Virtual Insure Blog

In a recent interview, I explained the major factors for getting your insurance agency to the top of the Google Places search results.  Here is the third of twelve excerpts about Maximizing Google Places Listings and focuses on choosing the right categories.

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The next important factor for getting your insurance agency to the top of the Google local listings is to make sure you choose the best and most appropriate categories.  Google will let you choose up to five categories for your business listing, so make sure you choose all five.  Take advantage of all the different categories they’re going to give you.

On a side note, Google will allow you to make up your own category so if you wanted to say,  “widget insurance specialist” as your category you could do that but I really wouldn’t recommend it.  I would stick with the options related to insurance that they already have in their system.

There’s probably around 7 different versions of insurance agency, There is:  life insurance agency, auto insurance agency, home insurance agency, health insurance agency, and then there’s just plain insurance agency.  Obviously you’re going to want to choose insurance agency.  I would choose four more that are most appropriate for you.

Some agents will tell me they don’t want to choose “renter’s insurance agency” because they say,  “I’m not a renters insurance agency, I sell it but I don’t want to be known for that.”  It doesn’t matter because if someone goes to Google and they search for “renters insurance agency”, you want yours to show up.  That would be better than if it didn’t show up, Right?  Sell them the renters and then sell them whatever else you want to.

Another thing to think about is the other types of business you’re involved with.  I know a lot of insurance agencies that like to use the category: “financial planner”. That’s another way you can draw people in, and you probably offer this type of service.

Put a lot of thought into your categories and most importantly use all five categories because it’s not going to work against you it will only help you show up in more searches.

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You can see the entire interview on our internet marketing channel on YouTube

What do you think about categories?  If you have any thoughts or questions please post them below.  I’d love to get some feedback!

In a recent interview, I explained the most important step for insurance agents to get their agency listed at the top of the Google local search results.  This is Part 2 of 12.  Here’s a transcript:

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Let’s start things off with the the most important factor for getting your insurance agency listed at the top of Google local listings. The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t already done this, is you need to claim your listing.

Let me talk about what that means.  Google doesn’t rely on insurance agency owners or business owners to go to their website and provide all the business information.  They go to the phone book and pull out business names and categories from the yellow pages.  The problem with this is Google might not be as confident with the information they are showing to their visitors knowing it’s coming out of a phone book which may or may not be accurate.

Because of this, Google allows business owners the opportunity to go to Google, look at the listing and click a button to claim the listing as the business owner.  This let’s you do some personalization, which I’ll talk about that a little bit later.  The biggest thing is you’re telling Google, “Yes I’m a real business, yes this is the right category, I am and insurance agency, yes this is my phone number this is my address and hey, I’m still here I’m still in business!”

The last thing Google wants to do is to send one of their visitors to a business that hasn’t been open for the last three years. If you haven’t already done it, you need to go out to Google and you have to claim your listing.  if you haven’t already done it, do it right now.

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You can see the entire interview on our YouTube Internet Insurance Marketing Channel

What do you think about claiming the Google Listing for your insurance agency?  Anyone want to tell their story below?

In a recent interview, I explained what Google Places is, how it relates to insurance agents and their online marketing plan, and why it’s so damn important that any insurance agent who’s serious about growing their business understands it.  Here’s the transcript:

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So what is Google Local, and why is it so important for insurance agents to understand it?

Google Local is like your modern day yellow pages.  Thirty years ago when someone wanted to shop for insurance they would break out the yellow pages, find the insurance section, and call an agent.  It was really easy to be a marketer as an insurance agent because all you had to do was buy the biggest ad that would actually draw people’s attention.

Nowadays things work a bit differently.  When someone is in the mood to shop for insurance, the majority of the time what they’re going to do is go out to the internet, and a lot of those times people are going to go to Google and type in the word: “insurance”.

This is what they’ll see… At the top will be Allstate, State Farm, the lizard, and below that you’ll see a map of local agents.  They call it Google Places, Local Listings, or Business Listings, and Google shows several locations on the map where there are local insurance agents.  They don’t rank those agencies in order of nearest to the person who is searching.  They actually rank them in the order of who they think is going to be the best agency to show to their website visitor.

It’s important to understand what is Google is looking for so you can adjust your listing and show up at the top.  Now why is that important?  With so many people searching for insurance in this way, being at the top of that list will bring your agency exponentially more phone calls, more referrals, more business, more of everything if you can get yourself to the top of that list.

Now getting there isn’t easy.  It takes two things: number one you have to know what to do, you have to understand what Google is looking for  The other thing is you have to actually go out and make changes so you’ll show up there.

Now I want to mention, that it doesn’t matter if you own your own website with your own domain name, or if all you have is a little section of a larger domain name, for example if you’re a State Farm agent and you just have a little section of the State Farm website with your webpage, Google doesn’t really care so you have just the same opportunity as does the person with their own domain name and their own website.

That being said, I repeat, it takes two things, Number one: you have to understand what to do, and I’m going to go through that, I’m going to tell you everything you need to do to show up at the top of that list. But the second is, you have to actually go out and do it.  Alright?

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You can see the entire interview on our YouTube Internet Insurance Marketing Channel

What do you think about what I said?  I’d love to hear in the comments below…