How many times has someone in the inbound marketing field approached you and told you they know how to improve your agency’s insurance website? Told you that you need more of this or less of that? That they know the best answer to how to optimize your website for search? How many times have you read an article on one inbound marketing tactic or another and thought “that’s it, my agency’s insurance website NEEDS this?”

We’ve all heard it and been through it, even here at Zywave. Part of having an online presence for your brand means that you will receive inquiries from other companies and that you will be interested in researching the latest and greatest tactic you can utilize. What you don’t want to do is blindly follow everything you read, as not all inbound marketing and SEO tactics are treated equally; and, not all will be appropriate for your agency.

When it comes to tactics for how to optimize your website for search, three of the more “popular” tactics we see being promoted to insurance agencies are:

• Your website needs more pages (content overload)
• Your website content doesn’t have enough keywords (keyword stuffing)
• Your website needs meta keywords, and lots of them

If you are wondering how to optimize your website for search, let’s start first by debunking some of the myths about what won’t help your SEO.

My Website Needs More Pages

Perhaps the biggest thing we see at Zywave is “my website needs more pages.” Having worked with insurance agencies in inbound marketing for the past five years, I can tell you this is what we call an “old school” tactic. Five years ago, adding a page for any and every insurance product you sold was the strategy of choice. This tactic even went as far as to have both a page for auto insurance and car insurance so Google could recognize that your agency should be found for both keywords. Google has gotten a lot smarter, understanding things like synonyms and semantics of a search query. Google has gotten better at determining a searcher’s intent based on what they type into the search engine, as well as understanding that a term like auto insurance is synonymous with car insurance, and home insurance with homeowner’s insurance.

It is better to have more comprehensive, engaging, and unique pages on your agency’s website than pages for all the insurance products you could possibly sell. When you get into having too many pages, your content becomes thin, repetitive, and won’t hold much value to your readers/visitors (your customers and prospects!). For example, if you sell auto insurance, off-road vehicle insurance, and RV insurance, why not create one, comprehensive, engaging, and unique page detailing all of the different vehicles you can cover and auto insurance policies you offer? Things like off-road vehicle insurance and RV insurance may not have much search volume or hold much SEO weight, but they are worth mentioning within your auto insurance content to show the depth of your policy offerings and catch the few people who may be searching for them.

Pro Tip: Where you’ll get the most bang for your buck for content on your website is through blogging. Blogging will continuously provide your website with fresh and valuable content, which is something Google loves. Blogging is great for engaging your customers and prospects and your posts will actually add more pages to your website. It’s better to add more pages to your website with engaging content like this than thin, boring pages detailing every coverage option you have available.

My Website Content Doesn’t Have Enough Keywords

The subject of keywords is a bit tricky these days. Google has made it clear to the inbound marketing community that they will not reward (and may even punish) websites that are “over-optimizing” their content. Over-optimizing your website can include having exact-match keyword URLs, hiding text boxes on your site, and more significantly, keyword stuffing.

One of the concerns we see in many agency owners is that the content on their websites doesn’t have enough keywords. There was a time years ago where you could write your website content simply to get exact keyword mentions in a certain number of times and you could bet on ranking for said keywords. Today is a completely different story. Your content needs to be written for a purpose; your content needs to be high quality, readable, and value-add to your customers and prospects. Keyword mentions within your content should be natural – your content should already keep its readability. Again, Google is smarter now. Google knows that if you’re in Warwick, Rhode Island and you talk about auto insurance on that page, that you’re relevant for a myriad of keywords including Warwick, Rhode Island, RI, auto insurance, car insurance, etc. Practices like calculating the keyword density of your content are outdated. Producing high quality content should always be the first priority for your agency’s website.

When you consider how to optimize your website for search, your content needs to be written first and foremost for people, not the search engines. Your content should read naturally – you shouldn’t be able to look through it and pick out every keyword mention.

My Website Needs Meta Keywords (Tag)

Your agency’s website should have what is called meta data on all of its pages. Your meta data should include unique and compelling title tags and meta descriptions for every page. A meta data field that is no longer of importance is the meta keywords tag. Here at Zywave, we do not use the meta keywords tag at all, nor do we feel it is important. Matt Cutts (Google’s Head of Webspam) himself has said that Google does not use meta keywords in web ranking.

Furthermore, the creator of Yoast (Joost de Valk), the highest rated SEO tool in WordPress, has set meta keywords to be turned off by default. In fact, if you try and turn them back on in the toolset, you’ll receive this message: “I don’t know why you’d want to use meta keywords, but if you want to, check this box.”

The meta keywords tag used to be a place where site owners would stuff lengthy lists of keywords they wanted to rank for in hopes that this would aid in boosting their rankings in the search engine results pages. This not only doesn’t help your website rank, but it could also look like you’re stuffing your site with keywords. Err on the side of caution and leave meta keywords out of your optimization plan.

What WILL Help SEO

Though your insurance marketing plan should include all of the tactics within inbound marketing, SEO is typically a focus for agency owners. Insurance is one of the most competitive fields in search, so keeping abreast of the different ways you can set yourself apart is crucial. However, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of focusing on the unimportant, or the things that can hurt you in the end. Google will always look for sites that have unique, fresh, engaging, and high quality content; their intent to connect users with the most valuable and relevant results has not changed. Put yourself in the best position by ensuring that your website has the right pages to sell your core products and continuous fresh content through onsite blogging efforts.