6 Tips to Optimize your Content Like a Pro

It’s no secret that people use search engines to find information about insurance, including how to get the cheapest home and car insurance rates. As an insurance brokerage or insurer, how do you get in front of users and convert them into clients?

Understanding SEO and using the latest tools and strategies to your advantage is critical to your company’s SEO success. Without optimizing your content, you risk losing your current and potential customers. A search query without proper SEO would be like finding a needle (You) in a haystack (The Web).

We’ve put together 6 tips to optimize your content to help you get in front of your customers.

1. Align your Content to What your Users Want

It’s critical to Improve the user experience (UX) on your website. What does this mean? People want their problems solved by reading your content and they want to know where to go on your site to find the solutions quickly. If your keywords get people reading your content, but the content is not relevant, or users don’t know what to do next, they will leave your site.

While keyword placement is still vital for SEO, engaging your readers with great, relevant content is even more important.

2. Optimize your Site’s Page Speed

Your brokerage’s page speed needs to be fast. Why? Imagine you’re searching for information on car insurance, and you want a quick online quote. The page you land on is slow to load and you leave in 5 seconds or less. Yes, this is a typical scenario among users, as people have a low attention span.

With competitors fighting for a piece of the SEO pie, creating a website with pretty graphics and fancy buzzwords will only slow your web visitors down and create confusion.

People want applicable information now, and if they can find it quicker on your competitor’s website, that’s where they’ll go.

Your goal is to appear at the top of the organic listings on Google, as people rarely get to page 2 of the SERP. Faster site speed will help you get your potential and current clients where they want to go.

Luckily, there are many tools to check your website’s speed, including Pagespeed, GTMetrix, and Site Audit – to name a few. Think about yourself as the user and how you would navigate your website for home or car insurance. It’s interesting to put yourself in the place of your user to see what works and what needs improvement.

3. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is one of the best ways to optimize your website content and HTML source code to rank higher on search engines and earn organic traffic. Improving on-page SEO means more eyes on your content.

Creating excellent content and optimizing meta tags and images is part of a basic on-page SEO strategy.

A meta tag summarises a page in the search engine results page (SERP). In contrast, a meta description determines the click-through rate (not your ranking.)

Other meta tags (H1s, title tags (aka meta title, page title) help search engines identify the subject matter of your web pages. Suppose you don’t create your meta descriptions. In that case, Google will automatically create one based on the keywords in a users’ query, which can sometimes lead to mismatched search terms and associated results.

Find out more about meta tags in this article.

4. Image Optimization and Site Speed

Optimizing your images can boost organic traffic and improve your site’s SEO. Image optimization is part of the on-page SEO.

Here are 3 guidelines for image optimization.

a. Choose the best file format. Why? Your website will slow down (site speed impacted) if your images are too large. Improve overall performance of your site. e.g. JPEG and PNG file formats are compressed differently so using one format over another can impact your site speed. Picking the format depends on whether you’re using the images with text or without text.

b. Compress your Images. Larger files equal longer site load speed. There are free tools to compress your images: TinyPNG, ImageOptim, ShortPixel are a few.

c. Provide Alt Text for Images. Adding alt text to images improves web accessibility and helps browsers better understand the images on your site.

5. Keywords: Research, Selection & Placement

Keyword research, selection and placement are still essential for an effective SEO strategy.

Keyword research, the first step in an SEO strategy, has dropped below the number one spot over the years for an effective strategy – especially the practice of keyword stuffing. The latter can now get you in trouble with Google and is worth avoiding.

The use of relevant keywords in your copy is still critical in three ways; to target people looking for information, drive organic traffic, and increase conversions.

It’s important to add keywords in your headline, the first 200 words of your content, and use keywords (and variations) throughout your copy in a natural way.
Don’t force using your keywords in sentences where it doesn’t make sense and seems forced.

Our six tips are the tip of the iceberg in terms of crafting an impactful keyword strategy. Brokerages and insurers will adopt a measured approach to get leads in the door. Spending time on your process will take your content to a new level.

6. Publish Long-Form Content

Long-form content ranks better than short-form content on Google. A key finding suggests that long-form articles (posts with 3000+ words) get 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than average length articles (901-1200 words). (Source: SEMrush)

While writers may find it time-consuming to write 3,000-word blogs and web pages, it certainly pays off. Done right, you not only create a higher level of content quality but your content will be seen and read by more people.

SEO and Beyond: Your Next Steps

In addition to our top six tips above, many other SEO recommendations will help you deliver an effective SEO strategy for your brokerage or insurance company.

Several other topics to read about are internal links, using keywords in your URL structure, avoiding duplicate content, and off-site SEO. Learning about technical SEO is another way to improve your overall search engine optimization.

Read how Trufla Technology is incorporating SEO for its clients.