Situation
This corporation is one of the nation's largest provider of personal lines insurance (services such as homeowners and auto insurance sold to individuals). They insure more than 16 million households and have over 12,000 exclusive agencies and financial specialists in the U.S. and Canada.
Part way through their engagement with iProspect, the company added a division to their website. This new group provides life insurance, annuity, retirement, banking and investment products through distribution channels that include internal agents, independent agents, worksite, financial institutions and broker-dealers.
The corporation does business in one of the most intensely competitive online marketplaces — insurance. Marketers wanted the site to achieve greater visibility on branded and non-branded auto insurance and financial services terms within the major search properties, and as a result attract more qualified prospects who would generate more revenue for each of their product offerings.
Challenges
Marketing online in the insurance sector is an overwhelming undertaking. Myriad insurance companies compete aggressively for top search engine rankings. In addition to the competition of other insurance agencies, the company’s website was being outranked on branded keywords by anti-company websites. When a searcher queried the company’s brand name, the number one listing directed users to a “complaint website” about the organization. So a major challenge was to outrank this detrimental website.
Another challenge for the website was that it contained a significant amount of content, but this content didn’t focus on any of the company’s targeted keywords. Although a lot of content usually benefits a site, ideally each page should focus on one or two targeted keywords. Because of the lack of keyword-rich content on each page, the site was not taking full advantage of strategies that would improve its ranking performance in search engines.
The client also recently added a financial services section to their website, and because it was brand new, it had no visibility, requiring the iProspect team to start from scratch.
Solution
iProspect was challenged to increase the number of new pages of the site that were indexed by Google and other major search engines, add new directory listings and obtain additional relevant content endorsement™ via links from other relevant websites, as well as create meta tags for both the existing and new sections of the website.
iProspect also developed a search marketing strategy to assist the client in modifying and simplifying URL names so that search engine spiders could more easily access each page of the site.
The team then made numerous content recommendations for existing Web pages. Because existing pages had substantial copy with no keyword focus, it was recommended that they target one to two important keywords per page and modify copy accordingly. iProspect also implemented a strategy for introducing new keyword-rich pages to the website that focused on the client’s new service offering.
iProspect subsequently initiated an aggressive search directory strategy. This process included a thorough analysis of all insurance-related search directory categories, the development of keyword-rich titles and page descriptions for each listing, and manual submissions for directory editor review.
Results
The client currently outranks all anti-company websites on branded keywords.
The number of search referrals to the client site has more than doubled since the start of the search engine marketing campaign.
Traffic increased 238% from Yahoo!, MSN, and Google combined, the largest search properties, according to market share.
52% of the client’s rankings are visible on the first page of search results.
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