Tom's Blog

Nearly every insurance agency website builder offers “template” websites. They do this because creating original content is the biggest expense when building a website and they want to keep their costs down to be competitive. This is another case of “You get what you for”. Unfortunately, insurance agency owners don’t realize the mistake they are making and why insurance agency websites should have all original content.

Before I continue, I bought a “template” website for my agency several years ago and unfortunately, I did not get what I paid for!

There is an online tool that provides a service (both free and paid) that will scour the internet and that will list other websites that have the same content (just like Google does when crawling your website). I subscribe to this service because I absolutely want to make sure my site and my clients’ sites have original content. Why is this so important?

One word, Plagiarism!

Creating new, original content is time consuming so many have copied content from other websites to pad their own website with content. Some years back, Google caught on to this and now penalizes sites for duplicate content. This is one of the reasons the template site I bought never gained traction.

Does your insurance agency website have duplicate content?

Go to http://copyscape.com/ and enter the URL for some of the pages of your site. Actually, if you want to be sure you have all original content, it’s worth testing all of your pages. The paid version offers a “batch” option that will search your entire site. Of course, if you personally wrote the content, you still may want to check to see if someone has stolen your content.

The free version will only display 10 pages that have the same content as your site. It’s shocking to see what the paid version will display for many sites out there. I have checked on our competition and hundreds of websites have come up with the same exact content.

Content is Cash!

Again, adding fresh, original and relevant content to your website on a consistent basis is as vital to your website’s search rankings as is your heart pumping fresh blood though your circulatory system.

Google and the other search engines crawl our websites almost every day. They may not look at every page every day but should complete crawling the entire site every 2-3 days looking for new content. Why?

Because Google and the other search engines want to give its users the most up-to-date relevant results to their searches. They also crawl our sites to learn more about the site and what it has to offer to their users. So, the more content you have on your site, the more valuable it will be to their users. This leads to higher rankings for more keyword search terms and phrases.

This is why you should have a strategy for adding new content on a consistent basis to your site. As you have heard, blogging is a great way to add new, relevant content. Another way is to add additional pages to your site.

At the time of this writing, my agency site has 283 pages and 223 blog posts. This has taken years to accumulate but has been well worth the effort and expense. You may have heard my comments about considering a website as an asset? You can see I am investing in this great asset.

How do my website clients and I add new, relevant content to our sites consistently? Most of the work is done by my copy writers that I have personally trained how to create the content and properly add to our sites while following SEO best practices.

If you would like me to review your website and see if you’re making the mistakes I have made and many other insurance agency owners have, click here and request a website review.