We recently did some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work for an insurance website. This company sells auto, home, life, and business insurance, and has several branches throughout Florida. We did some keyword research and came up with a strategy for their meta tags. After consulting with them and agreeing on the key words we were targeting, we implemented their meta tags, submitted their site to a nice amount of directories, made some minor content changes on their site, and waited about 8 weeks to see the results.
The above work is what I consider to be the foundation for any SEO project. Every site needs it to get started. I wasn’t expecting huge results after just 8 weeks, since insurance is such a competetive industry – and I must say I was amazed at the results! For almost all of the keywords we targeted, the site actually shows up on the 3rd page of Google, the 2nd or 3rd of Yahoo, and – get this – for ALL of the keywords, the site shows up on the first page of MSN! That’s pretty good for an insurance website with just this initial work done. Before we did anything, the site was not listed anywhere at all in any of the search engines.
Now, where do we go from here? If nothing else is done, I would expect the site to gradually increase in rankings over time – not huge advances, but minimal improvement over a 6-month period. Then, it will probably start to drop after a while. My recommendation to the company is to start a link building campaign. This includes submissions to more directories, article writing, press releases, and other such methods of creating external links to their website. If this is done, then they will see a much greater increase over the next 6 months, and we’ll eventually begin approaching the first pages of Google and Yahoo. They agreed, and we have committed to a 6-month link building campaign.
As with all SEO work, it’s a slow process, but we’re going about it the right away, so the company will definitiely see great results, as they already have in the short time since we started working on their site.