and the increasing interest in insurance means that it’s the perfect opportunity for insurers, including insurance brokers and agents, to step up and inform this generation about the importance of insurance, the different policies available to them, the benefits they provide and more. A lack of this type of authoritative and informative content in the industry will only drive a wedge between an insurance provider and customers.
Lack of Trust
These days, a positive customer experience (CX) is critical for business success. However, the global insurance industry is behind the curve when it comes to user-friendliness and engaging with clients online. Several factors contribute to distrust from customers, a few of which include:
- Lack of clarity on policies.
- Poor user experience (UX) on insurance websites.
The good news is that a pointed and intentional SEO effort can help solve these problems for insurers while simultaneously breaking down other barriers. By employing SEO services from an experienced SEO agency, insurance companies can improve their online presence, making it easier for potential insurance clients to find the information they need.
Low Lead Generation
Optional insurance products, like life and health policies, are in a bit of a weird place. People are altogether unlikely to show interest in these products — especially if they haven’t been educated about them. Additionally, with the plethora of insurance options available online, including insurance brokers offering various insurance solutions, standing out becomes a challenge.
This results in low lead generation across the board. But this is where insurers can put their expertise to work and funnel it into a content marketing strategy that helps drive leads. By investing in SEO services and launching targeted SEO campaigns, insurance companies can increase their visibility in search engine results, attract more qualified traffic to their insurance websites and ultimately generate more leads.
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Understanding Today’s Digital Insurance Customer
Insurance customers today are aligned with customers of most other services and products: they want a good customer experience. In fact, millennials are more likely than Gen Zers to switch to a competitor after just one bad experience with a company — insurers included. With so many options available at their fingertips, including online insurance brokers and comparison websites, maintaining a strong online presence is essential.
It stands to reason that it’s time insurance companies upgrade their legacy practices to ones that appeal to the modern consumer. Of course, this goes beyond just exceptional SEO; however, starting with your website is a great first step to success. Utilizing SEO tools and partnering with an experienced SEO agency can help insurers enhance their digital footprint and better connect with potential insurance clients.
The Benefits of SEO for the Modern Insurer
Insurance companies are in a unique position when it comes to SEO. Sure, every industry can benefit from increased organic website traffic and higher search result rankings. However, insurers have incredibly high subject matter expertise (SME) in their field. Not everyone is cut from an insurer’s cloth (or a math cloth or an investing cloth, for that matter). By leveraging this expertise through tailored SEO strategies, insurers can position themselves as industry leaders.
The average consumer may often find insurance and all of its nuances complicated to understand. Not everyone knows exactly how different types of insurance work or what options are best suited for their specific case — but most people do need it.
Insurers can leverage their SME to build authoritative content that informs and educates the general populace about the importance of insurance, the different types of insurance and other critical information to help build credibility. By optimizing their insurance websites with relevant keywords and creating informative content, they can improve their visibility in search engine results. Through this, insurers can establish themselves as an expert worthy of trust, which can provide a competitive advantage over competitors in the industry.
The best part? Building this type of insightful content is sweet, sweet nectar to Google. Your proficiency in all things insurance, when translated into the right content, can do wonders for both your potential and existing customers and your search engine rankings.
Here are a handful of benefits that insurers can expect when implementing a robust SEO strategy:
Increase Organic Website Traffic
The more comprehensive your insurance marketing strategy, the better it can help drive organic traffic to your website. By utilizing SEO services and optimizing your content for relevant keywords, your insurance website can rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This increased visibility can lead to more clicks and more potential insurance clients visiting your site.
Generate Quality Leads
More traffic often results in more quality leads. With effective SEO campaigns and the use of SEO tools, you can attract visitors who are actively searching for insurance solutions that you offer. And while not every visitor will convert, the data you can collect as part of your strategy, through tools like Google Analytics, is invaluable. This information can help you refine your tailored SEO strategies and improve your conversion rates over time.
Improve Credibility and Brand Awareness
Particularly important to the insurance industry, building credibility helps convert leads. By providing valuable content and optimizing it with relevant keywords, you position your insurance agency as an authority in the field. Being a credible presence in the insurance sector also does wonders for building brand trust — something we highlighted as a main challenge for an insurance business. Additionally, a well-optimized insurance website reflects professionalism and commitment to serving insurance clients effectively.
Drive Local SEO to Generate Regional Interest
Insurers often plant roots within a city or town to sell to people who live there. More often than not, customers interested in buying a policy — especially older folks — may want to speak with their insurance professional in person. The good news is that instead of relying solely on legacy local marketing tactics like radio and TV ads to reach a regional audience, an insurance agency can take advantage of local SEO.
For a strategy like this, it’s all about playing to Google’s algorithms while leveraging localized keywords and setting up business profiles. For starters:
- Set up a Google My Business profile: This will house all of your insurance company’s information, such as location, links to your insurance website, contact numbers, customer reviews and more. This makes it easier for potential clients to find you through local search results.
- Encourage happy customers to leave you a review: Lots of people check reviews for local businesses before deciding to engage. Filling your Google business profile with positive reviews will reflect positively on your brand and appeal to potential customers.
- Optimize for local keywords: Incorporate local keywords into your website content and metadata to improve your visibility in local search engine results.
- Use local directories: Register your insurance agency with local directories to enhance your local SEO efforts.
By implementing these strategies, your insurance agency’s SEO can significantly improve, attracting more regional interest and converting local visitors into insurance clients.
Now that you know just how significant a difference content marketing and SEO can make for your insurance practice, including improving your search engine rankings and attracting more insurance clients, let’s talk about how to develop a winning strategy.
Developing Your Insurance SEO Strategy
If your insurance website is outdated, hard to navigate and lacking content, those are all great places to start when developing an SEO strategy. Working with an SEO agency can help you identify key areas for improvement. But first things first, it’s imperative that you know your audience so that you can tailor your SEO efforts to them, creating content and using keywords that resonate with potential insurance clients.
Know Your Target Audience
Let’s use millennials as an example. We know they’ve gone through a change in perspective and behavior from not caring about insurance to becoming more interested in purchasing it. So, what caused that shift? When it comes to buying insurance, what are some of the most important considerations for this audience?
One consideration is that they are tech-savvy and rely heavily on search engines to find information, so appearing in search engine results is crucial.
Another factor is price. A survey revealed that 8 in 10 millennials overestimate the cost of life insurance. Using that as an example, insurers can strive to bring more transparency and clarity to insurance pricing. By creating informative content on your insurance website and using relevant keywords, you can address these misconceptions directly. Additionally, utilizing SEO tools can help you identify the keywords millennials are using in their searches, allowing you to tailor your SEO strategies effectively.
On-Page SEO
Starting with on-page SEO can help insurers get their footing — especially when overhauling an outdated insurance website. This might include developing landing pages for each type of insurance you sell, for example:
- Life insurance.
- Business insurance.
- Health insurance.
- Car insurance (auto insurance).
- Home/renters insurance.
From there, let’s use life insurance as an example, creating subsequent pages about each policy variation:
- Universal life insurance.
- Whole-term life insurance.
- Convertible term insurance.
You get the picture. Each of these pages can be further optimized for a chosen keyword that’s related to that specific page and topic, which will help boost your rankings in search engine results and, hopefully, get you on page one of Google for that term. That way, more users will find your business and be introduced to your brand.
After that, you can support that flow of traffic with blog content that ranks for your chosen keywords. Consistently publishing valuable content can position your insurance agency as an industry authority.
Another great thing you can do is work on internal links. By adding internal links — that’s, links to your webpages on the same website — you’ll create a web between your pages that will help Google’s crawlers make better sense of your website and the information on it. When done correctly, internal links can help you rank higher. Additionally, using SEO tools can help you assess your on-page SEO and make necessary adjustments.
Optimizing Your Insurance Company’s SEO Strategy
Optimizing your content is what will get you noticed by Google and seen by users searching for insurance services. However, augmenting the strategy itself can help you increase awareness, engagement and authority tenfold. Here are a few ways to enhance your insurance SEO strategy for better results.
Technical SEO
Your insurance agency website itself plays a major role in organic search. After all of the on-page SEO, optimizing the technical side of things will help Google’s crawlers (and users) navigate your website better. A well-structured, fast-loading and mobile-friendly insurance website can significantly improve your search rankings.
Technical SEO refers to any optimization that you can make to the website itself, including UX, page speed, mobile responsiveness, secure connections (HTTPS) and more. Utilizing tools like Google Search Console can help identify technical issues that need addressing. Anything you can do to improve these aspects of your website design and its servers will be worthwhile for generating more organic website traffic. Ensuring that your site is accessible and easy to navigate will enhance the user experience for potential insurance clients.
Take Advantage of Email Marketing
Digital marketing, no matter how much it has evolved, will never forget good ’ole email. And it’s maybe more effective than ever. Click-through rates of all kinds of emails, such as informative messages, advice, service offerings and more, are higher across the board in 2023 compared to 2021.
Use Social Media
When you think of social media, you may not immediately consider an insurance agency to be worthy of following. After all, how engaging and interesting can their content really be? Well, the people who think that are wrong.
For an insurance agent, social media can supplement the rest of their insurance marketing strategy. Platforms like LinkedIn are great for the more professional and bureaucratic crowd that wants to learn from and engage with experts.
Getting Started
While insurance agencies may be behind the curve of digital transformation, hope is never lost. By embracing SEO services and working with SEO experts, you can develop a tailored SEO strategy that elevates your online presence.
Search engine optimization can help you get to where you need to be to appeal to Google and potential customers alike.
Editor’s Note: Updated February 2025.