What if your insurance agency uses the same generic standard content as 100 other agencies? What kind of review would you give your current website, if you were to review it from the perspective of a potential customer, potential employee, or potential partner? If your agency is simply copying standard content, chances are you are in the penalty box, placed there by both Google’s algorithms and your prospects. Let’s take a look at how and why it got there, and remember, this information is in the public domain, accessible to everyone.
Your agency may be using standard content from an insurance website platform. These can range in price from a few hundred dollars in total cost to thousands of dollars per month. Regardless of the price, the approach is the same. You select the coverage lines you want from a standard content library and that becomes your website content. Now your website is like dozens, or even hundreds of other agents, agencies, and brokers.
You can test your site for duplicate content by repeating the following four steps:
1. Navigate to one of your internal pages. For example, homeowners insurance.
2. Copy a sentence from your website page and paste it into a Google search. Here’s a good example: “There are four main types of life insurance, and each has a place in any solid financial plan.”
3. Review the results pages. Are they made up of agencies like yours?
4. Visit some of those websites. Does its content resemble yours?
Repeat this several times on multiple pages (Auto, Life, Group Health, etc.). If your answer to points 3 and 4 is “yes”, then your insurance website is using duplicate content.
When it comes to duplicate (or distributed) content, search engines often don’t know which pages to include or exclude from their ranking indexes. Also, search engines don’t know whether to direct link metrics to your website or to another site. And they may not know which page to rank for their query results (which agency to show on their search engine results pages). Clearly, when there is duplicate content, websites suffer rankings and traffic losses. And potentially worse, your best prospect or new potential hire may click on a competitive site that looks like yours, or notice that your website looks the same as another agency, located down the street.
The solution is quite simple, although it can be overwhelming for a busy agency. Rewrite all of your website content to make it truly unique to your agency, and do so from your specific value proposition and brand perspective. If your agency lacks the time, talent, or tools to pull this off, or if your website can’t pass Google’s mobile device compatibility test, you can contact a competent insurance agency marketing firm and outsource these initiatives.