How Your Agency Website Can Be Friends with Google
(and visitors too):

70%+ of all insurance purchases begin with an online search

A website is neither a "marketing expense" or something that is "nice to have" — it's a necessity to your business. Websites and search engines play a huge role in the insurance sales (and retention) process.

Consumers are now empowered and fully capable of doing their own online research before they take action or talk to an agent. In fact, over 70% of consumers are using online tools and websites to research insurance before they call you. Your website needs to be where people are searching and clicking, not just for new business generation, but in order to retain your existing clients also.

Advisor Evolved websites are built from the ground up to help improve your online visibility so you can take advantage of these search queries and ultimately make more commission while retaining your existing customers.

Google is declaring websites "Not Secure" that don't have SSL

Do you think it would be good or bad if a client or prospect came to your website and got a warning that your site was insecure? In January (2017) Google announced on their official security blog that they will now show a "Not Secure" warning in browsers if the website does not have an SSL certificate.

Here's what it looks like in Google Chrome:

What's more, websites that have an SSL certificate (like Advisor Evolved websites) will get a slight rankings boost according to Google. Bottom line, if your current website doesn't have SSL, you're missing out on rankings and there's a good chance you'll be scaring people away who see this warning!

Your SEO will tank if your website isn't compliant with Google's new Mobile-first algorithm

60%+ of all internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. When the mobile version of your website is nothing more than menu tabs, what little SEO value your site might have is going to go bye-bye. This is because Google has put a massive priority on the mobile experience and has publicly stated that the mobile functionality of your website is now a ranking variable in their algorithm.

In fact, Google recently posted on their official blog that they have moved their index to a mobile-first index, meaning that they prioritize the mobile version of your website before the desktop version. People are five times more likely to leave a website that isn't mobile responsive.

All Advisor Evolved sites are optimized for the mobile experience, and are actually built for mobile devices first, before we look at the desktop version. This mobile-first approach is huge for your SEO, user experience and ROI.

Speaking of SEO, our websites are built to rank

Do you want your agency website to rank higher in search engines? A silly question, I know… of course you do!

In order to give your site the best opportunity to rank well, you need to focus on both performance and optimization. Search engines love lightweight, cleanly coded websites that provide them with clear information. The more information you can give to the search engine, the better off you are in terms of SEO.

Thanks to our remarkably efficient code architecture, our websites offer performance capabilities that few others can match. Not only do we serve streamlined, search engine optimized HTML5, but we also minimize HTTP requests, regardless of what design you’re using!

(That’s geek-speak for “your site loads faster because it uses fewer resources.” Search engines LOVE this kind of thing.)

Separate your website with Schema!

Markup schema is part of the new standard used by search engines to understand content on the web. Right now, major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are looking for this code on your site so they can improve their search results.

The implications here are serious: If your site doesn’t leverage markup schema, it’s probably going to lose rankings to another site that does.

But if you’ve got Advisor Evolved, you’re going to be the one taking those rankings.

Thanks to a lightweight HTML structure that’s enriched with markup schema specifically for Insurance Agencies, our designs can help you give search engines precisely what they want. What that means is, our designs don't just tell search engines you're a local business (what most Schema does) we tell them that you are actually an Insurance Agency.

That small difference can make a huge impact in terms of someone finding your website in a search query and is one of the reasons why our sites generate leads with the site owner doing very little work to get them.