It’s been a few days since I set up the Wordpress site on the sample domain. I have done nothing with the site since then. It only has the first post I created on it. I will be adding to it down the road but for now I just want to show you where it ranks 5 days after the first post. It would be ranking higher if I had a better domain name but I decided to work with a domain I already owned since AZ and Arizona can be sometimes interchanged with the search engines (exact matching ‘Arizona’ and ‘Arizona’ will be better than how I have it now and is encouraged) and I’m confident of what to do here.

This screen shot below is from Market Samurai’s rank tracker section. I use it to track where my site, and all its pages, rank against the keywords I’m targeting (on the left cut off).

The Broad Position ranking is if you just type in the keyword by itself. The Phrase Position is if you were to type the keyword phrase inside quotes in the search engine. Ex. Broad – home insurance, Phrase – “home insurance.”

The G, Y & B are Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. On the right it shows BL and PR. BL is the amount of links back to that page on your site from other websites (backlinks) and the PR is the Page Rank of the page listed. Page Rank is a level of authority Google gives sites. A PR of 10 is much better than a PR of 1 (or 0 like here) and if you get links from PR 10 sites to your site that means more to your rankings than a link to your site from a PR 1 site. I’ll explain more on this later.

As you can see, the homepage is at 162 (page 17) and 169 for two different keywords. I’m also in the 3rd (1st page!) and 24th (3rd page) on Yahoo for those same keywords. With Bing I’ve been indexed but not ranked. That’s indicated by the ‘+’ sign. The ‘-‘ sign means I don’t rank for that keyword (yet).

This is the power of a blog based site backed with, the more important, market research.

SEO Competition Analysis

Here’s a shot of the SEO Competition page from Market Samurai and I’ll walk through how you use it as your guide to getting your page ranked fast. I briefly talked about this in the market research videos and will show you how to use this page as your roadmap on how to work your site and make it search engine optimized.

The first 2 rows of this image are the two URLs from my home site listed above. The first is the homepage and the second is the post I created the other day. The next 10 are the 10 sites listed on the first page of Google for this keyword (I’m not on the first page for this yet).

First, some SEO basics. Your site is ranked by two major factors: On Page and Off Page factors. Off Page factors have more influence to your ranking than On Page but you have more control over On Page factors. These are very simple descriptions but important to understand so you can take action.

The Off Page Factors (listed in the columns above) are:

• DA – Domain age. Older domains are considered established businesses and will get better ranking if all else is the same.
• PR – Google Page Rank. This is Google’s authority index of a web page. Higher PR is better for you and will rank higher.
• BLP – Backlinks to the Page. Number of backlinks to the specific page ranked. ex: www.site.com/page.html
• BLD – Backlinks to the Domain. Total number of backlinks to the domain. Any page on www.site.com.
• BLEG – Backlinks to the Page from .edu or .gov websites. This supposedly have more authority and are harder to get.
• DMZ – dmoz directory listing. This is the largest manually updated online directory of sites. You can submit your site to get listed to their directory to help your rankings.
• YAH – Yahoo paid directory listing. Yahoo just stopped charging their $300 fee to be listed in their directory so I don’t know how this will play out in the future. It is still considered a ranking factor as of now, however but I expect will change soon.

The On Page Factors (listed in the columns above) are:

• Title – Page Title. Is the keyword in the page title? This is the title that shows up in the top of your browser. It is also shown as the title on a search.
• URL – URL. Is the keyword in the page URL?
• DESC – Page Description. Is the keyword in the page description? The description is what’s listed under the link on a search results page.
• Head – Header Tags. Is the keyword used in an html header tag on the page? These are generally the larger fonts on the page but a <h1> tag is generally the headline on the page and an indicator of what the page is about.
• CA – Cache Age. Number of days since Google reindexed the page. If Google gets sent to your page a lot from other site’s links to yours, this is a good thing. You want your site crawled a lot, if possible.

Okay, so that’s the definitions of what’s there. So what next?

You have control of the Title, URL, DESC and Head on each page of your site. Make those contain the keywords your targeting to get that page ranking for those keywords. Now, if you didn’t already, you see why it’s important to have the major keyword in your domain. This will allow the homepage to rank more easily for that keyword and give you the 4 – ‘Y’ across those fields, as I have with my first post.

If you’re using Headway Theme, it puts all these fields on each post page for you to update and make sure it’s SEO friendly. If you’re using the SEO plugin it will create these fields to work with for this.

Then, your next steps are to create content for your site. Create an About, Contact & Privacy page for your site. The search engines like these. You also want to create content on a regular basis to get the engines to crawl your site on a regular basis. In your Wordpress blog, use the supporting keywords as categories and write a post for each category over the next couple of weeks.

Last, you want to create links back to your site to increase your off page factors. This is easier than you think and I’ll go into it in much more detail later. However, you’ll be creating simple pages on other (free) sites that will link back to your site. These are very easy to do. If you have good information on your blog, other bloggers will link back to your site too. (If you want to learn more on Blogging and getting your blog out there Yaro Starak has a great program I went through last year and highly recommend called Blog Mastermind. It’s more for people that want to make money blogging but it can apply here too. I’ll be going through some of his information here if you don’t decide to get it.)

I’m guessing I’ll need only a couple dozen links back to my site to rank on the first page for this keyword. This is an easy target to shoot for and is the start of my process now that I have the On Page factors completed here.

If you have more questions on Market Samurai and want more explanation using the software they have some excellent videos walking you through almost every aspect of the program. Their team is incredible at showing you how to use this tool. I wish all my kids toys came with instruction manuals as detailed as their videos.

With that, let me know what you think below and any questions you have. Also, share with other agents you know that could benefit from this. There’s a I’ll be going over link building, blogging, social networking, more Market Samurai soon.

Wordpress.org vs. Wordpress.com

The main difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com is where your site is hosted.

Wordpress.com is hosted at Wordpress.com. Your URL would be yourname.wordpress.com. While it’s easy to set up and get started this way, you will have only a few choices for themes and no flexibility with plugins. It’s hosted on their site so they won’t let you make changes and risk messing up their site.

Wordpress.org is hosted on your domain. Your URL would be whateverdomainnameyoubuy.com. It’s actually a version of the software running Wordpress.com that you put on your webhost. It’s free. It’s fully customizable with any of the thousands of themes available or any of the plugins you want to use to expand what it can do.

Now, since you’re probably not familiar with either, the Wordpress.org sounds nice but maybe a little scary. You can set up an account at Wordpress.com just to get a feel for the guts of the system and how it works. However, if you want to add quote forms or additional features that make your site actually your site then you’ll need to host it on your domain, on your webhosting platform. This is why I recommend Hostgator because you can set up the Wordpress.org with a few clicks.

I hope that clears up the confusion and helps you understand why I recommend the self hosted Wordpress installation.

Should you use your current website?

Since I know nothing of your current site, I don’t know. However, if you’re like 99% of insurance agents your site will not be worthwhile for this project. If your site already has ranking on the first few pages for the keywords you found in Step 1 – Market Research, keep your site. If not, start with a fresh site and, when you follow these steps, you should be ranking very high, very quickly.

Can I Have A Traditional Site Built For This Niche?

Of course. You can use a traditional “static” site for this purpose. However, wait before commissioning it to be built. In the next videos I’ll show how to take the “on page” ranking data from Market Samurai and how that determines what you put on your website and where you put it.

Keep in mind, if you’re unfamiliar with html and how to change anything your site then you won’t have any flexibility to make changes either. For example, one of my sites was ranking in the mid 30’s on Google (it was 3 pages into search results). I made one change on the page with a few words of text and in about 2 days, after Google crawled it again, it was in the top 10. It took about 3 seconds for me to make that change because I use a Wordpress blog where updating the page is very simple.

Can I Use Wordpress Like A Traditional Website?

Yes! Very much so.

If you want, you can create a static homepage. How I recommend doing it is creating a page titled, “Home.” Then in the “reading settings,” there’s an option to choose “A static page” for your homepage. Here’s a screenshot of the settings, and you just choose which page you want for your homepage.

Another option, which I personally use, is to use one of the premium themes by StudioPress or Headway.

Headway will allow you to actually customize how the homepage will appear inside its settings with very easy drag and drop settings.

The StudioPress Themes have various layouts with excerpts from your recent blog posts for the homepage. It’s a little more difficult to customize these themes unless you have knowledge of CSS, PHP and HTML. However, the layouts they offer are very clean and easy to use.

Will You Be Writing A Lot?

This is the fear of many agents. Yes, this will involve writing. It’s not difficult to come up with ideas to write about. Also, don’t fear bad grammar, splitting infinitives, or other writing “boo boos.”

As you can tell by reading what I write here, I don’t care if my English teacher writes on her screen with a red pen about my grammatical errors. My site is now graded on dollars earned, not by some random person with an attitude. So, unless your niche is school teachers, don’t worry about it.

Second, you have no shortage of what to write about. Anytime you get a question from a customer or a tip from an insurance company, that’s a topic to write about. Don’t worry about giving away the farm to your competition. (Look what I’m giving away here.) Your writing will build you up as an authority in your area. Your competition won’t be reading your site everyday so forget that fear.

While you don’t have to write a lot, the more content you produce the more keywords you’ll rank for in Google. If you can make a commitment to write two or three 300-800 word articles (500 word average) a week, that relate to your keyword, you’ll increase your ranking much more quickly.

Don’t stress over this but it’s a great habit to get into. If you do it for 30-60 minutes everyday when you wake up, you’ll grease your brain and find this to be an easier process everyday. Most of my articles take about 15 minutes to write, 5-10 minutes to edit and 5-10 minutes to find the images to place with them and post to the site. (In case you haven’t noticed I’m not the best at editing) Set aside time and make it a habit (read the War of Art to understand the importance of discipline and how it increases your creativity).

If you feel you don’t have time for writing, wake up earlier. You can make the time, if you want it bad enough. You can also have staff write articles for you. And, over the next few weeks I’ll show you how to find other people’s content and rewrite it for your site. Whatever you do, do NOT steal other people’s content. Make it your own.

What Next?

Okay, I should have went over this at the beginning in more detail but I was so excited about getting the content out it slipped my mind.

Ultimately, this is about establishing your market authority online. You’ll become the recognized expert quickly. You’ll learn how to network online, tap into other professional’s readers and get referrals. This is about becoming the market leader online.

We’ll dissect the results from Market Samurai to figure out what’s important to ranking for keywords that are actually searched by consumers. Then, you’ll learn how to create content that establishes you as an authority and increase the ranking of your site. Last, you’ll learn how to meet and find other professionals online that will network with you and give you referrals and increase traffic to your site and your authority in the marketplace.

Quick note, I’ve had a few people ask about using Traffic Travis instead of Market Samurai. Traffic Travis is a great piece of software that I use too. It has a new simple to understand SEO tool but does not compare in other features to Market Samurai. If you have Traffic Travis you can use it for research but will be missing out on the many other features Market Samurai offers as we go through this. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then just ignore this paragraph and get Market Samurai)

Hope that clarifies a lot of where we’re going here and the method to what you’re learning.

It’s taking me a little longer than anticipated to get the videos out on time as I want to put them on YouTube and have to edit each segment to 10 minute or less intervals. Good thing is it breaks everything up into shorter, more easily watchable segments.

With that, comment below and let me know what you think about the process or if you have any questions.

Now, as you relax, take a deep breath and allow any anxiety to drift away, watch the first video and marvel at how incredibly simple it is to set up a Wordpress blog.

I recommend using the Wordpress.org blog because it’s free, it’s incredibly simple to use and has one of the most supporting and giving communities out there. Anyhow, you’ll see how simple it is to set this up after you watch these videos.

What is Wordpress and a blog?

First, a blog is short for “web log.” Originally they were used as daily diaries and are generally organized in a date fashion. The newest post/article is on the top of the first page of your blog. However, over time and as Wordpress and other blogging platforms have evolved, they’ve become what’s known as a content management system. Now, it’s just an easy way to organize and create content online.

Wordpress is a blogging platform that will provide software that sits on your webhost’s server. It creates the ‘look’ of your website. This site is built with a Wordpress blog software. The theme is what makes the header, footer and sidebars look the same on all the pages. Or, if I customize it, makes things look differently on each page. All I do is upload this area here (what you’re reading now) and it creates the webpage with the header, footer, etc. all nicely formatted around my content.

Go set it up and play around with it. Try out several themes and see how the content stays the same but the way the site looks can be modified with just a few clicks. Here are the videos to get you started…

#1 – Installing Wordpress

If you’re not using a hosting account with Hostgator or host with CPanel, you can the Wordpress blog software here and manually install it yourself (that’s how I originally started, this is much easier!).

#2 – Changing Themes (the look) of your site

As I said, there are thousands of themes to choose from. If you want to start with one of the free ones at Wordpress.org, that fine. It’s rare you’ll see another like yours out there with so many to choose from. However, if you want to start with a premium theme that has support behind it and the ability to customize and help you get rolling, I highly recommend either:

• StudioPress Themes or,
• Headway Theme

I own all of the StudioPress Themes and Headway Theme. They both have incredible creators behind them with great support. StudioPress has a small selection of themes to choose from so you can be working right out of the box with little customization necessary.

#3 – Changing Settings And Plugins for additional features

Here are the two options I recommend for your Permalink Settings, either:

• %post_id%/%postname% – or
• %category%/%postname% – what this site, InsuranceMarketingOnline.net uses for link structure.

Here is a list of recommended plugins you can install (that I use) for additional features. Just search inside the Wordpress admin panel on the add plugins page for each of these to install straight from Wordpress without downloading or uploading. I’ve bolded the one’s I always install on each of my sites.

• Akismet – Comes with Wordpress and is an AntiSpam defense
• FeedBurner Feedsmith – Track who’s subscribed to your blog RSS feed. Requires free Feedburner account.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Creates a Google Sitemap to help Google crawl your site.
• Pretty Link – URL shortner to create links that redirect to other sites so you can track clicks.
• Replace WP-Version – Replaces the Wordpress version in your code for security purposes.
• Search Meter – Use if you have a search box on your site. Tracks what people are searching for on your site.
• TinyMCE Advanced – Creates a friendlier WYSIWYG bar in the post and page editor.
• Ultimate Google Analytics – Easily adds Google analytics code to each page of your site. Need free Google analytics account which I’ll cover later in this series.
• WordPress.com Stats – Another analytics program that uses Wordpress.com’s statistics. See inside your dashboard what’s happening without the detail from Google Analytics.
• WP-SpamFree – Another AntiSpam defense plugin.
• WP Security Scan – Scans your Wordpress install for security leaks.
• WP Super Cache – Not important at first but if you get a lot of traffic will help speed up the load time of your site.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Not important at first. Will create a list of links of related posts on your site at the bottom of each post. Helps for SEO and keep people on your site longer.
• Platinum SEO Pack – Important to make your site even more SEO friendly. Not needed if you’re using the Headway Theme.
• SexyBookmarks – Not important but pretty. Creates a list of Social Bookmark sites for people to submit your articles after reading.
• WP-Footnotes – Not important but allows you to quickly create footnotes in posts. Makes it very easy.
• WP Smush.it – Shrinks images you upload to your site to help your site load faster and give a better user experience.
• WP Status Notifier – Notifies you of posts pending review.
• WordPress Database Backup – Easily backup your Wordpress database and set up automatic backups. Very important, in my opinion.

As you get into it, you’ll look for more features and will be able to find plugins that will help you. These are the basics I recommend for AntiSpam measures, site management, and SEO purposes.

#4 – Creating Posts & Pages

These are a quick overview of creating content on your site. My goal is to simply show you what’s possible. You should spend time with each and see how it changes your site. Also, change your widgets (the things in the sidebar) and other options to see how things work. Worst thing that happens is you go back to your CPanel and delete everything and start over from the beginning. BTW, that is the worst. Nobody will get hurt if you mess it up so bad it can’t be fixed, I promise.

#5 – Adding Your Site To Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker

This may be a little premature but you can now add your site to Market Samurai’s rank tracker module to see where it ranks for your keywords. My morning routine consists of checking where all my sites rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing with Market Samurai. It takes a few minutes and if there are drastic changes I can go into the SEO Competition page for that keyword and find out what’s changed. This may be a little advanced right now but will make more sense as you get more content on your site.

This is a quick run through of Wordpress. As I said above, it’s up to you to get into it and play. If you want more about the administration panel of Wordpress and what each component does, visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page for their documentation.

As always, post your questions or comments below.

You should have a main keyword that has a large daily search volume, low number in the SEOC column, and a lot of green on the SEO Competition page. You should also have a few other related keywords that have some volume. I sometimes check the Google Keyword Tool to verify the amount of traffic for my chosen keywords but it’s not necessary.

What we’re going to be going through over the next few weeks is very simple search engine optimization. I’m not going to go into canonical urls, page rank sculpting or other esoteric SEO tricks. We’re talking basic SEO strategies because you’re going after lower competition spots that only require the basics to get you listed and going fast. We’re shooting the fish in a barrel.

You won’t want to use your current agency site for this. The main domain for my agency, that we use for our email addresses, doesn’t have a site at all. If you typed in the URL it redirects to one of my other sites.

So, what you want to do is register a domain for the main keyword you found in Market Samurai.

As in my example from yesterday, the main keyword would be “Arizona home owner insurance.” I would want to buy the domain arizonahomeownerinsurance.com if it’s available. If not then I would try the .net. If the .net is not available I would go with a hyphenated version of those words with a .com or .net without looking too odd. An example would be Arizona-home-owner-insurance.com. If I’m still having problems then I would add “quote” or “quotes” before the .com.

I use Dotster to look up and research availability of domains. I don’t have any registered there currently but they’re a great place to research.

Why are we buying a new domain name? If you noticed on the SEO Competition page in Market Samurai, one of the “on page” ranking factors is the url. If the domain name is the search phrase then Google looks more favorable on your site as a site that should rank for the search term. (I’m going to use Google as representative of all search engines including Yahoo, Bing and others. Google is the big dog and it’s shorter than writing “search engines” each time). The more red squares you can make with your website the better position you’ll be against the competition.

What we’re going to do in Part 3 is set up a Wordpress blog on this domain. They’re extremely search engine friendly and easy to use. You’re going to have to trust me here. With a couple of clicks you’ll have a website up and running. First, you need to get hosting for your new domain and your soon to have blog.

I use and highly recommend Hostgator for webhosting. I work with several companies but Hostgator is my favorite. They’re easy to use, have great customer service (it’s US based and they’re friendly even at 2 am), and great reliability. They also allow the ability to host multiple websites without any additional charge (important if you want to target other lines of insurance too). But, most important is they have CPanel site management. This will give us our easy one-click Wordpress installation and save you learning new tricks. I don’t recommend GoDaddy at all, ever.

When you click go to Hostgator’s site, get the “Baby” package. If you look at the picture above the choices there will be a coupon code to save 20% off your initial order. Right now it’s the word “Autumn.” As you’re signing up, you can also register your new domain to save yourself two separate accounts and make this even easier.

It will take 24-48 hours for your domain and website to register. Once you’re done you can relax and in another couple days I’ll have the videos up to walk you through setting up the Wordpress blog and starting the customization process. We’ll also be going through the other fun stuff Market Samurai can do to track and find other opportunities for you online.

To those that want to use their current site:

Yes, you can do that if you want. However, if you did not set up your site and don’t have access to the hosting or files, this is a bad idea. If you don’t know anything about html, this is a bad idea. Unless you have experience, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Also, when you do it this way you’ll have a site, basically free except for the hosting and domain name costs, that you’ll be able to customize without knowledge of html, php or other programming language. You’ll be able to create the meta tags that make more of the “on page” ranking factors red with your site. If you’re using your old site then you will have to call your programmer, webhost, whatever and have them make changes.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments below.

The first tool I recommend you get, and one if you plan on doing any long term marketing online is a must have, is Market Samurai. I’ve had this for about a year now and only recently have begun to really use it to a fraction of its potential. I’ve used it mainly for pay-per-click campaign research and now have found it invaluable to finding keywords that I can rank quickly, provide traffic, and monitor my site’s ranking in all the search engines. This is the tool I’ll reference throughout most of what you’ll be learning here and can’t recommend it enough. Go download the free trial and give it a shot.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Market Samurai, you can start your first campaign. I’m going to use ‘home insurance’ throughout this series but it will apply the same for health, life, auto and any other line of insurance. The principle is to find a keyword that is easy to rank well for that also has some natural search engine traffic.

In these short videos you’ll learn how to search for keywords that get traffic and identify opportunities to rank fast. First you’ll see a keyword that would not be ideal to go after. Then you’ll learn how to find keywords that get targeted traffic and are easier to rank on the first page of Google and other search engines.

Now that you’ve seen a bad keyword to target, here’s how to start finding search phrases that are easier to rank well for and actually get some search volume on a daily basis.

This may take you a little while to find several good related keywords to target. Your goal is to find 4 to 9 related search phrases that:

• Have some daily search volume, I prefer 20 SEOT or more but you can go with less on some.
• Have a PBR of at least 15% or higher.
• Have a SEOC less than 60,000 but prefer to have at least one with less than 30,000.
• Have a lot of green on the SEO Competition page, especially on the columns for DA, PR, BLP, BLD, BLEG.

I know I ran through these rather quickly and without a lot of explanation on each column or tab. Market Samurai has a lot of great tutorials on how to use their software and will leave that to them. Also, learning to use the system and what you’re searching for is the best way you’ll get the most out of this. Once you learn this part you can help friends, family, or business clients that market online figure out where they’re dropping the ball and help them refocus their online marketing.

The next series will be on how to start using this new information. Spend a good amount of time here researching your market and finding keywords with the 4 items listed above. You have no idea how much time and headache this will save you later.

If you have any questions or comments leave them below. I’ll do what I can to answer them in a timely manner and others may be able to help too.

Man, I love that quote.

This will kind of be a rant since I received a marketing piece from another insurance marketing guru that irritated me.

They were pitching a “done for you” internet marketing plan. You pay them a huge chunk of change along with large monthly fees and they’ll manage your online marketing. I’m sure they’ll sell a lot and take advantage of a lot of really talented agents. However…

Guess what happens once you stop paying?

That’s right, you’re screwed…twice.

You shelled out a large amount of your hard earned cash over time and you lost a cash earning lead source (I’m assuming they’ll produce leads for you).

Now, think about this. You actually learn some basics of online marketing. It’s really not hard stuff so please keep reading this. You learn the basics. And, for less than the amount you would pay these marketing gurus you could outsource many things (like building a website) or you can do it yourself.

And, I’ll show you how for free over the next few weeks.

Marketing insurance online only consists of three simple things: Market Research, Traffic, Conversion. That’s it.

I’ll introduce you to the tools I use online to get sites listed fast. Some of the tools cost money and I highly recommend you buy them. If you’re slightly interested in marketing online these will save you many hours of your life. With them you can also help friends or businesses you work with and show them some of the tricks up your sleeve.

You don’t need to learn how to program websites, however some basics you’ll learn as you go. Most of what I do is plug and play. This will involve a bit of writing and time but if you dedicate 30 minutes to an hour each day you can have a site on the first page of Google within 30 days. No joke, I’ve done it a few times.

Now, the question for you is, do you want to be someone’s business opportunity or do you want to learn to fish?

When you watch this, think about how easily your prospects and customers will be able to find out about you, rate you, and make decisions about you and your services. Also, think about how much information you will be able to find out about your prospects as you walk into their home, business, whatever.

Much of this technology is already available. My wife and I switched to IPhones last month. One of the applications allows you to hum or sing a song and it will tell you the band, song name, album, etc. Another allows me to take a photo of a book cover and gives me pricing, reviews, etc. in a couple seconds. One is tracking our flight and hotel reservations when we go out of town this month.

As you can see, it only cost them $350 to build this. I would imagine this is not far away from coming into use on a regular basis.

My question to you is…Are you keeping up with technology or are you complaining about it? Good or bad, it’s changing.

If you’re marketing insurance online now, these are a must listen. If you’re thinking about marketing insurance online and don’t know where to start, these are a must listen.

The first is with Todd Officer

The second is with Scott Kirby

I don’t know if I should be sharing this but after Scott and I were done with the questions I kept the recorder going. Since he was one of my first people to take me up on the course I asked him some private questions about the course to see what I could add or improve. As you listen, keep in mine he went through the raw, unedited version of the course.

Listen to Scott’s damaging admission.

I guess I’ll have to live with this problem. And, as Scott said with his success, it’s something he’ll live with too.

Make sure you take out your pen and take notes. There are a couple small details in here that will slip by if you’re not paying attention.

Let me know what you think below.

Scorpions live here too.

My grandfather and his brother were in North Africa during WWII. They were in the Air Force (back then it was the Army Air Corps). He was with the 64th Division of the 57th Fighter Group aka the Black Scorpions. He said they got their name because the first thing they saw when they got off the plane was a large black scorpion and they had problems keeping them out of their stuff when they slept. I miss him and his ‘war’ stories.

Arizona scorpions are a little different than the big black scorpions my grandfather told me about. They like to hide. They’re difficult to be see. They’re rarely seen during the day and come out at night to eat. And, even at night they’re difficult to see unless you have a black light. Under a black light they glow like a Christmas tree.

I went out the other night to see if there were any around. Watch this, it’s very short compared to a lot of other videos on this site at just under 3 minutes. I apologize about the “Blair Witch” camera work. That wasn’t intended.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was surprised to see the gecko at the end. We see gecko lizards during the day all the time. The gecko actually helps keep the scorpion population down by eating a lot of the same things the scorpions do and removing its food source.

At first I thought about the big auto insurance company with the gecko mascot that is taking market share by writing direct…and taking the agency channel food source.

Then, I thought about how finding your website online is like hunting for scorpions. Your potential customer searches are “auto insurance” or “health insurance.”  They’re not searching for “car insurance in Salt Lake City Utah” where you may be on page one of Google. This search is the equivalent of the the customer remembering to get a black light before searching for you. You’re anonymously hiding in the world wide web of crevices.

Then, I thought about how a highly targeted pay-per-click ad is like handing your prospect the black light before they search for you. Your customer types in the search term and your ad magically pops up in front of them, glowing brightly like the scorpions in the dark.

Then, I realized I can use as a quick teaching example on website design for lead generation.

Get A Quote Or Leave!

When a client lands on your website, do you know what they are doing? Most people don’t search for insurance related terms unless they’re in a buying mood. While there are a few people out there looking for information, the typical customer wants to get quotes, proposals, or find a local agent. They’re very specific in what they’re searching for.

My goal when I set up a website is to give them one decision when they land on the landing page: get a quote or leave. That’s it.

This is a screen shot of my original website (Click to enlarge).

This is a mildly effective site. As you look at it you’ll notice links on all types of insurance products. There is personal, business, life and health insurance. The reader can also read my “Free Report” if they want (As if there’s something magical I have written that isn’t posted somewhere else online for free). There’s also a lot of text to read. The eyes move around as you look at it and there’s a lot of distractions.

While it’s not a bad site, when someone lands on it for home insurance they see an option to get auto insurance quotes and may not get the home insurance because now they want to wait until they have their car insurance data so they can fill out the form. Then you’ve lost them forever.

This is a screen shot of a landing page from one of my pay-per-click websites, which I call micro-sites (click to enlarge).

When you look at it, you know what it’s about…Home Insurance. If you come for advice, wrong place. If you come for auto or health insurance, wrong place. It’s home insurance. The only links “above the fold” (which is what shows up on your screen when the page first loads) is my headline, two links to the quote page and my phone number. Every bullet is a benefit driven bullet to encourage them to fill out the quote form. There’s a photo of me standing there next to testimonials from satisfied clients, social proof we can do what they’re looking for and adding a human touch element.

While this is not a perfect website, in tests driven from pay-per-click ads, the one on the bottom will convert 38% more quotes than my original site. And, as a marketer that’s all I care about.

What’s Your Decision?

As I said above, the customer should have only one decision to make when they hit your landing page. Blogs are great to bring in traffic but they will bring traffic to an article. Then they’ll want to read the article, click around for other articles and get lost, even if they were searching for a quote form.

If you watched the video Where To Start Your Online Insurance Marketing then you saw the Google analytics between my first site, one of my blogs and one of my pay-per-click sites.  The amount of traffic that converts to quotes is ridiculously low on the traditional site and the blog. The pay-per-click site converts almost half the visitors into quotes.  I attribute this difference to two things: the “one decision” option they have when they land on the site and the targeting of the keywords.

So, how does your site rate? Have you looked at it from the customer’s perspective? Or, did it just make you feel good because it talked about how great you and your agency is?

I have a couple case studies from a couple of agents that have been testing what I teach. That will be posted tomorrow. They share some of what I teach so you’ll enjoy those.

Let me know what you think below and how you feel about this.