Blog

Insurance agents blog for a number of reasons. These include building an expert reputation, connecting with customers, starting conversations, attracting media attention, and improving the website’s visibility in search engines. Blogging can be a very effective tool for SEO, or search engine optimization, and you can get great results without being an expert. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Know what you want from each post. What are the goals for each post you write? Are you planning to attract a new audience, persuade people to your viewpoint, promote a product or service, or showcase your company? There are a number of reasons people write blog posts, but many don’t specifically think about each post’s purpose before they start writing.

Know who you’re trying to reach. Are you looking to talk to existing customers? To generate new business and attract new prospects? To attract the attention of industry leaders or influencers? A key aspect of business writing is knowing who your audience is—and what they want from a post like this—before you start writing. This makes you better able to craft a post that will appeal to them.

Conduct keyword research. Keywords are the words people use to search for a website like yours—and find the type of information you’re writing about. Including them on the page is crucial to your rankings. Use a keyword research tool to identify which keywords to target. Don’t overstuff—choose about two to four keywords or phrases that have relatively high traffic and low competition from other websites.

Write a strong post. Once you know your audience and your goals for a particular post, write the post. Integrate your keywords naturally—include your most important one in the title and two or three in your first few paragraphs, but don’t let them make your text sound stilted. Write an in-depth post with a lot of value—these days, longer posts, upwards of 2500 words, tend to do better in search engine results, so plan accordingly.

Consider visuals. Embedding rich media content, graphs and images, or video can enrich your post and make it more valuable to readers. This in turn can result in more sharing, more visibility, and more traffic. A text-only post can also be effective, but consider ways to incorporate other types of media if you can.

Promote your post. It isn’t enough to write an excellent post and then move on. If you want attention, you’ll need to promote. There are many ways to do this: blast the post all over your social media profiles, feature the post in an email newsletter, email thought leaders and business partners who you quote or feature—or whose audience might find the post useful—and more.

Getting your post seen requires more than writing an excellent post. It requires some planning around who you’re targeting and what you want the outcome to be; it requires keyword research and incorporation of keywords on the page; and it requires a promotional strategy. Nail these three things, and you should be able to improve SEO on every post you write.