Before getting started with your insurance website marketing, it is worth checking first that your site is set up to compete. Here is a basic performance checklist:

Article keyword optimization

Are your articles optimised for search? If you have a WordPress website, a plugin like Yoast is your friend. Make sure all your articles get a green light for the chosen keywords.

A well optimised website will naturally attract new visitors from Google, complimenting your other marketing activities and boosting your results at no extra cost.

Pagespeed

Fast loading pages are absolutely fundamental to any modern insurtech website wanting to offer the best user experience. Page load speed has also been an important SEO metric since 2010. You can check the speed of any webpage on Google Insights. Make sure your website achieves at least 90% Pagespeed for desktop and mobile.

Get your website indexed immediately

To ensure your website gets indexed asap, send your sitemap to Google Search Console.

Easily fix all broken links

Find and fix all broken website links. Here is a great free tool to quickly find broken links on your website.

Is your mobile website perfect?

This 2018 SEMRush study found 73% of fintech website users in the UK were on mobile devices. Needless to say, at least half your visitors will be on mobile, so pick up your phone and spend time every page on your site offers a perfect mobile user experience.

To measure the effectiveness of your insurance website marketing, you need a way of monitoring usage and some clearly defined goals. Below are the essential tools for monitoring website usage.

Google Analytics

Ask your developer to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website, this takes 5 minutes. You can then use Google Analytics to track website usage statistics such as how people find your website, time spent on the site, and your most popular pages.

What is the main purpose of your website? For an insurance website, you will either want users to get an online quote, purchase a policy or maybe just fill out a contact form. These are all examples of goals. You will find it useful to setup these goals in Google Analytics so you can actually measure your success. For example, you may know that 200 visitors reach your landing page everyday, but how many of those 200 actually contacted you? Setting goals will provide such insights.

Google Search Console

Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, it is relatively easy to register your site on Search Console, allowing you to receive performance and SEO tips plus keyword suggestions for your website.

Google Tag Manager

With a basic insurance website you can get away with Google Analytics only. But if you have insurance web apps, insurance premium calculators, sell policies online or have any other type of subscription process: then Google Tag Manager is important as it allows you to monitor in more detail exactly how users interact with your webpages.

Tags allow you to monitor specific on page events such as when a users clicks a call to action button, scrolls down a page, when they view a certain part of the page, or if they watch a video. Gathering such data allows you to understand what works well on your webpage, and what needs to be changed – essential if you are serious about conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Tag Manager is not easy to set up, and you will need an experienced developer.

Take 30 minutes to set up and optimize your company profiles on each of your chosen social networks.

Google My Business

An easy first step is to claim your Google My Business listing. Click here to get started. You will need to confirm your address with Google, who will send you a secret pin number by post.

To get the most out of your Google My Business listing make sure your profile is complete – add your logo; a keyword rich bio; a list of products and services; links to your website and of course – your company address.

Once registered, your business will also appear on Google Maps.

Popular social networks in the insurance sector

LinkedIn is essential for networking and recruitment in the insurance sector and a must for most insurers. To give an immediate boost to your profile, ask employees to follow you and even share their opinion of work life at your company.

Increasingly, insurers are using either Facebook or Twitter to drive customer engagement and to improve brand affinity.

Let me explain that one. Often customers are left frustrated by a lack of answers or chat with a robot. This report by McKinsey found that settlement amount actually ranked 12th among factors driving customer satisfaction with auto insurance claims. The policyholders surveyed cared more about employee courtesy and ease of communication than payment – especially when the amount was small.

Facebook or Twitter offer a simple but effective platforms from which you can address the issue of customer communication whilst improving brand affinity. This can be as simple as responding directly to client questions.

Find out more: this report on Unmetric examines social media trends in the insurance industry.

There are lots of important insurance websites where you can create an insurance company profile gaining immediate visibility. These include:

• Insurance news or event websites, for example The Digital Insurer (UK), or Insurzine (Italy).
• Insurance forums/ chat
• Insurance directories e.g. The Insurance Journal (USA), BIBA (UK) and IVAAS (Italy).
• Comparison websites. Whether you are you going to feature on insurance comparison websites is probably more a political or pricing decision rather than marketing, but either way it needs consideration. In some countries, price comparison websites are free, impartial and can be a great way to gain immediate visibility and sell policies. Elsewhere they may charge a fee and have limited benefits.

Any established insurance firm should have a Wikipedia Page. That said, strict guidelines dictate how this is done. The insurer cannot add their own page, as this poses a conflict of interest and would break the impartiality of Wikipedia. Similarly, anybody paid to publish the page on behalf of the company is required to disclose the payment. A more viable option is to write the texts, but request a Wikipedia writer to edit and add the page for oyu. The page must be factual and in no way of a marketing nature.

So why do it? As well as the extra visibility, an official Wikipedia page raises your company profile, as well as your online authority and credibility (note: these are also important SEO metrics).

Why will this only work for an established insurer? Startups struggle to claim a dedicated page as Wikipedia requires significant media coverage from multiple independent sources (see notability guidelines).

If you sell insurance cover online, positive reviews are going to set you apart from competitors with comparable cover – so the sooner you start collecting reviews, the better. But which is the most reliable review platform for the insurance sector?

Google My business, Facebook and LinkedIn are probably all services you are registered with. The My Business review platform is particularly useful, as any reviews collected here will often show up in Google Search beside your company name.

Trust Pilot is probably the most popular and trusted review site for the insurance sector.

Some countries have their own review platforms, such as Avis Vérifiés and Opinion Assurances in France, so depending on where you are based you may want to look around.

Whichever you choose, positive reviews are essential, especially if you sell cover online. Choose which platform(s) you want to use and start collecting reviews as soon as possible.

Once you have a healthy number of reviews, you will want to add them to your website to boost conversions.