Sunday, November 25, 2012

Insurance SEO Best Practices: Attain What Is Attainable


With respect to insurance agency SEO, as with all things, attention to detail, complexities, and nuances can cloud our perspective - we can't see the forest for the trees. A common manner in which this SEO vexation manifests is through keyword rank tunnel-vision. In a previous blog, we explored the nature of the keyword - what makes a keyword a good or bad pick. Now we must reexamine our keywords to determine performance, efficacy, and attainability.

Performance manifests itself in the simplest, most easily tracked manner. Has the ranking of your site for a given keyword gone up or down on a given search engine in the last month (monthly assessments are best)? If your rank has improved, then your site is likely performing well. If you were on page 3 and you are now on page 2, that is a very good start. If you were on page 3 and you are now higher on page 3, that is a modest gain that must be improved upon. Inevitably, your site's rank for some keywords will stay flat or go down. Simple enough.

Efficacy is easy to understand, but more difficult to track. A closed-loop integrated marketing and sales approach, usually bolstered by a CMS (client management system or content management system), is required to make such determinations. The question is not how your rankings have changed, but how many prospects have resulted from the rank changes, and how strong is your conversion ratio for this prospect pool. Once we understand these finer aspects of inbound marketing, we gain a greater appreciation for the value of our SEO rank gains.

Attainability is the elusive aspect of SEO that can cause us to miss the forest for the trees. While efficacy is similarly important, it is more often appreciated and understood. Attainability is the ability of your SEO team to make effective gains on your site's ranking for a given keyword on a given search engine. Though Web CEO, Google AdWords, HubSpot, or other services may inform you that the competition for a given keyword is a specific numerical value (or numerical approximation), the actual competitiveness can vary dramatically. Beyond this, the far-reaching effects of Google's panda algorithm can play differently with various keywords. In the end, nothing beats experience and observation in determining the attainability of your keywords.

If you are targeting a pool of ten keywords that all have a similar keyword effectiveness index, and 3 go way up, 4 go up a little, 2 stay flat, and 1 goes down, you should intelligently examine the possible explanations for this, and try again. Once you have been targeting these keywords for 3 to 4 months, however, you should be able to determine which keywords are ripe for the picking, and which are extremely challenging to impact. It is better to focus your efforts elsewhere for more profitable time investment. In this regard search engine optimization is much like sales - a Yes is good, a No is bad, but it's the Maybe's that will kill you. Identify the winners, ditch the losers, and pursue a more optimum batch. See the forest for the trees.

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