As a Search Engine Marketer, one of the questions that I get asked most by clients is “What determines my position in Google search results?”

It is a popular point of confusion — clients have a separate SEO team establishing the importance of using keywords on their website in order to gain visibility in search results while their SEM team touts the ability to use marketing budgets to force Google to place their advertisement in search results on important keyword searches.  While SEO (search engine optimization) is a merit-based system of ranking, SEM (pay-per-click) is an auction-based system that allows advertisers to gain visibility based on keyword-specific bids.  Let me explain!

PPC results, as we all know, appear at the top and right side of Google search results.  There are ten available positions on each search result page (normally three at the top and seven on the side).  On the surface, Google uses a simple formula to determine how these results stack up against each other.

PPC ads are ranked using this formula:

Ad rank = keyword bid ($) x quality score

Keyword bid (or CPC bid) is the maximum dollar amount that you are willing to pay for each click on your ad for that specific keyword (“car insurance”, in this instance).  Quality score is a Google metric that determines how relevant and useful your ad is to the search engine user. The higher your quality score, the better. Google actually assigns a quality score for each keyword that you wish to advertise for (1-10 scale).

Quality score measures “relevancy” by looking at two things: your PPC advertisement and the page to which you are directing traffic after the click (the “landing page”).  Both must be directly related to the keyword on which you have placed a bid, or else Google will assign you a poor quality score.

For example, if your PPC campaign contains insurance related keywords Google will:

What happens if you have a poor quality score? Good question.  In most instances, this poor quality score will be reflected in a higher required cost per click or in a lower ad rank (if you do not compensate by increasing your keyword bid).  In other examples of ads that are not remotely relevant to their associated keywords, Google will simply not show the ad in search results in an effort to improve their user experience. Remember, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the exact information that it believes its user is looking for.

Google will determine your specific click cost on a keyword-by-keyword basis, using the formula above. But remember this when wondering how your cost per click is calculated in Google: just because you have bid $4.00 per click for a particular keyword doesn’t mean that you will pay that much.  It is the maximum that you will pay for that keyword.  All things being equal, the advertiser will pay will pay the minimum amount for their ad’s position as possible.  If the quality score is the same for two advertisers competing for the same keyword, the high bidder will pay only $0.01 more per click than the next highest bidder and be placed one rank higher in search results.  Confused?  Don’t be.  Let’s look at an example:

Advertiser 1 has a maximum keyword bid of $10.00 for the term “boise auto insurance”, more than any other competitor. They have a quality score of 8/10. Advertiser 2 has a maximum keyword bid of $8.00 for the same keyword, with a quality score of 8/10.  They are the second highest bidder.  Advertiser 1 will be in position 1 in search results, with a cost per click of $8.01.

You won’t always pay a per-click cost equal to your maximum bid, which is pretty cool!  You can further improve your cost efficiency by doing things to raise your quality score, but that’s a different blog post for a different day.

There you have it – a quick explanation of how Google determines your position and cost in Paid Search results.

By now, it’s safe to say that we all are aware of how crucial blogging is to one’s overall Internet Marketing strategy. Whether you publish content weekly, 3 times per week or even daily it’s likely that the time will come when you are struck with writers block. It’s not easy to create content that not only naturally incorporates your keywords but is also readable, entertaining and something your readers will want to share.

When you’re struggling for ideas, where do you turn? Perhaps you scour the office for industry-related updates or maybe you check your favorite news station’s website; whatever you do to dig up some blog-worthy ideas can easily be combined with these tips for creative content creation:

Behind-the-Scenes Insight

Your blog serves many purposes including the need to: to increase your overall SEO efforts, thus increasing traffic and generating leads – as well as highlighting your agency’s culture. The goal with any good Insurance Marketing strategy is to capture the attention of prospects, retain current clients and inevitably grow our business. To do so you have to position yourself at the forefront of your consumer’s mind; and how do you do that – by separating yourself from the competition.

When you think of insurance, what comes to mind? Most often you’ll envision accident scenarios, policies and claims. But there’s so much more to what you do and who you are, so showcase that on your blog. Do you celebrate employee birthdays with a giant cake? Maybe you volunteer with a local charity. Perhaps you have launched a friendly office-wide competition…take Astonish Results for example and our office’s RFM Weight Loss Challenge! By providing current clients and prospects with a sneak-peak into what life is like at your agency you are allowing them the opportunity to connect with you on a different level and build a relationship that goes beyond simply selling them an insurance policy.

Appeal to the Season

Changes in season are the perfect starting point for an informative, yet appealing blog post. You can coordinate your blogging efforts with the ever-changing weather patterns; think about including information about recent storms, local damages and how to best prepare for severe weather.

Seasonal posts can stretch farther than what may be falling from the sky. Think beyond weather and consider the activities that your consumers may participate in during any given period of time. Perhaps in the winter you talk about preparing your vehicle for the colder weather or in the summer you highlight the watercraft insurance policies your agency can offer its avid boaters. Nearly everything has its own season; weddings, back-to-school, holiday prep, etc. focus on providing useful, valuable information that can apply to your consumers’ everyday lives.

Tips & How-To’s

One of the most popular and well-received blogging styles is those that include tips and “how-to” information. Alongside your mission to gain a competitive edge, increase your agency’s visibility and strengthen your SEO, your blogging should also serve a greater purpose—providing value to the reader. You should strive to craft content that can positively impact your current and prospective clients, give them the facts, advice and general knowledge they both want and need.

These types of blogs can include general insurance tips, such as how to keep particular premiums low or can span across a variety of topics such as how to protect your home from burglars or fires safety tips for one’s home and office.

Current Events

Another aspect of your blogging strategy is using your content to brand your agency as a credible, knowledgeable expert – and better yet an active community leader. To do so you need to know what’s going on in the world around you and how it both applies to and affects the lives of your consumers. Developing a reputation for your agency which portrays you as a trusted resource for valuable information and news can help you both draw in readers (and prospects!) as well as keep them coming back for more.
When blogging about current events, make sure that they are either applicable to the industry or specific to your local community. Look for changes in legislation, new acts or regulations or even choose to stay up-to-date on the constantly evolving issues with health care. Perhaps a new driving-while-texting ban was passed in your state; that would serve as a quality blog post as well as provide you with the opportunity to incorporate some auto insurance information within the content. Or maybe flood damages reached a record high in your region, explain what this might mean for area homeowners and their insurance premiums.

Whatever you choose to write about, make sure your blogs are always valuable, interesting and portray your agency as a leading insurance resource. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box—do what you can to make your insurance content appealing and share-worthy.

Have any suggestions? Where do you go when your content has you stumped? Share your suggestions and comments with us below and feel free to check out our additional blogging tips for making the process more enjoyable!

LinkedIn is a great resource to use to brand yourself professionally and your business. But how do you go about using it? The Insurance Marketing HQ team has put together some simple steps to help insurance agents get started with LinkedIn and utilizing it in an effective manner.

Generally LinkedIn is a place to network and connect with other businesses, their owners, and employees. It all does back to the goal of social media for insurance marketing—to get your agency brand and name out there, and find leads via social networking and share your expertise.

You’ve picked your keywords.  These are keywords that match what you sell and people are actually using them in their searches. But what do you do with them? How do you deploy these good keywords so they help drive relevant traffic to your site?

Well, to start, you want to write good content that uses your keywords throughout.  The trick here is not to overuse your keywords and look spammy.  Google is really working to cut the spammy pages from their results.   Try spreading your words out in the content.  Start with having the keyword you’re focusing on in the first sentence of the page.  Hopefully you have enough good content that your keywords can be mentioned a couple of times in the body without looking like spam.    Finally, it is good practice to close with the chosen keyword in the last sentence of the page.  I like to add it in to the call to action whenever possible.

In addition to placing them throughout the content, you should add the keywords to the on page title. This lets the search engines and potential clients know what the page is about.  Also, emphasizing or bolding your particular keywords tells your potential customers and the search engines that these are important and your page has what they want. “Hello! Look over here.  This is the keyword you’re looking for.”

Of course the most important place for your keywords is in the title tag.  The title tag labels your page in the browser, this appears at the very top of your browser window, and is what shows up as the title for your page in the search results. So it is important to write good title tags for both the search engines and the people searching for your specific keywords.  A bad title tag can be just as bad as not having one at all.

You now know that it is important not only to have good keywords, but to strategically place them throughout the pages of your site.  Your keywords will appear important enough to the search engines to rank your site and relevant enough to potential clients who see these results and will click on your page.  But alas, keywords are only one part of the picture. To move your site to the top of the results you still need more. But enough of my blibber blabbering…until next time…have an Astonishing day!

As a Search Marketer I often have to justify to our clients the amount of money that we spend on pay per click advertising- SEM and why they should consider future ad spend.

Often the number of clicks (web site visits) far outweighs the number of actual form conversions (form leads) produced by any given campaign. We do see some of our click to conversion rates as high as 30% which is nothing less than awesome.

Also as a rule we factor in the number of qualified phone calls that come through the designated SEM phone numbers and combine those calls with total form conversions to arrive at the total SEM opportunities.

Confusion arises when you take the amount of money that is spent and divide it by the number of leads received to arrive at your cost per lead.

Defining SEM ROI does not and should not stop there. It’s not quite as clear cut as buying leads and the true cost per acquisition is not so easy to nail down.

Without getting too esoteric, here are some OTHER favorable attributes gleaned from a typical SEM campaign:

Branding

Every ad view (impression) your SEM ads receive via pay per click is an opportunity. It is a virtual billboard just for you on the internet super highway. The best part about impressions is they are FREE… You don’t pay to have your ad show up next to or even above your competition. Exposing searchers to your brand is crucial to maintaining consumer “top of mind awareness”.

Our clients often say they don’t want to pay for branded (name) keyword phrases to show up on the search page.

I ask WHY?!

It’s not surprising some 80% of today’s consumers use search engines to research an upcoming purchase. These folks don’t always buy online and they may not even be buying immediately.  This tire kicking by-product of search engine marketing is known as ROPO, (research online purchase offline)

ROPO gets a bad rap because it’s not so easy to tie offline sales to online advertising.

Here are just a few ways to trace offline conversions back to online origins:

• We already mentioned having a unique phone number for SEM that is accessible only to folks that initiate contact via an SEM campaign and the calls are noted as such.

• Special landing pages that are only used with SEM campaigns are another way to isolate traffic origin.

• Surveying customers by asking where they first heard about your company or product can help quantify online origination.

• Offering special rebates or coupons assigned to specific search campaigns is another great way to track online to offline sales.

Search Engine Marketing is so much more than purchasing leads…

It is a major catalyst for advertising your brand, shouting your message, besting your competitors, and setting yourself apart from the rest.

SEM is also a lot less expensive than TV, Radio, Newspaper or the Yellow Pages…

Take another look at SEM and see it for the multi facet marketing medium that it truly is.

Recently, after a whirlwind of a year, Astonish Results CEO, Adam DeGraide and President, Tim Sawyer, had the opportunity to sit down together and reflect upon some of the common themes they saw while talking to insurance agencies.

 It’s obvious that as technology changes so must the approach taken by agents. Sawyer commented on the mindset that today’s agencies seem to have, stating: “they discovered that they can drive traffic; they can increase the quantity and quality of traffic to their websites and they can get more sales opportunities,” – sounds like a movement in the right direction. Well not entirely, “the reality is that ultimately is not going to fix anything,” Sawyer responded.

 So what will?

“Train you people,” Sawyer said. It’s the common thread Astonish Results has seen from all agency leaders they have met with this year. Both Sawyer and DeGraide couldn’t stress enough the importance of the right people, process and tools and how all of that must flow cohesively with proper, effective training.

“Just because someone has been in the insurance industry for 20-years doesn’t mean they are great at serving the modern consumer,” Sawyer explained. Agents must be trained in a way that they aren’t just told how to do something; they must be shown, in addition to being provided feedback and benchmarking. It all comes down to a “comprehensive, consistent training system,” according to the Astonish President.

DeGraide had a lot of insight to share as well, including the vital ingredient that all agencies should be focusing on, “how well do you communicate effectively with the modern consumer”. DeGraide explained how many people think that marketing their company and selling more policies are results that will spawn from the use of “widgets” and “gadgets”; something the Astonish CEO proves is very untrue.

“Technology will be different next year. The thing that will never change though, is that if you have a good process of training your people on how to sell and serve the modern consumer and you’re willing to go through the pain of what that actually takes to listen to phone calls, to actually monitor what’s actually going on in your business, then these agencies can literally change their lives”.

Like Sawyer, DeGraide highlights how vital detailed training is to the success of the modern agency. He also has high expectations for the upcoming year and the field of insurance marketing as a whole. “What I find really encouraging is that they are starting to get it. They realize what the investment is, they realize what the cost is and most importantly they train their people to convert opportunities into sales”. 

As the needs of the modern consumer evolve so do those of the agencies providing them with insurance; it’s all relative to the Astonish “find, keep, sell” method and that cannot be achieved without thorough onsite training.

Facebook announced today that they will be rolling out Deals for Facebook Places in the near future starting with 22 vendors from local businesses to large companies such as Gap. Gap will be offering at some point next week, a free pair of blue jeans to the first 10,000 check-in’s using Facebook Places on a mobile device.

Unlike previous Facebook applications, which did not allow you to check in directly, the new applications are available for Droid and Blackberry starting as of yesterday. So how can the insurance industry leverage this new application? Here are a few ways to implement mobile marketing into your insurance agency efforts.

Check-in’s for Charity

Many agencies have leveraged their Facebook fan pages by offering to donate a dollar or two to a specific charity or cause for users to “Like” their page. With Facebook Deals soon being integrated into FB Places this could now be taken a step further. Instead of having them like you on Facebook, you can create a deal for people in the area to come in for a free quote and in return you will donate a certain amount to charity. This will drive local people into the actual office and help a good cause simultaneously.

Gift and Quote Exchange

Another possible way to leverage Facebook Deals, is by creating a deal that gives away a gift. It does not have to be a large gift, it can be something as simple as a slice of pizza or a free coffee at the Starbucks down the road. Announce in the deal that the first 20 people to check-in to your agency and sit down for a free auto policy quote will receive the gift of your choice.

Donate Your Time

Every “deal” does not have to be monetary. Instead of rewarding people with gifts, offer to donate your time. Whether it is 15 minutes to community service for each check-in and quote given, or something quirky such as running around town in a chicken suit, you would be surprised what people might check-in to see.

Over the next month Facebook Deals will be rolling out, giving the opportunity for businesses to be able to create deals in their area. In the meantime download the newest Facebook Application for your Smartphone and see if any promotional deals pop up. Some of the company’s chosen to test out the new application are the North Face, H & M, McDonalds, The Palms Hotel and Casino, and more. For a full list of trial companies on Facebook Deals starting next week check out the Facebook Blog.

With so much interesting insurance news out there, it’s hard to cover it all. Fortunately IMHQ has you partially covered. Below is a mix of useful and useless knowledge based on social web meanderings.

• One of my favorite headlines this week comes from National Underwriter’s Life and Health Insurance News: Employers: Workers Still Slugs. It’s basically a blame piece of insurance managers blaming health plan participants for living with poor health habits, thus causing coverage to be more expensive. They also found blame with companies hired to “persuade” plan participants to be healthier. My problem, if you need to be “persuaded” not to be fat or smoke cigarettes (etc.), than you don’t want to fix the problem in the first place and no company is likely to convince you otherwise. Great article title though.
   
• Walt Podgurski, the visionary behind the insurance industry’s most social forum (InsuranceCampus.org) reminds us of the importance of claiming your Google local listings. If you haven’t done so, set it up now. And while you’re at it, sign up for an account at InsuranceCampus.org, Tuesday is “Make-a-Friend Tuesday” after all. 
• According to CNBC.com, Hummer H2/H3 owners are the most likely drivers to receive speeding tickets, a full 4.63 times more likely to get pulled over someone driving say, as opposed to someone with a 2000 Toyota Camry with three missing hubcaps. We all know tickets affect insurance rates so think twice before topping triple digits in your land tank.
   
• Scared of flying, maybe you should be more scared of stubborn, bucking burros. Statistics show that donkeys contribute to more deaths every year than plane crashes. Obviously it’s a factor of more people relying on donkeys as opposed to airplanes for transportation globally, but when considered , you definitely should think about watching your a$$. Special thanks to USICNA Insurance for sharing this and many other bizarre facts with their Facebook Fans in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada and Texas. 
• Struggling to fill your insurance blog with content that actually has an effect on lead generation? Follow Amherst, MA-based Encharter Insurance’s lead by finding a college kid to earn internship credit while blogging for free. It helps to be near an educational hub, but an insurance blogger doesn’t need to be an insurance expert, just get direction from one.

Marketing maven Hubspot, recently released a report called, The State of Inbound Marketing 2010, based on interviews with 231 professionals, “involved or familiar with their business’ marketing strategy.”

The three major takeaways from the research were:

• Inbound marketing, or helping customers find you by offering more than just marketing/sales pitches through traditional mediums, costs less than outbound marketing
• Social media and blogs are the fastest growing segment of marketing budgets/departments
• Businesses are creating real customers with social media and blogs

None of these findings should come as a shock when you see Twitter and Facebook logos popping up in the corner of Super Bowl TV ads, but is social media the end-all, be-all of insurance marketing? To answer the question, you must consider several factors.

Social media allows instant and constant communication, which puts agencies at the behest of clients and potential followers 24 hours a day. This is great for communication and humanization, but it’s easy to get sucked into conversations that build rapport with clients while robbing time spent selling insurance. The fix, an effective, lead generating and converting insurance website should ALWAYS come first.  When social media efforts start to bear fruit, people can make a seamless transition from potential lead to new customer via the website, and more important, it stays on autopilot even if you’re social media participation goes on hiatus.

Social media also provides access to voluminous amounts of information, much of it inane banter. Without a system for preserving the information that matters, data will be shared and lost before it can be used for any real purpose. Cloud computing and digital storage make over-stuffed, paper filing cabinets obsolete so finding a CRM program or system for tracking data gathered through social networking is another wise first step before sharing and engaging.

Lastly, insurance agencies should never jump on the high-speed social media trolley just because a marketing report or blog says too. The convincing should already be done and you should WANT to do it for your business’ sake. Once you’ve gotten to the point of embracing social media, you can start having productive fun and incorporating it into a grander insurance marketing strategy. Participating begrudgingly is the best way to crash the trolley before it even gets on the track.

For single agents, social media can be the most powerful tool in the belt since they only answer to themselves. For larger agencies, it’s a bit more complicated. The SEO-friendly, lead converting website and tracking system are musts, but having savvy employees who understand the benefits and risks of social networking and the potential consequences from abuse, are nearly as important.

Unless you despise all people, are woefully uninteresting, or have an office full of vindictive, angst-ridden employees, social media should make the cut in some way as part of insurance agency marketing efforts.