SEO for Insurance Websites

I am so confused; I don't know where to start! I have an old website that needs to have the text and keywords updated and am ready to build a new site just for our annuity business.

I am not an Internet/technical guy but I do realize the importance of SEO marketing. We tried PPC but didn't have much luck in our budget range.

So now, I have a a company who has made us this offer:

Right now we are offering a 60-Day ONLINE SOLUTION Challenge to new customer to test drive our service for two months to see if the exposure from a local listing online will help your business.

Here is the breakdown of what you get for the 60-Day Challenge:

1) The creation of 5 custom categories that describe your services or products.
2) Placement of your listing on the first page of ALL 75 search sites online.
3) We'll put you in the TOP TEN on the map that pops up on both GOOGLE and YAHOO so you will stand out from your competition.
4) You get a WEBSITE with a free domain name, free hosting, and free website design for your business that links to this service.
If you currently have a website, we will set yours as the primary and link ours to that.
5) Monthly management and optimization to ensue top placement.
6) Call and click tracking to provide feedback on the traffic coming to your listing.
7) Your listing will be searchable from any I-Phone and mobile Blackberry as well.
8) No contract!
9) No obligation to continue!
10) One time set up fee of $99 to put your account online that can be billed one of two ways: either up front or spread over the two months, which ever works best for your business.

Are we just wasting our time and money with something like this? Other options included buying Adobe Contribute and adding/modifying keywords and text ourselves. Or hiring a local professional to make some tweaks to our content and keywords to get us going.

Any ideas or help in prioritizing where to begin and what to do would be helpful!

Help! :)

 
I am so confused; I don't know where to start! I have an old website that needs to have the text and keywords updated and am ready to build a new site just for our annuity business.

I am not an Internet/technical guy but I do realize the importance of SEO marketing. We tried PPC but didn't have much luck in our budget range.

So now, I have a a company who has made us this offer:

Right now we are offering a 60-Day ONLINE SOLUTION Challenge to new customer to test drive our service for two months to see if the exposure from a local listing online will help your business.

Here is the breakdown of what you get for the 60-Day Challenge:

1) The creation of 5 custom categories that describe your services or products.
2) Placement of your listing on the first page of ALL 75 search sites online.
3) We'll put you in the TOP TEN on the map that pops up on both GOOGLE and YAHOO so you will stand out from your competition.
4) You get a WEBSITE with a free domain name, free hosting, and free website design for your business that links to this service.
If you currently have a website, we will set yours as the primary and link ours to that.
5) Monthly management and optimization to ensue top placement.
6) Call and click tracking to provide feedback on the traffic coming to your listing.
7) Your listing will be searchable from any I-Phone and mobile Blackberry as well.
8) No contract!
9) No obligation to continue!
10) One time set up fee of $99 to put your account online that can be billed one of two ways: either up front or spread over the two months, which ever works best for your business.

Are we just wasting our time and money with something like this? Other options included buying Adobe Contribute and adding/modifying keywords and text ourselves. Or hiring a local professional to make some tweaks to our content and keywords to get us going.

Any ideas or help in prioritizing where to begin and what to do would be helpful!

Help! :)



A great way to quickly find out if the company is reputable or not is to "Google" their URL and scroll through the first 5 pages of results to see if anyone has commented on their services. Forums like this get indexed by Google so anyone talking good or bad about them should show up there.

Secondly, it sounds like all they're doing is putting you in Google maps (which is free) and it doesn't say placement for WHAT keyword on the search engines. I mean they could place you for your company name and say that they "did something" when in reality they didn't. $99 sounds a little too low for anything good when it comes to SEO. What's the company name? I'll let you know if I've heard of them. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to post the name here.
 
I agree, it doesn't sound like they are able to give you anything of value.

75 search engines? :D

There are a lot of search engines. However are only 3 or 4 that count. The others are fighting over something like one or two percent of searches.
 
2 count, the rest have no traffic.

Not to start a debate here, but I think MSN is sometimes under-valued. It's soooo easy to rank there if you know what you're doing where as Yahoo, to me, is a mystery (on how they rank). I think Yahoo is confusing on purpose so that more people will use their paid-submission. I get more hits from MSN than from Yahoo.
 
Not to start a debate here, but I think MSN is sometimes under-valued. It's soooo easy to rank there if you know what you're doing where as Yahoo, to me, is a mystery (on how they rank). I think Yahoo is confusing on purpose so that more people will use their paid-submission. I get more hits from MSN than from Yahoo.

MSN is very underrated. Their results many times offer more accurate than Google does. The traffic I get from MSN converts to sales on ALL of my sites at a higher rate than Google visitors do. I can tell exactly where each visitor to my sites come from, what search query they used, and whether or not they completed any applications and MSN really does convert better.

Yahoo prefers a Silo site structure with your internal pages containing fewer out going links on each page but they don't mind links back to your most important main pages.

MSN will also show new sites faster in the top rankings that either Yahoo or Google will. But those newer sites will not stay up there long unless the owners learn what it is the MSN wants to keep you there and relevant. MSN also places more weight directly on keyword placement/proximity within the URL string than Google does. Yahoo will consider this about 50% of the time but will also give relevancy to to keywords ocassionaly as long as they appear in the URL string.

There is some good advice in this thread for everyone. Thanks everyone.
 
One of the issues with Yahoo! is that some of their supposedly organic listings are paid for. This makes it difficult to rank well using SEO. In my opinion, this is what killed ASK.com.
 
Very true Alston.

Chumps, if your Norvax site is using a URL that is about 90% relevant to a popular search query, MSN will rank it well just due to that one factor. MSN places more weight on keyword targeted domains than Google does as they mostly consider things such as external link power, site age, visitor duration etc.
 
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