How do you advertise your website?

[thackeragency]

This site is less than a year old, and most of our traffic comes from google.

This isn't actually a 'website'. It is a forum. Under certain circumstances you can get recognized earlier. But if it is just a site to sell insurance, it will take a while to get noticed.

Forums, blogs, and social networking sites show up earlier. This is a good forum, there aren't many insurance forums, and you probably rank on keywords that aren't competitive.

You have done a very good job with this idea. My most recent project http://www.short-termhealthinsurance.com took 9 months to be recognized on google for expensive and competitive keywords. If you get proper links coming in it can be done. But Google uses time as a factor for ranking. 4 years ago I could be in the Google index in a day.

It always changes.

 

[Sam]

There is no question that insurance quotes rankings are extremely competitive... Have you tried some linkbait?

 

[thackeragency]

I've tried everything. Everything works a little bit. Every six months I'll discover something that works REALLY well. But it doesn't last long because they change algorhythms.

I haven't really had a good idea for 'link bait' yet. I'm not technical enough to develop something like that. I'm always thinking though.

I do press releases, used to do link exchanges, now I do articles, and forum posts are supposed to be good which led me here. I have a blog that I post to as well. On occassion I purchase some one way text links but you have to be careful when paying someone for services like that.

Title Tags, keyword density, internal linking, directory submissions. . . . all of it works together to form the whole SEO package.

The most recent thing that worked surprisingly well was Craigslist of all things. I was able to spam the crap out of google in Jan with some twists I did to my craigslist postings. My Craigslist postings were 3 of the top 10 in VERY competitive terms within 2 weeks of posting them. It surprised me more than anything.

Social bookmarking sites are the SEO rage now. . . but they are more designed for blogs and forums. It'd probably be good for this site to work the social bookmarking angle.

Like I said, I've tried everything.

 

[somarco]

What kind of ad wording do you use on Craigslist?

 

[Sam]

It doesn't always work, but when you post on craigslist, or yahoo answers or squidoo or even youtube or some site like that, the title becomes the actual title tag for the page, so if you want to rank for a specific keyword, that is very heavily weighed by google, and since the site it is on already has a lot of internal link juice, you can rank for some of those words.

Even though some of the insurance agent youtube videos are pathetic, they really can rank for geotargeted insurance quote terms.
Also, Glenn, the owner of www.americaninsurancebroker.com has some text links and blog posting seo services that are targeted specifically to the insurance market.

 

[Bob_The_Insurance_Guy]

I have my web address on my business card, which I display on the counter of a local diner. I also hand out my business cards to referrals and centers of influence.

I don't have it registered with any search engine because I don't want tire kickers. Every networking event I attend, I hand out my card. I facilitate a Job Seekers Group, and hand out my card to any and all new attendees.

Every time I DON'T make a sale, I either send a "thank you" note or an e-mail, with my website on it, for future consideration, or referral purposes.

In other words, I remain in control, and I avoid all tire kickers.

 

[TriDad]

I'm pretty sure that if a website is either all or primarily FLASH, Google will not rank it high because their web crawlers pass over that type of content.

Better to have some Flash components, but not an entire Flash website. Another reason is that some people may not have the latest Flash plug in which means your site won't run on their machine. And one last thing to consider...if the programmer isn't the greatest out there, they may produce a site that takes a while to load on the typical person's computer. If they have to wait more than 10 seconds...you may lose them!

 

[slushhhpuppie]

Check this out

www.customeraq.com

Looks like a pretty innovative way to qualify potential buyers and have them contact you.

But, at $12,000 UPFRONT, as well as $7.25 per client referred (not to mention the $10,000 annual renewal fee) it seems pretty risky.

I couldn't stop laughing after the sales rep pitched me the "low cost of $11,999!"

Don't get me wrong--its sounds like an interesting idea. However, and I don't think I'm alone here, I'm not willing to front THOUSANDS of dollars for ANYTHING, let alone an insurance marketing gimmick.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

I don't know - I hear about all these ways to optimize the placement of your website but the average person hitting a search engine looking for health insurance probably types in "health insurance quotes."

When I type that in I don't see a single listing for a "regular" health insurance agent's website. All I see is paid ads at the top and right, and also companies who pay for ads listed in the general search results.

Obviously advertisers paying huge amounts of money on pay-per-click would go NUTS if they saw "Big Billy Bob's Health Insurance Agency" on the fist page of a search and "Big Billy" isn't paying a dime. I certainly would sent an email to Google if I was paying.

I also don't think most people even go to the second page. Why would they - 20 companies offering free quotes are on the 1st page.

 

[senior-advisor-indiana]

I have NEVER looked at the 2nd page of results on anything that I have searched for.