Hitsearch are an award-winning agency that have provided SEO for insurance brokers, along with digital marketing consultancy services to ambitious businesses in the insurance sector for more than 15 years. Our tried and trusted approach to insurance digital marketing is honest, ethical and transparent. We always aim not only to deliver excellent services and results, but also to help improve your in-house knowledge and expertise where we can. We develop great long-term relationships with our clients and always try to work as an extension to your own marketing team for great positive synergy.

Why insurance brokers should be running SEO campaigns

Search engines are the first port of call for most people when they are looking for insurance. Every month in the UK, there are 500,000 searches for ‘car insurance’ alone, peaking at 675,000 searches during July.

It’s not just car insurance that people look for more information on through search engines. Pet insurance is searched for 135,000 times every month, with 12,100 monthly searches just for cat insurance.

People search for a variety of insurance terms to find the best deal or more information on types of cover. These include:

Types of policy e.g. car, home, pet, business
Brands e.g. Churchill, Swinton Insurance, Direct Line
For quotes e.g. cheapest car insurance, car insurance cost, compare car insurance
For reassurance e.g. best car insurance
For insurance with a local touch e.g. insurance broker in Manchester, insurance company in Birmingham, insurance companies near me

Google is the place that consumers and businesses go to check out deals and to find a new insurer, so your insurance business needs to have a prominent presence in search results when the right kind of customer is looking to purchase or renew a policy.

With search marketing, there are two key tactics available to marketers:

Paid search – where you pay per click. This can very expensive in the insurance space specifically, with a generic term like ‘car insurance’ currently costing more than & per click for a new campaign. Research shows that around 71% of Google users ignore PPC ads and if it takes people an average of five visits to your website to convert into a customer – the costs of PPC can soon mount up and focusing entirely on this activity might not be best use of your resource – especially in the long term.
Organic listings – using search engine optimisation to help your site rank in listings for relevant search terms used by your potential customers. As well as driving significant amounts of traffic, good rankings can also be a strong trust signal to users – as the top organic results are often perceived as trustworthy brands in that field.

Most, if not all, of your competitors will be using both of these tactics already, and ignoring either of them can result in you losing more market share every day.

SEO is a long-term strategy to drive the right kinds of customers (with buying intent) to your website. This channel is usually second only to email marketing in terms of ROI.

SEO services for insurance brokers

We assist online insurance brokers with all aspects of SEO and work as an extension of in-house teams to ensure a consistent and aligned approach. SEO is a highly measurable marketing discipline, and our focus is always based on ensuring a positive return on investment, although it must be said that SEO is no quick fix. Results can take time to achieve and hold, but the business rewards can be truly significant.

A typical SEO campaign contains a combination of different elements, each tailored specifically for your business and audience. The best SEO activity works to complement the other marketing channels and activity to give the best possible results and return e.g. content marketing, digital PR and social media.

SEO audit and market research

Every new SEO strategy needs to start from a place of analysis in order to make sound data-led decisions about the right approach going forwards. The specific analysis required can vary somewhat, but will often include:

Keyword research – finding out the best terms to target (usually a combination of generics and long-tail) and agreeing these for the period ahead
Tech audit – what technical issues are limiting the organic performance of the website currently? What needs to change in order to fix these?
Ranking analysis – to benchmark where the website currently performs in terms of SEO results which will help to track growth in the future. It’s important not to base success on rankings alone – as keyword rankings don’t necessarily mean more money in the bank if they are less likely to convert. It’s important to take rankings in context with other performance results for a balanced view
Competitor analysis – conduct SWOT analysis on competitors and track their data monthly to highlight where they are performing better than you (and why) and show opportunities where you can start to outperform them
Trends – are there any trends that change how people search for what you offer? Are there Google algorithm or other changes that could have an impact on results? Is your customer device use changing over time? How can you better meet their needs on different devices?
Customer journey mapping – what does a typical customer journey look like and what search terms do they use at different stages? What are their pain points and how can your website overcome these? The idea is for your website to be ever-present throughout every stage of the buyer journey.

On-page SEO

Focusing on code, content and user experience via:

Technical SEO – with suggested code tweaks and improvements, ensuring compliance with Google guidelines, liaising with developers to add additional features and fix any issues flagged by the audits and monitoring all technical aspects on a monthly basis.

Content – revising existing content to be more relevant to search terms used by customers, to add new content to cover new themes and target new terms, to ensure the content aligns with wider content marketing strategy that includes social media.

User experience – measuring Google’s Core Web Vitals regularly, suggesting technical enhancements to improve user flow and suggest improvements across every area of the site for enhancing the UX. Our dedicated CRO team can conduct analysis and provide all recommendations.

Off-page SEO for insurance brokers

When it comes to a strategy for SEO activity that happens off the site itself, Hitsearch take an ethical approach that is highly successful. We often tie off-page SEO in with PR and social media activity, which means that not only is there an SEO benefit, but other marketing channels can amplify this even further to maximise results and the cross-channel ROI.

Whilst every off-page strategy we develop is bespoke to focus on the specific client requirements, some of the elements we may incorporate can include:

Inclusion in quality online directories that drive traffic as well as include a link
Digital PR activity to include national, regional and trade press/media, to achieve coverage that can help to influence the target audience as well as links
Outreach to relevant influencers and opinion-formers, designed to incorporate links and help drive traffic and policy sales
Securing branded coverage across major digital platforms like social media and Google’s knowledge graph
Developing key, long-term relationships with key publishers and journalists
Competitor analysis to discover who is linking to them and why – activity can be developed to help exceed this