Over the last 5 years, agency marketing has evolved to uncover a lot of great ideas, and even more practices that should be avoided. We've learned a lot here at CompleteMarkets about how to obtain the best results, when trying to maximize your exposures. Back in 2014 our President and CEO, Adrian Holloway, put together a piece on the "5 Lessons - The Modern fundamentals of Insurance Agency Marketing." It outlined some of the best practices to help expose your agency to new prospects in the era of high technology.

One of the biggest efforts taken on by companies these days is in regards to search engine presence. The fact is organic traffic has the biggest return for investment, especially over any amount of time. Efforts you put in today, you could see returns on, for years to come. In Adrian's article, he hit on some massive points, but I'd like to address this one specifically this week.

Website & Search Engine Optimization - This is still very much at the top level of importance, when it comes to maximizing your ROI. However, many agency owners don't realize when diving into this, that the effort that is behind SEO is pretty intense. It requires lengthy, new, relevant content posted frequently. Look at it this way...when a user does a search on Google, Bing or Yahoo, will your page be the one that answers their question/s? Think about how many questions you get day to day, and then having to write a unique article (about 1500 words) that focuses solely on answering one question. The search engines don't just look at the content on your page for keyword relevancy any longer, they pay attention to how the USER interacts with your pages and how relevant your information is to their needs.

Trust me, this is far more time consuming to do, than you probably can even imagine. Not impossible, and this is the biggest bang for your buck, but also the most costly part of any proper marketing. You have to create unique and relevant content, but also know how to tell the search engines that it's there and then design your page to make use of capturing those prospects that land on your page.

This is why a lot of agencies use CompleteMarkets. Basically, they piggy back off of our efforts to help get them more exposure to the internet search power. When you have a collective source of information available to the public your put in a might higher category to search engines. CompleteMarkets has well over 10 million pages. We've put a lot of time and effort into presenting these pages to the public and to search engines to gain more and more traffic over the years. A large site like CompleteMarkets is seen as an expert in the insurance industry, because we have one focus, insurance related topics and we have a lot of pages focused on insurance related topics.

Taking a few minutes to update your User Profile and create a Company Profile can have a large impact on helping expose you to the search engine rankings. Not only to make sure when a client/prospect finds your profile, that it's completed and looks professional, but also has relevant information on the products/services you provide and they have the correct way of contacting you directly. Just as people find friends and family through Facebook (and thus those profiles are very popular on search engines) many people have or will find your CompleteMarkets user and company profile.

Utilizing the site we've already established reliability with the search engines, and piggy backing on our massive presences can help (even more so) expose you to new prospects. Setting up your profiles are easy, but don't forget we have a fabulous support team willing to help any way we can.