Make Money While You Sleep

A Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Leads from Your Website

By Aaron KassoverTM

AgentMethods, LLC helps agents grow their agency through a high quality insurance website. We’ve developed the Agent Website Platform at AgentMethods from the ground up to put agents in control of their online website presence and give them the edge in marketing their business online.

Here are just a few of the benefits available through the Agent-Methods website builder:

Present a professional brand with a high quality site•Engage prospects and visitors with professionally written •website contentKeep the site current through our continually updated selec-•tion of homepage promotionsNever need to pay a web master again! You can make changes •and add pages to your site in minutesSearch-engine friendly design that lets you easily fine-tune •your search optimizationIntegrated Leads Management to track all of your leads and •follow-ups

About the AuthorAaron Kassover, managing partner of AgentMethods LLC, has spent the last 10 years helping insurance carriers, agencies and brokers bring their services online. He has applied this knowledge to the development of AgentMethods, a Website Platform for insurance agents, agencies and brokers.

Copyright © 2010 AgentMethodshttp://www.agentmethods.com/

About Agent Methods

4 Introduction

6 Step 1 - Have a High Quality Website7 Checklist 1 - High Quality Website

9 Step 2 - Tracking and Analytics10 Checklist 2 - Tracking and Analytics

11 Step 3 - On-site Search Engine Optimization14 Checklist 3 - Planning16 Checklist 4 - On-Site Optimization

18 Step 4 - Link Building Strategies19 Checklist 5 - Link building19 Checklist 6 - Competitive Research Link-Building

20 Step 5 - Maintaining Your Site20 Checklist 7 - Keep your site current20 Checklist 8 - Manage your SEO20 Checklist 9 - Maintain your link building

Table of Contents

It’s no secret that the Internet is quickly becoming the first stop for consumers and businesses alike to search for insurance.

With the growing role of the Internet in insurance sales, we’ve also seen a rapid increase in the number of companies focusing on generating insurance leads that they turn around and sell to agents. While buying leads from these firms can be a viable option for some agents, the best Internet leads are the ones that you generate yourself.

By generating a lead directly from your website instead of buying it from a broker, you are reducing the chances that multiple agents are competing for that lead’s business. More importantly, because the lead completed a form on your website, that person already knows who you are and is expecting your call. These two factors dramatically increase your chances of making a sale with each lead.

So how do you generate your own Internet leads? In this ebook, we share strategies that agents like you are using to drive prospects to their website and convert them into leads. But before we begin, there are some things to consider:

1. Generating Internet Leads takes timeIt may take months to see a return on your efforts. Traffic to your site will build slowly. You will need to monitor that traffic to learn from it and refine your efforts. This is not a quick fix.

Introduction

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2. Generating Internet Leads takes effortIf you want to generate leads online, it is going to require your continual effort. You should plan on setting aside a few hours a day to implement your Internet strategy or hire someone to help you. Once you get the knowledge required, things will speed up, but there are no shortcuts to Internet success.

3. If you follow these steps, you will be successful in generating Internet leads. The process of generating Internet leads has been proven to work. However, few agents have the discipline and patience to follow through on their strategy.

4. The successful Internet agent has more income potential than a traditional agent.Many of the limitations of traditional selling are completely removed online. You can come in contact with hundreds of people a day and effortlessly span the entire country. Tools are available to streamline and automate many of your routine processes, allowing you to focus on closing more deals. This means that you can make more money.

In the following pages, we’ve broken down the five steps to position your site for lead-generating success. For each step, we provide a checklist of the things you need to do. This is not an exhaustive list and the topics discussed here can get as complex as you want them to get. However, keep in mind that we’re offering a practical approach – our goal is not to explore the inner workings of search engines or to debate theory. The tactics and techniques described here, step by step, are proven to work. Follow them consistently and over time you will be successful.

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Step 1 - Have a High Quality Website

It all comes down to trust. Regardless of how you are selling insurance, you aren’t going to succeed unless your customers and prospects trust you. How do you develop trust? By building relationships.

As an insurance agent you know the value of relationships. But, your website might be the closest your customers ever get to you. Does your website further your relationships? Does it reflect your professionalism and knowledge? Or, does it encourage your prospect to think of your site only as a place to “get a quote”?

Your website should communicate two straightforward ideas to your prospects:

Why are you the right person to meet their unique 1. needs? Do you have the experience, knowledge, professionalism, and ethics to meet their needs? Do you understand them?

Do you work with the right carriers to meet their unique 2. needs? Do the carriers you work with offer the right product, with the right rating, at the right price? Can you zero in to the product that is right for your prospect?

That’s it!

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To do this, you must have a high quality website. If your website looks homemade, doesn’t work in all browsers, doesn’t load quickly, is outdated, or has poorly written content, it tells your visitors that you aren’t professional. Nothing says “unprofessional” on the web like a broken, incomplete, or confusing website. Your site MUST be a reflection of your professionalism.

Checklist – High Quality Website:

So what are the factors of a high quality website?

Clean, uncluttered navigation and layout. ☐Clear, informative, well-written, and typo-free content. ☐A focus not just on “quoting”, but on education. ☐Polished design and use of imagery throughout the site. ☐ W3C compliant code that has been tested across all ☐major browsers (ask your web designer).Search-engine friendly design. ☐ Clear call to action that draw your visitors toward your ☐goals. Feature, and not hide, YOU as the real human being ☐behind the site.

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Additionally, there are several things that you should look for in your website:

Can you add and change the content yourself, or do you ☐have to pay your designer to do it?Do you have control of the key factors of SEO? ☐Is it hosted on a fast, reliable, and high quality server? ☐ Do you get access to new content you can put on ☐your site on a regular basis, or do you have to create everything yourself?

Additional Materials:

VIDEO: Take a tour of a high quality insurance agent website.

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Step 2 - Tracking and Analytics

Once your site is live, you are going to want to know what’s going on with it. Tracking and analytics software will tell you generally who is visiting your site, where they came from, and what pages they visited. This will allow you to track how your site is doing over time, letting you know such things as:

What search phrases are driving the most traffic to your •site? What other sites are linking to your site, and how much •traffic are they driving to you?What pages are people visiting, and in what order?• What browsers and screen resolutions are visitors •generally using? How effective are paid marketing campaigns, such as •pay-per-click advertising and email campaigns, at driving traffic to your site?Where in the site do most people leave?•

You can use this information to fine tune your site, removing bottlenecks, adding content, and focusing your visitors’ experience. By tracking where people come from, you can focus your efforts on what’s working.

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Google provides a free analytics tool called Google Analytics. You integrate it into your site by adding a small script to the bottom of every page, which allow Google Analytics to keep track of your site visitors. If you are using a website platform, you should be able to enter the script once into the platform settings. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually add it to every page on your site.

To learn how to setup and use Google Analytics, visit their help site at http://www.google.com/analytics/discover_analytics.html.

Checklist – Tracking and AnalyticsSet up Google Analytics ☐Add analytics code to every page your website ☐Monitor changes in traffic ☐ Monitor traffic sources and search keywords that drive ☐traffic to your site

Additional Resources

VIDEO: Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting on your data.

LINK: Instructions to set up Google Analytics with your AgentMethods website.

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Step 3 - On-Site SEO

1. Planning - What keywords should you focus on?

Now that your site is looking great and analytics are set up, you’re going to want some traffic. Search engines are a fantastic way to get people to your site. However, if you go to Google (or any other search engine) and type in “insurance agent”, your site isn’t anywhere to be found. Don’t panic! Through the process of search engine optimization (aka SEO), you can control your destiny.

SEO begins by figuring out what phrases you should focus on. The ideal target phrase is one that your customers are typing into search engines with some regularity, is directly relevant to what you sell, and isn’t too competitive. With these three tests, we can quickly refine a list of potential keywords down to our best candidates.

Take a look at these different keywords that might seem like a good target, but upon further analysis, aren’t:

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Keyword: “Insurance Agent”

Search Volume Relevance CompetitivenessHigh – there are lots of searches every month for this phrase

Low – People might be searching for this because they are looking for an agent, but they also might be looking for a career as an agent. Also, because there’s no geographic boundary, traffic is likely to come from states you don’t sell in.

Extreme – You are competing with every agent, insur-ance job board, and insurance com-pany website in the country.

Keyword: “affordable health insurance”

Search Volume Relevance CompetitivenessHigh – Lots of searches

Medium to Low – Search-ers are probably looking for what you sell, but given the number of states, they’re probably not located where you sell

Extreme – Again, you are competing with every agent in the country.

So what kind of phrases should you focus on?

Look for phrases that fit this pattern:

Relevance = High – There’s a very good chance that the person

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searching is someone looking to buy insurance where you sell. That means the phrase is specific to a type of insurance, specific need, and geographic location.

Search Volume = Low to Moderate – The higher the volume, the more likely you are to find lots of competition. But if volume isn’t high enough, you are going to do lots of work for little to no results. We recommend looking for phrases that get 200 to 1000 searches per month. Keep in mind that you are going to have better success, at least initially, targeting 5 phrases with 200 searches per month than you are a single more competitive phrase that gets 1000 searches per month.

You can find estimated search volume using Google’s keyword tool (search for “keyword tool” in Google to find it).

Competitiveness = Low – The less competitive, the better. A good indicator of competitiveness is to do a search for the phrase using the “allintitle:” modifier. Pages with the exact phrase in their title are likely optimized pages about the same topic that you are targeting. To do this, type allintitile: ”some target phrase” into Google.

Using the above criteria, begin to brainstorm a list of potential keywords that are likely highly relevant. Don’t be afraid to look at some competitor’s sites to see what keywords they are using in their title and h1 tags. Once you’ve created your list, run them through Google’s keyword tool to identify the 20 best candidates with decent search volume but aren’t too competitive (the keyword tool gives you an estimate but not exact values). Next, take your refined phrases list and do the allintitle search with

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them. Finally, find the priority of the keywords using the formula:

“Priority =Search Volume2/Competitiveness”

This formula weights search volume and adjusts for competitiveness, finding the keyword phrases that are likely to give the best return on your effort.

Checklist - Planning Brainstorm a list of potential insurance-related keywords ☐that your customers may search for. Use dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and acronymfinder.com to get ideas. Remember to add local qualifiers. Identify 20 target relevant search phrases that have ☐300-1000 searches/month using Google Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Select top 10 phrases based on high traffic to competition ☐ration, using formula (search volume)2/(# of all-in-title results)

Additional Resources LINK: Questions? Visit our keyword research and

planning forum.

VIDEO: Watch a walkthrough of the keyword research and planning process.

DOWNLOAD: Keyword Research Spreadsheet

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1. On-site optimization - Getting the phrases placed properly on your siteNow that you have your list of target search phrases, the next step is to get them placed properly on your site. Before you put them in your copy, consider a few things.

First, a search engine’s goal is to find the best possible web 1. page out of the billion or so pages out there for each specific phrase. This means that quality counts. You need to have good, useful, informative content. It needs to be well written, free of typos and grammatical errors. And, most important, it needs to be unique – you can’t just copy it from another site. Second, search engines are blind. Because they can’t “see” 2. a page, they have to look at how the page is structured to determine what it is about. This means you need to put your target phrase in the appropriate places on a page to let the search engines know that that’s what this page is about.Finally, target one phrase per page. The more targeted pages 3. you create, the wider a net you cast. Plus, by targeting one phrase per page, you will guarantee that when people end up on your page from a search engine, they will find what they are looking for.

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Checklist - On-site OptimizationCreate a page for each targeted phrase.t ☐ Write 500 to 750 words of content about the keyword. ☐Use the keyword in the first sentence, and naturally throughout the page. Content should be original, not duplicated from ☐somewhere else. Put phrase in browser title (the HTML “title tag”) of ☐the page, making it no more than 70 characters long following the format “Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Site Name” or similar. Put phrase in page title (the HTML “H1 tag”) of the ☐page For each page, write a short description ‘selling’ the ☐content of the page. Why would someone want to visit this page? Think of this description as an ad for the page. Put this description in the page’s “meta description” tag.Use the phrase in a link to a different page. ☐ From other pages on your site, use the phrase to link to ☐the targeted page.

Additional Resources

VIDEO: Watch a walkthrough of on-site optimization.

LINK: Questions? Visit the ‘On Site Optimization’ forum.

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Step 4 - Link Building Strategies

Once you’ve completed your on-site SEO, you need to build up your pages as the authoritative source on their respective topic. You do this by getting other trusted and relevant pages to link to you. Search engines look at these inbound links as votes of confidence toward your content, and keep track of the keywords on the linking page as well as the “anchor text” (the text used in the link) to help determine keyword relevance of your page.

To be successful in search engine optimization, you need to put a plan in place to consistently develop links back to your site. This is an ongoing process that takes work. Avoid link-building schemes that automate this process as they can appear unnatural and fishy to search engines, putting your site at risk of getting “black-listed”. Instead, focus on getting links back to your site using the following strategies:

Article Marketing – Write short articles related to your target phrases and post them on ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, goarticles.com or other article syndication sites.

Guest Writing – Contact owners of related sites such as community sites, real estate or financial planning blogs, or local business sites, and offer to write an article for

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their site. Keep the article educational, and to the point. Link back to your site in your short bio.

Directories – List your site on insurance and small-business specific directories.

Local Directories and Local Search – Make sure you show up in local business directories. These are both nationally maintained directories like Yelp and Google Local and locally maintained directories like neighborhood business sites and local chambers of commerce.

Trade Links – Get other services and professionals to link to you by linking to them. The recommended strategy for doing this is to be proactive. Begin by creating a resources page and linking out. Then, contact the businesses you link to requesting they link back to you.

Additional Resources

VIDEO: Questions? Visit the ‘Link Building Strategies’ forum.

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Checklist - Link Building Write two to four 300-500 word articles per month, ☐posted on article marketing websites. Contact one site owner a week offering to write an article ☐for their blog, site, or newsletter. Include three our four sample topics and links to two or three articles you’ve written in the past. List your site on all directories listed on the ☐AgentMethods insurance agent directory list. Identify local business directories on which to list your ☐site. Claim your Google, Yahoo, and Bing local listings. ☐ More details on our insurance website blog. Create a “Useful Resources” page on your website where ☐you link to 20-30 useful professionals, services, and resources. Contact the resources listed on your “Useful Resources” ☐page to tell them about the link and ask for a reciprocal link.

Checklist - Competitive Research Link-building Install the SEO Toolbar for Firefox at ☐ http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html Turn the SEO Toolbar on, and do a search at Google for ☐each of your target phrases For each of the top results, go click on the “Y! page link” ☐links to show pages that link to that result Go through the linking pages to find additional linking ☐sourcesRepeat for each of your target phrases ☐

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Step 5 - Maintaining your site

The website marketing and promotion process never ends. It will take consistent effort over three to six months to begin seeing results. The longer you stick to it, the better these results become. Plan on setting aside time every week to review, refine, and improve your website, search engine strategies, and link building.

Checklist - Keep your site currentMonthly - Add new content ☐Quarterly - Update your home page images quarterly ☐

Checklist - Manage your SEOMonthly - Track your rankings on target phrases ☐ Monthly - Review and adjust your target keywords ☐ Monthly – Update on-site SEO based on adjusted target ☐phrases

Checklist - Maintain your link building Monthly - Write two to four articles a month on targeted ☐phrasesWeekly – Contact a site owner about guest writing ☐Monthly – Review your competition’s linking ☐

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