 Landon McArthur with SecureAge in Marketing again bringing you an insurance marketing show that we do a weekly. We appreciate you guys joining us again I really really am excited about search engine optimization for a couple reasons I know that there's a shift coming in the market Right now digital marketing is taking a lot of market share from traditional media in general in the insurance industry I know this because we spend a million dollars a month on digital marketing whether it be Google YouTube Facebook Instagram, you know what landing page is whatever just in the insurance space alone And so I am seeing a shift go massively towards social media Well, what's happening is is because this massive shift is going towards social media There's actually a opportunity because everybody's focus of digital marketing is now social Which is driving up costs. It's diluting the lead quality. There's some issues going on with that So on the flip side what we try to do is try to kind of go in a different direction as the crowd And we've kind of figured that figured that out a little bit It's a little bit of a waltz not to say that social media isn't where we're going not to say that We're not doing that like the rest of us, but there's opportunity that is Other places as well besides social media and that is in my opinion search engine optimization What is search engine optimization? Obviously, it's getting your website found on Google to get an organic Ranking to get passive lead flow Into your business to we don't have to pay per lead, but you're getting passive lead flows throughout the month Also, what's happening is is the industry is shifting to less face-to-face less walking into the insurance office and more telephone sales doing the multi-stake and your license in multi-states So what happens is is you're kind of fighting the What's if you're face-to-face with somebody you have an opportunity to impress them You have an opportunity to show up sharp to basically, you know show up in a nice car whatever that is and then but with digital and with phone sales you kind of have to like Really exude that that presence as much as possible and a lot of people what's happening is they're googling the company that you're with They're googling the carrier talking about they're googling you as a person And if you don't have that brand figured out and if they Google, you know, John Jacobs Springfield, Missouri, and you're not on the list with a website. It's gonna hurt you you're gonna get less You're not gonna really realize it But less people are gonna do business with you because of that. I promise so what I want to do today It's been a little bit of time one I'm gonna go through about 10 to 15 things that is search engine optimization All of these things you could probably Google and find mountains of information Just as a quick plug. I'm gonna be doing a masterclass December 4th. There's a link in the description below For you to be able to check out that masterclass where I'm gonna teach this stuff for two hours I'm gonna go through the tools. I'm gonna get everything Where I'm gonna teach you how to do this as opposed to just talking about it right now but there's a lot of you guys that are interested in kind of hearing some of this stuff and Probably a lot of you guys that are doing some of it, but not all of it So I just kind of want to walk through those specific points So the first thing that I want to talk about with search engine optimization that is an important factor It's what I would call premium hosting or like your hosting environment your site speed You got to make sure that you're you know Google will ding you for having slow site speeds slow mobile Site speeds and the way that you set up your premium hosting is actually important if you just go for like the cheapest You know a website that you pay 49.99 a month or whatever and they stand up a website I guarantee you that hosting package that you're on is poop and you're gonna Google's gonna basically Ding you for not having a good hosting environment over all see we know we've set up our stuff in WP engine and some other hosting environments that are you know topped here We don't do the cheapest hosting environment possible, right? And that's something that does matter to Google because they're the ones that are sending traffic to your Website and one of the first things they check is who is this hosted with what are the credentials? And that leads into the next thing which is SSL certification So there used to be sort of a myth that only SSL certification Mattered for e-commerce specifically, so it's not necessarily true anymore You need what will happen is on the left bar of the search of the where the URL is it'll say not secure That's just like a I mean just think about the perception that that brings that if you're going to the website And says not secure You know you're gonna have this perception that oh this guy who is this guy? He's not secure. You know what's going on and a lot of our clients are older people and if they see Not secure it kind of has a tendency to kind of freak some people out Even though they don't know what that even means and they for sure don't want to put their credit card in but if they're putting their Email address and trying to go through our lead forms through gated content or reach out to us directly by calling the number on The deal and they see not secure that's gonna hurt you Google knows that so they count that against you as well So with any good SEO strategy the next thing that you want to make sure that you do is anybody can You know shoot an arrow at the wall walk up to where the arrow landed and draw bullseye around it, right? That's not what we're trying to do a search in an organization We're trying to do keyword research to make sure that we know the target that we're trying to shoot at You may think keywords Just kind of come to you and what you would Google yourself You need to really do some keyword research to figure out where the actual search volume is on Google So there's lots of tools out there I'm gonna go through some tools on on my masterclass that we use that are free To do all the keyword research So you want to make sure that you first understand which keywords you're going after on a search engine optimization strategy Because if you don't know where you're going you don't know what you know create content about you don't know how to Structure your website. It's not it's not the ideal situation for sure So, you know, that's an important thing is that keyword research So the next thing you got to make sure you do is, you know, Google ranks websites Predominantly, I wouldn't say predominantly but well, yeah, I would say predominantly based on the amount of content So I don't care how good your SEO is on a five page website a 20 page website on the same topic is that structured correctly with SEO is always going to outrank the five page website Just think about it. If you're a user Google wants to send their users to good educational websites If Google identifies this website as having five pages of content on a particular keyword and this website of having 20 pages of content On a particular keyword, which one has more domain authority. Do you think obviously the one that has more content? So you need a good content strategy. A lot of people don't really understand like how to structure that though A lot of people think that that means just building a website and then putting a blog feed and just creating all these blog content That's not how you do it either. There's all kinds of ways to screw this thing up That's that's the main thing is to have some sort of a content strategy Then you got to make sure that you're doing something all the work that you're doing you got to have a way to track it So you want to have an independent? Source that tracks leads clicks bounce rates content Captures which blog posts are your popular ones so you can create more content around that Different markets different areas have different hotspots for different keywords So if you are able to create a big library of blog posts You can actually see which of your blog posts are getting more traffic more attention and driving those leads into your overall website that way So in order to track that you have to have Google analytics setup. Okay, Google analytics is free to set up It's not rocket science What is a little more difficult though is setting up the goal conversions in the lead form captures and all that stuff But just getting analytics on your site is not that hard and it's free You just have to have a log in set it up. It's not it's not rocket science So the next thing while you're doing analytics is a tool called Google webmaster tools Google webmaster tools is basically the interface that Google gives us as Owners of a website to look at how Google is seeing our website. That's where errors come up. That's where Google gives you your sort of Information to say this is what's wrong. This is what's right. This is what you're doing good This is what you're doing bad Also, that's where you submit your site map and you basically are able to with Google webmaster tools That's the interface that we have to tell Google how to crawl our website if you don't use Google webmaster tools You're just waiting for the search engine robots to crawl your site and just kind of do a lot of guess work Which is not how you want to approach in this digital age. You want to make sure that you have a good foundation set So that I already touched on the site map as well Now the next thing you got to do is if you have your content structure figured out You've got to make sure that your on-page SEO is is fixed what that means is is you got to have your page titles your Meta descriptions your h1s your copy you got to look at your keyword research You got to make sure all of your meta data is set up correctly on the existing pages and all these blog posts that you're creating You got to make sure that you're adding the right keywords and structuring that correctly with the site map That was talked about etc But you know the main thing is is your page title Is if you were able to go up to the tab on Chrome and hover your mouse over the tab that you're on a little rectangle Will drop down and it'll give you the keywords that you're focused on if you don't put those into Google Specifically then Google will guess for you I can't tell you how many times I go to a website and the page title is home and we're an insurance agent You know why would we want home as our number one keyword that we're going for on our home page? That's silly right the reason is because no one went in and set it up So you're never going to get ranked ever no matter what you do if you don't have their correct correct metadata built out The next thing that you got to do is go through and make sure that you have all these directory listings sorted out So every mention of you or your business on the internet needs to align with the phone number Description address etc if there starts to be a bunch of different versions of your address a bunch different versions of your name A bunch different versions of all these different You know mentions of your business that are saying it's here. No, it's there No, it's here's the phone number. No, there's the phone number. They do this know they do that Google sees that as inconsistent and they actually ding that against you on the flip side if you have it all set up correctly Not only does that bring you inbound links it also gives you authority with Google as well because it's all consistent It's more trusted basically So that brings me into a sort of link building link building is still a thing with with search engine optimization It's not near as important as it once was link building used to be the actual SEO strategy that we all use Which was called the link wheel so you had your you know your main website and you had your different websites that you would link to And Google would look at all the links to a website and give domain authority based on that final site That was being linked to because well a lot of people are linking to it then that site must be You know the most authoritative on this particular keyword Well Google realized that people started to gain that system and so they links are still important What's not as important as it used to be but you still want to try and get some organic links if you can whether it be through PR releases there's plenty of press release, you know Systems that you can submit a press release with your link and they'll give you a link and there's social links you can do But the directory listing also will give you those links as well The only thing I don't love about link building is it's hard to like the Google is getting more and more They don't want you to buy links in any way And so if you have any system that's sort of selling links to you if you can actually get in trouble by buying links big time I've had to have clients, you know Google has like a naughty corner that if they catch you doing things It's called black hat SEO. They'll put you in the naughty corner and they'll take you off their search engine all together So the last thing that I want to kind of go through is some sort of ongoing review system Google does look at reviews and the star rating of those reviews embedded in your website as a indication of performance It's weird how they do it. It didn't used to be a thing But Google realizes that consumers use review star ratings and reviews and amount of reviews as a point of authority as a point of Basically a website that has 50 reviews on it means that it had 50 customers Come in and pay attention enough to leave the review So Google actually does look at that stuff. You've got to set it up correctly But it is it is important to look at And then you really just at the end of day if it's it may seem overwhelming But it's all a project that you can kind of work on and move towards There's always the next level to get to a search engine optimization. There's always the next level to actually arrive and what you'll find it with a good social search engine optimization strategy is that over time you will get increased traffic You'll start to get lead flows I can't tell you how many customers customers I've helped where they've had paid ads and search engine optimization So they get your paid ads driving the leads and then you've got your search engine optimization Finally, they catch up and then cut the paid all together. That's happened. I mean more times than I can count I've done millions of dollars of search engine optimization over my seven years of digital marketing And that's like our biggest win is when we can basically say, you know what? We just have to pay 10 bucks a click just to get you know X amount of clicks It would cost us X amount of dollars now we're getting that amount of clicks organically Let's cut the paid all together Just focus on sort of lead development over here, but not usually use Google paid tools any any further But on the flip side by the way Google does use AdWords data conversion rates, etc to give you authority on your website as well So one way to get a boot up bump on your search engine or Optimization rankings is to have an AdWords campaign with decent conversion rates driving traffic to your site because Google does look at that Information as well because they'll say wow, you know, they're paying $10 per click You know, they have a 10% conversion rate on this particular landing page They must be an authority on this particular keyword and they do bump up your domain authority by doing that So guys, I would love to kind of teach you more about this with actionable steps of how to execute this yourself It's not rocket science. I can get you you can even do this with your own wicks and in Squarespace site You don't even need a WordPress site to do some of this stuff So what I would love to do is invite you guys to our masterclass. That's going to be happening December Fourth and you will see the link in the description below and we would love to see you guys there I'm gonna teach you all this stuff. It's gonna be a two hour. I'm gonna record it Um, if you sign up for it, I'm gonna give you the recording And everything is gonna be sort of laid out a little bit more simply and steps We're gonna take more time to unpack each of these things and walk through all of them together So thank you so much for your time. It's really not as mystifying as people think It's really just a matter of work ethic and executing and creating content strategies and but but most importantly Making sure it's structured the right way so that you're building authority towards the keywords that matter That's that's what SEO is basically So thanks for joining us. I look forward to seeing on the masterclass Also, you can reach out with the link below start here If you want me to a site audit and look at your actual search is an optimization of your site If you're interested in working with an insurance professional To help you with your search is an optimization think about this guys if content marketing and content that means writing custom content You want an insurance professional an insurance only person that is only insurance marketing to be writing the content for your insurance website Trust me. It's it will help So anyways, thank you guys for joining us. We will talk to you on the next time