Insurance Agent Forum

[JRoot]

What do you health agents do to drive traffic to your health insurance website? What works best for you? Also, do you have any experience with the following:

Pay Per Click?
Link Exchanges?
Local Online Portal Ads?
Getting your site Search Engine Optimized?


Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. Thanks,

[K-Dub]

Originally Posted by JRoot

What do you health agents do to drive traffic to your health insurance website? What works best for you? Also, do you have any experience with the following:

Pay Per Click?
Link Exchanges?
Local Online Portal Ads?
Getting your site Search Engine Optimized?

Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. Thanks,

Pay Per Click? Not Effective! 90% Tire Kickers! Ask John!
Link Exchanges? Can be effective if done correctly!
Local Online Portal Ads? Don't know!
Getting your site Search Engine Optimized? Effective and the most important! Don't overpay for this though!

Based on just search engine leads I usually get about 6-10 a week, this is just off people searching on google, yahoo and MSN. Not a lot, and most are tire kickers anyway! What is your website? You should let us critique you on content first.

[JRoot]

Originally Posted by K-Dub

Pay Per Click? Not Effective! 90% Tire Kickers! Ask John!
Link Exchanges? Can be effective if done correctly!
Local Online Portal Ads? Don't know!
Getting your site Search Engine Optimized? Effective and the most important! Don't overpay for this though!

Based on just search engine leads I usually get about 6-10 a week, this is just off people searching on google, yahoo and MSN. Not a lot, and most are tire kickers anyway! What is your website? You should let us critique you on content first.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm getting my site designed right now, I paid a designer for a 6 page flash website. I would actually welcome some criticism of my content. I'm about finished writing my content, just trying to "perfect" it. This is my main page content (I'll post other pages if I get some constructive criticism) Please pick it apart...I won't take anything personally

Main Page

"Shopping for Health Insurance in California can be a daunting task. This website is set up to help you make informed decisions and obtain instant quotes from the major health insurance carriers in California.

People who buy health insurance from me are looking for more than a rate. They are looking for assistance in finding the right plan out of 1,000s of choices. You get my expertise, my ability to negotiate with underwriters and the comfort of knowing that I’ll re-look your policy year after year in the ever-changing California health insurance market.

Please feel free to ask me anything about health insurance. I’ll work to answer your questions promptly and arm you with the knowledge you need to find the right policy. I can be reached at (800) 829-8207 or shoot me an email at jeff@website.com"

Above the instant quotes on main page:

"Rates for health insurance in California are the same whether you purchase your health insurance directly from the insurance company or from a broker's web site. We both use the same published rates. Using a broker web site such as website.com gives you the advantage of comparing rates in one spot."

[CHUMPS FROM OXFORD]

Please forgive my journalistic background.

"1,000s of choices" Spell it out.

"I’ll re-look your policy" Try "review."

"I’ll work to answer your questions promptly" Get rid of "work to."

"arm you with the knowledge" "provide" instead of "arm". "Arm" sounds good in speech but not in print.

"shoot me an email" Just say "email me."



My kids hate when I review their papers, reports etc...

[somarco]

Sure you want a flash presentation? "Pretty" sites don't always sell.

[thackeragency]

I've been working with this for 4 years. You need to learn SEO yourself and do it yourself if you don't want to spend money for a successful site.

It always changes. What worked 5 years ago doesn't work now, what works now won't work next year.

I was first on adwords and got 20 leads/day for cheap. Now it is way too expensive to do PPC for insurance. There are tons of ways, and I could go over some of them, but like I said, it always changes. You want 'free' traffic through Search Engine Optimization. But the main thing involved in SEO is TIME. Google won't even recognize your site for a year. Be patient.

[JRoot]

Originally Posted by CHUMPS FROM OXFORD

Please forgive my journalistic background.

"1,000s of choices" Spell it out.

"I’ll re-look your policy" Try "review."

"I’ll work to answer your questions promptly" Get rid of "work to."

"arm you with the knowledge" "provide" instead of "arm". "Arm" sounds good in speech but not in print.

"shoot me an email" Just say "email me."



My kids hate when I review their papers, reports etc...

As you can tell, I'm not the best writer...just a sales guy, tell your kids to appreciate what they have! Thank you.

[Sam]

Google won't even recognize your site for a year.

This site is less than a year old, and most of our traffic comes from google.

[RolloverCoach]

"Duct tape marketing" by John Jantsch is a great book to read.
Many useful areas not only about web marketing, but also
About promoting your business and creating leads.

I consider it to be the best $16 I spent last year.

[healthagent]

Don't miss the easy stuff. I have my flyer up in every local grocery store's bulletin board. I get quotes through my site and phone calls.

[thackeragency]

Originally Posted by Melmunch3

This site is less than a year old, and most of our traffic comes from google.

This isn't actually a 'website'. It is a forum. Under certain circumstances you can get recognized earlier. But if it is just a site to sell insurance, it will take a while to get noticed.

Forums, blogs, and social networking sites show up earlier. This is a good forum, there aren't many insurance forums, and you probably rank on keywords that aren't competitive.

You have done a very good job with this idea. My most recent project http://www.short-termhealthinsurance.com took 9 months to be recognized on google for expensive and competitive keywords. If you get proper links coming in it can be done. But Google uses time as a factor for ranking. 4 years ago I could be in the Google index in a day.

It always changes.

[Sam]

There is no question that insurance quotes rankings are extremely competitive... Have you tried some linkbait?

[thackeragency]

I've tried everything. Everything works a little bit. Every six months I'll discover something that works REALLY well. But it doesn't last long because they change algorhythms.

I haven't really had a good idea for 'link bait' yet. I'm not technical enough to develop something like that. I'm always thinking though.

I do press releases, used to do link exchanges, now I do articles, and forum posts are supposed to be good which led me here. I have a blog that I post to as well. On occassion I purchase some one way text links but you have to be careful when paying someone for services like that.

Title Tags, keyword density, internal linking, directory submissions. . . . all of it works together to form the whole SEO package.

The most recent thing that worked surprisingly well was Craigslist of all things. I was able to spam the crap out of google in Jan with some twists I did to my craigslist postings. My Craigslist postings were 3 of the top 10 in VERY competitive terms within 2 weeks of posting them. It surprised me more than anything.

Social bookmarking sites are the SEO rage now. . . but they are more designed for blogs and forums. It'd probably be good for this site to work the social bookmarking angle.

Like I said, I've tried everything.

[somarco]

What kind of ad wording do you use on Craigslist?

[Sam]

It doesn't always work, but when you post on craigslist, or yahoo answers or squidoo or even youtube or some site like that, the title becomes the actual title tag for the page, so if you want to rank for a specific keyword, that is very heavily weighed by google, and since the site it is on already has a lot of internal link juice, you can rank for some of those words.

Even though some of the insurance agent youtube videos are pathetic, they really can rank for geotargeted insurance quote terms.
Also, Glenn, the owner of www.americaninsurancebroker.com has some text links and blog posting seo services that are targeted specifically to the insurance market.

[Bob_The_Insurance_Guy]

I have my web address on my business card, which I display on the counter of a local diner. I also hand out my business cards to referrals and centers of influence.

I don't have it registered with any search engine because I don't want tire kickers. Every networking event I attend, I hand out my card. I facilitate a Job Seekers Group, and hand out my card to any and all new attendees.

Every time I DON'T make a sale, I either send a "thank you" note or an e-mail, with my website on it, for future consideration, or referral purposes.

In other words, I remain in control, and I avoid all tire kickers.

[TriDad]

I'm pretty sure that if a website is either all or primarily FLASH, Google will not rank it high because their web crawlers pass over that type of content.

Better to have some Flash components, but not an entire Flash website. Another reason is that some people may not have the latest Flash plug in which means your site won't run on their machine. And one last thing to consider...if the programmer isn't the greatest out there, they may produce a site that takes a while to load on the typical person's computer. If they have to wait more than 10 seconds...you may lose them!

[slushhhpuppie]

www.customeraq.com

Looks like a pretty innovative way to qualify potential buyers and have them contact you.

But, at $12,000 UPFRONT, as well as $7.25 per client referred (not to mention the $10,000 annual renewal fee) it seems pretty risky.

I couldn't stop laughing after the sales rep pitched me the "low cost of $11,999!"

Don't get me wrong--its sounds like an interesting idea. However, and I don't think I'm alone here, I'm not willing to front THOUSANDS of dollars for ANYTHING, let alone an insurance marketing gimmick.

[healthagent]

I don't know - I hear about all these ways to optimize the placement of your website but the average person hitting a search engine looking for health insurance probably types in "health insurance quotes."

When I type that in I don't see a single listing for a "regular" health insurance agent's website. All I see is paid ads at the top and right, and also companies who pay for ads listed in the general search results.

Obviously advertisers paying huge amounts of money on pay-per-click would go NUTS if they saw "Big Billy Bob's Health Insurance Agency" on the fist page of a search and "Big Billy" isn't paying a dime. I certainly would sent an email to Google if I was paying.

I also don't think most people even go to the second page. Why would they - 20 companies offering free quotes are on the 1st page.

[senior-advisor-indiana]

I have NEVER looked at the 2nd page of results on anything that I have searched for.