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SEOBold.com's Search Engine Optimization team recently took on a client that wants to increase traffic to their website, PolicyDog.com. We met them through a personal referral. The owners of the site are a great group of people and we're highly motivated to get them great results.
This site presents some challenges:
- The site offers a range of products, which are totally different. For example, collector car insurance is totally different from motorcycle insurance, which is also different from boat insurance. They may seem similar because they are all insurance products, but we want to help searchers find the right product.
- "Insurance" is too broad, it's not likely that someone who searches for "Insurance" wants "boat insurance". We treat each product as it's own web site.
- The insurance business requires domain specific knowledge that we needed to acquire. In order to do a good job making pages that are highly relevant to the needs of PolicyDog.com's customers, we need to understand their business, products, and the needs of their customers.
- PolicyDog.com's website has a proprietary content management system, which makes installing content easy but organizing it how we want challenging.
Getting Started
To get started, we had an initial phone call with the customer side project owner and the lead web developer. We listened and learned a lot about the insurance business and PolicyDog.com's commitment to providing quality insurance policies to their customers. We took notes, and then we spent some time explaining the SEO process and what to expect. It's important to make the process transparent so that our customer can feel comfortable and confident in our service. The next step was to set some goals, target some specific customer needs, and put together a statement of work that reflects the client's strategic goals.
Content Creation
SEO shouldn't involve trickery. It's all about creating content that is relevant to what users are searching for. Once we understood what PolicyDog.com's customers were looking for, we were able to create content to effectively explain what the various products are. We wanted to make sure that the customers understood that:
- PolicyDog.com sells affordable insurance
- Provides a free instant insurance quote
- Enables you to buy your custom policy online
For each product, we created custom content to communicate these key points to site visitors.
Call to action - increasing the conversion rates
There's no point in drawing visitors to a web site unless you want them to do something. The site had forms to enable users to get an online quote for various products, but the content management system didn't allow us to integrate those custom forms into the optimized product. That means extra clicks for site visitors, which is annoying and costs the client business. Their content management system was amazing for managing products, but it needed some additional features for the marketing needs. Each require click means fewer sales. We went on site to meet with PolicyDog's web development team so they could update the site code to accommodate the marketing needs.
Reporting - That which gets measured gets managed
If management can't see what visitors are doing on the site, then we can't work with them to increase sales. One of the first things we do when we setup a site is install an analytics package. The management team now gets a report on the first of every month showing current traffic, sales conversion rates, and compares website performance to the prior month. Each month we review the report to identify opportunities for improvement.
Registration with search engines
Once the site was done, we created search engine facing site maps to help Google, Bing and Yahoo! find all the pages in the site for effective indexing. If your page isn't indexed, then it can't show up in search engine listings. Most major search engines support mechanisms for detecting site maps, and also support site map submission.
In addition to registering the site with search engines, we also register the website with online directories to create links to the site. Links make a huge difference in search engine results.
Subscribe to this RSS feed to stay tuned as we follow PolicyDog.com's progress and evaluate the results. We look forward to seeing their business grow!
