It's the life insurance broker's dream. Wake up every morning to an email inbox of consumers anxiously awaiting your call so that they can purchase life insurance. All you have to do is somehow rank on the front page of Google. Unfortunately there's a hundred thousand other insurance brokers who woke up this morning with the same dream. Fortunately, you're reading this article and I'm going to tell you how to actually rank.
Three ways to rank on the front page
Go Google a term life “life insurance brokers in {your hometown}” and look at the page that Google presents. You'll see that there's not one, but three locations that you can rank on the front page. The traditional way is to rank in the organic listings – this is what everyone thinks of when they think of Google rankings. However notice that there are two other blocks on the front page – the paid advertising (pay per click, PPC, or adwords) and the 7-block of local listings. You don't have to rank in the organic listings to get on the front page! We'll cover those last two opportunities in our next articles, for now we're going to focus on the organic results.
Two factors to ranking
There are two main items used by Google to rank your website. Ignore the rest of what you read about this; these two things always remain true because they have to remain true. The first thing you need is content. You can't rank on insurance terms if you don't have insurance content.
Content
Content is just a matter of writing it. Pick a bunch (more is better) of terms that you want to rank on, and write an article on it. The title of the article will be the search term, then write 500 words or so on the topic.
Forget writing articles on 'term life insurance'. Find niche topics, ones that are less competitive. Here's some ideas:
- life insurance for stay-at-home moms
- life insurance for franchisees
- life insurance renewal premiums
- life insurance for prostate cancer
More articles means better results. You're not looking for 1 article that generates 50 leads per month, you're looking for 50 articles that generate 1 lead per month.
Links
The second factor in ranking is inbound links – other websites linking to you. This is a two step process. First, you need to find the websites that may link to you (that's prospecting). Secondly, you need to determine why they would link to your website (that's your sales presentation). The best links you can find are those that are from high quality websites that are related to what you do. Bonus points if they're local to you.
Finding sites to link to you
You should always be looking for opportunity to develop links to your website. If someone has a pulse, they have a website and thus they should be linking to you. However initially lets look at some standard techniques.
First, write down a list of everyone you know that has a website. Secondly, write a list of everyone you sell to – anyone in your client list who has a website. Thirdly write down anyone that you do business with. There, you've got a huge list of people you can contact to give you links. You should remember this technique from your first days in the insurance business. Start calling.
Other lists you can generate are lists of business associations in your area, lists of financial blogggers, or even Google the terms you want to rank for and look at sites in the top 10 pages.
Why do they link to you
Now you've got a list of websites to contact. Why would they give you a link? The same reason they would buy insurance from you over the 10,000 other agents they have access to. Find the reason.
1.
Networking: “Hey buddy, how about a link” works for family and friends and close business associates.
2.
Membership: Business associations frequently simply require membership.
3.
Testimonials: Why would a company that supplies your business offer you a link? Try calling them and offering them a testimonial – they'll be happy to publish your words of praise along with a link to your site.
4.
Content: Bloggers will frequently accept a guest post from an expert.
There's as many ways to justify a link as there are websites so it's tough to generalize. In fact, be careful about generalizing or using automated methods. If a website allows easy links on their site it's likely a low quality site. The best websites are those that are difficult to get a link from.
Summary
Look to rank on 50 small terms instead of one large term. Write lots of articles to increase your chances of ranking on less competitve terms. Develop a list of websites who may give you a link and then approach them personally with a reason to give you that link.
Glenn Cooke is a life insurance broker and president of Life Insurance Canada.com Inc. He's been ranking websites in the highly competitve life insurance marketplace for over a decade.
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