There are lots of reasons people in the wholesale insurance industry blog. It’s a great way to build credibility, highlight the ins and outs of new products, and establish a reputation as a thought leader in specialized insurance topics. But one of the more important reasons to blog—for wholesale insurance agents and for anyone in business—is for better SEO.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It refers to your website’s rank in the search engines—especially Google—when people search for certain relevant keywords. Better SEO can result in more traffic and significantly more business over time. Here are a few tips for improving your blog’s ranks in search results.
Write good content. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s actually one of the most important aspects of SEO. Google’s entire purpose is to deliver searchers content that solves their problems and is relevant to their questions. That means writing high-quality, in-depth posts that discuss and solve key insurance problems in tangible ways, or shed light on some of the more challenging corners of specialized insurance. It means knowing what problems your agents deal with on a daily basis, and how to solve them. It means writing blog posts that are helpful resources.
If you do this, you’ll be working with Google’s mission—not against it—and everything will be easier.
Build backlinks the right way. “Backlinks” refers to when another website links to your site. The crucial point is never to buy backlinks—there are websites that will sell, but Google is onto this trick and it can get you banned. Ideally, you’d cultivate relationships with websites that have great SEO standing and credibility—such as websites with a .gov or an .edu domain name—and hopefully they’ll link back to you as a credible source.
Be active on other industry blogs. Participating in the community can help you build your profile. Choose other blogs that cater to the same audience you talk to. Use a signature that includes a link to your website. This helps you make connections with other bloggers—which can lead to valuable guest post opportunities—as well as generating backlinks for your blog.
Focus on your social media profiles. Social media works in tandem with your on-page SEO efforts to amplify your work. If you build a loyal following on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or in other places, promoting your blog posts becomes easier—and Google notices when a large number of people retweet or repost an article.
Building good SEO takes concerted effort and promotion—but if you were to take away only one thing from this article, it would be to write excellent content. Know your audience, know what problems they face, and write blog posts that clearly solve them—and you should be ahead of the game.
