An Insurance SEO Case Study: How We Ranked an Insurance Company from Zero Keywords To 27,000 Keywords in a Year.

We Started with a Complete SEO Audit

Our client’s website was built well and had no previous penalties as it was relatively new and had just launched earlier in 2017.

We did discover that it had some aggressive anchor texts making up 9% of the websites profile, but we knew we had the budget from the client to diversify and expand.

We Did Keyword Research and Identified Several “Low Hanging Fruit” Keywords

We identified 230 keywords ranking in positions 5-30 with keyword volumes between 20-12,000 MS.

Since many of these keywords were already ranking in the first few pages of search results, we knew we could focus on them quickly to see some instant jumps in traffic.

All of these initial keywords were terms being used for competitors PPC campaigns, meaning that their competitors were bidding on them in Google Ads and they would provide great value if we were to spend a little extra timing focusing on them. Even some of the lower volume keywords were tremendously lucrative with CPC prices ranging from $10.50 up to $18.29 per click.

We took this all into account as built our approach on keywords & landing pages, as several of the pages ranked for a multitude of keywords.

Additionally, by sharing this information with our client, they were able to help us to optimize their landing pages with LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords to help boost the rankings for those pages.

We Performed a Competitive Gap Analysis Report

A Competitive Gap Analysis report is designed to help us locate keywords that their competitors were currently ranking for and that they were not. The benefit of a Competitive Gap Analysis Report is that it helped us discover keywords and content to drive new ideas, articles, and landing pages.

We initially identified just over 1,200 keywords that their competitors were targeting and that their website was not.

The report helped us identify three main types of content to target and we utilized each at different strategies over the course of this project:

Sub-Category Pages

These are broad, high-volume keywords that speak to the user in general about a specific service they offer.

Service Review Pages

The Competitive Gap Analysis helped us to identify valuable branded terms and service terms to review. We used this to build a substantial amount of content that would help to produce revenue.

Supporting Content / Article Content

We used the data from the report later in the project, after we completed the initial base content, to begin creating supporting content for higher competition keywords that we could use for copywriting in articles.

For example, we would support a broader keyword or topic with well written relevant articles that all linked to the higher competitive keywords article, which in-turn built a stronger foundation for ranking.

Kicking Off the SEO Project

After running a complete site audit and a Competitive Gap Analysis report we started with building their backlink portfolio. With all SEO projects, we want to create a diverse portfolio of high-authority backlinks (Off-Site SEO).

We heavily relied on natural white hat link building techniques aggressively reaching out to high authority bloggers as well as creating several strong blog posts ourselves for distribution to increase website traffic. Here are the steps we took:

• Step One: This project started with diversity links, guest blogs, and our own created content.
• Step Two: As the project moved forward, we added more content and shifted to higher quality links.
• Step Three: As we saw the success of our content ranking and the broadness of our targeted keywords expanding, we shifted even more budget into website content, while continuing to build high-authority backlinks.

Here’s What Happened

Thanks to the initial reporting and the well-crafted strategy, execution, and overall great communication with our client in the span of less than a year, we were able to move them into a position online to be a major contender in the insurance space. We were able to get extremely high rankings for some of the most competitive keywords in the insurance industry.

The site’s current organic traffic value is estimated at $351k per month. This means the traffic they are driving for organic keyword rankings would cost a competitor $351k per month in Google Ad spend:

Their website now ranks for over 27,000 keywords, and their traffic has grown aggressively month-over-month:

Our Thoughts

As with all our clients we value the relationship we have with them and their trust in us to build out an SEO strategy specific for their needs. We continue to work closely with this client, and they continue put trust in us to follow the process while also working closely with their team to continually identify high target keywords in the insurance industry to focus on.

In addition, because their willing to spend at a higher level, given the highly competitive insurance industry that they’re in, it enables our team to prepare additional analysis of competitors. This provides them with better insights which continue to drive their SEO efforts and influence their business decisions.

Learn more about our SEO strategies.

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