What’s the difference between Local Insurance SEO and National Insurance SEO? For that matter, what do SEO specialists mean when they discuss the difference between Regional SEO and National SEO? And how do these three important categories affect the Search Engine Results Pages for leading search engines like Google and Bing?
Let’s start with the basics, a definition of each of these terms:
National Insurance SEO: Search Engine Optimization targeting long-tail keywords which are national in scope, without regional or local modifiers. For example, Business Insurance, Property and Casualty Insurance and Directors and Officers Liability Insurance are all examples of general, non qualified, “national” keywords. If a prospect typed this term in their browser, they would receive a national list of the most relevant matches. The long-tail keyword phrase, Property and Casualty Insurance, is searched over 40,000 times per month according to Google.
Regional Insurance SEO: Insurance agents can consider regional SEO as modified national long-tail keyword phrases. For example, if we take a national keyword phrase like Life Insurance and add a state or regional modifier, the resulting keyword phrase would look like this: New England Insurance. New England Insurance is searched 4,400 times per month according to Google.
Local Insurance SEO: Local Insurance SEO requires a different strategy than national and regional, and produces different types of results. If you were to type, Boston Life Insurance, a map appears with up to 10 listings of local businesses which have locations in that geographic area. After the map and the associated listings are displayed, the search engines will list all other relevant search results, which may or may not have an actual location in the area.
Which search is appropriate for your insurance agency or brokerage? That depends on your business profile. Are you a small local firm selling in a confined geographic area? If so, your agency should focus heavily on Local SEO. Are you a regional firm, selling in a multistate area? Then your insurance agency web marketing plan should target Regional Insurance SEO. However, you can still target local insurance SEO, particularly if you have multiple offices in those states. Lastly, if you are a national insurance agency or broker, you should work on national long-tail keywords which will drive the best possible traffic to your site.
It’s important to note that SEO is only one aspect of Insurance Search Engine Marketing. Driving traffic to your insurance agency website is the result of an integrated approach, combining agency website development, insurance social media marketing, blogging, vlogging, ePublshing and to some extent directory submissions and link building. Take a comprehensive Insurance Search Engine Marketing approach to optimize all SEO initiatives.