Who would read a blog about insurance, you might ask? Honestly, not many people. That said, you should read this blog. Here’s why.
If you’re on this page, you’re probably wondering if an insurance blog will bring more traffic to your website. We know the answer to that question. And, we’re going to share with you why you should and should not have an insurance blog. We know the good, the bad and the ugly about blogging. The reason we know is because we’ve been writing an insurance blog for eight years. In this post we’re sharing what we’ve learned with you.
To learn about ValChoice tools, click the button below. You can schedule a demo that shows how ValChoice tools help insurance agencts find more prospect and close more business.
Why would I have an insurance blog?
There’s one reason to write an insurance blog. Website traffic. Traffic to insurance websites if very hard to attract. A blog can help, if done properly. There are two ways an insurance blog can help attract website visitors:
- Search content
- Backlinks
Let’s look at how each of these two points can be applied to your website.
Search Content
Your blog should cover topics for which your website can rank highly. For example, don’t blog about “discount insurance,” “cheap insurance” or any other commonly used terms. The big companies like Geico, Progressive, State Farm, Allstate and discount online brokerage services are ranked highly for these search terms. Unfortunately, your agency will not appear high enough in search for competitive terms like this to get clicks to your website.
However, if you’re in Des Moines (just an example), you may be able to rank high for terms like “Des Moines auto insurance” or “Best auto insurance in Des Moines.” There are free tools available that will give you an estimate of how easy it is to rank for keywords. Click here for a free tool we use occasionally. Look for two things in the search terms you choose. 1) the term is easy to rank for and 2) the search volume is as high as possible.
Backlinks
Blog about topics for which you can get backlinks. Also, you want backlinks from companies with a high domain authority. In other words, you need to blog about topics that are interesting enough for sites with a large number of website visitors to link to your content. There are a couple ways to do this:
- Your blog post needs to be interesting and informative enough to become a news story. Links from local newspapers or TV stations are valuable for two reasons. First, these websites tend to be considered as credible, high authority sites. Having links from high authority sites will help in terms of getting Google to present you higher in search results. Second, links from high traffic web sites can drive referral traffic. Referral traffic is where someone from the other website clicks the link and is Brough to your sire.
- Blog about your carrier partners and get them to link to the blog post. Everybody wants a positive story about their company. Also, insurance companies often have decent website authority. Getting links from insurance companies is valuable. For an example of how to write a blog post that your carrier partner is likely to link to. Click here for a post by Evarts Tremaine about Westfield Insurance. You will need to ask the carrier to link to your post. Fortunately, it’s in their best interest to do make that link.
Are there reasons not to have a blog?
There is one reason not to have a blog. That reason is that you don’t want to have the pressure to regularly update the blog. If your blog gets stale and posts are out of date, it gives the impression that you’ve gone out of business.
However, that’s part of the fallacy of blogging. You don’t need to write hundreds of blog posts. How do we know that? We know because we did it. First, we hired the SEO experts. Next, we chose the key words for which we could rank, and some we couldn’t. Then, we wrote the blog posts and optimized the text. Yes, we did it all. Here’s proof. Checkout our nearly 400 published blog posts at ValChoice insurance blog.
Other Important Points About Your Insurance Blog
Here are some key points that will make blogging less of an onerous task while helping your website traffic grow:
- Have 52 blog posts
- Keep the date current (within approximately one year of the current date)
- Blog about topics that get backlinks
- Link from the blog to other pages on your website
Why 52 blog posts?
One post a week is good enough to have fresh content. This will be a regular enough update to keep Google, Bing and other bots crawling your site looking for new content. Not letting the bots (or your potential customers) think you’ve gone out of business is important.
Keep the Date Current
Once you’ve completed one year of blogging, congratulate yourself on a job well done. Next, instead of writing a new post each week, update an old post. Make some changes (they can be fairly minor) and republish with the current date. The date will draw the bots back to crawl again and show your customers that you’re still in business.
Never change the URL on the post. Keeping the same URL ensures all of the backlinks you’ve gotten are still valid and live.
Blog About Topics That get Backlinks
We discussed this above so rather than repeat that information, here’s a bit more on getting backlinks. You can ask other businesses with websites to link to your posts. You can even hire firms that will build backlinks (often through posts on other websites) to link to your content. Hiring firms to build backlinks can get expensive. Also, if you take this route, be sure to hire a reputable firm. Low quality backlinks will not help your business, and can hurt your websites credibility.
Link From the Blog to Other Pages on Your Website
When blogging about a topic, be sure to link to other pages on your website that talk about that same topic. For example, let’s say you blog about the unique coverage options that one of your carriers offers for home insurance. Link from that blog page to your home insurance page. Presumably there will be more information, or complementary information, on that page. This helps in a couple ways: 1) get the reader to spend more time on your site consuming your content, and 2) when you get the carrier to link to the blog post page, your reference to the other page on that site will create some flow through link equity to the other page. That way multiple web pages (and the domain) get a more significant boost from backlinks.
Blogging Summary
Blogging isn’t hard. There is some up front investment in time, but if you keep the blog up to date and put in the work to get backlinks, it will pay off. Over time blogging gets easier and the benefit grows. However, you do need to keep the blog current.
Other Digital Marketing Considerations
The insurance agency website is only part of the online strategy. Other important elements include:
- Website – Does my insurance agency website need updating?
- Search Engine Optimization – Five Steps to Maximize Insurance Agency SEO
- Social Media – 4 Must Know Items for Your Insurance Agency Social Media Strategy
- Advertising – Should insurance advertising be part of my agency budget?
ValChoice tools address all of these needs. Click the button below to schedule a demonstration.
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