The Insurance Agency Website and Lead Checklist

Each item below is something you can check on your own site this afternoon. Where we have done the work for an agency, we say which one. Where a fix needs software or ad spend, we say what it involves.

One page for each line you write

People shop for coverage by line: home, auto, business, life, farm. A single “Insurance” page with a row of carrier logos answers none of those searches. Give each line you write its own page, so a search for business insurance from someone nearby lands on a page about business insurance.

Each line page should carry:

• Who the coverage is for, in plain terms: homeowners, families with a teenage driver, a contractor with three trucks.
• The questions your producers answer by phone about that line, written down with their answers.
• The producer who handles it, with a photo and a direct number.
• A quote form for that line, so nobody has to start over on a general contact page.

This is the line-of-business half of insurance agent SEO. The town half, a page for each place you write policies, is covered in our post on insurance agency marketing in small towns. Build the line pages first: every agency has lines, and not every town has enough distinct to say to earn a page.

Intra-State Insurance Corporation in Parkersburg writes home, auto, business, health and life coverage for clients in nine states. Their old site was one page that didn’t work on a phone. We rebuilt it around the agency’s people, and our page on website design for insurance agencies covers that kind of build.

Quote forms that get finished

The quote form is where independent agency lead generation either works or stops. A form that asks for a VIN and a driver’s license number before it asks for a name loses people who were ready to talk. Ask for what a producer needs to call back, and collect the rest on the call.

• Ask for four things: a name, a phone number or email, the line they want and their town. That is enough to start.
• Send each form to the producer who writes that line, not to a shared inbox that someone checks on Fridays.
• Make it work on a phone, with fields big enough to tap and no tiny drop-down menus.
• Say what happens next: who will call, and roughly when. Promise only what the office can keep.
• Test it once a month. Send yourself a quote request and see who gets it. A form that quietly stopped sending looks fine from the outside.

Leave out details you don’t need yet. A quote request carrying a Social Security number is a record you now have to protect, on a website and in an inbox that were never built to hold it.

Why insurance clicks cost so much and how to spend less

Carriers, comparison sites and lead sellers bid on the same insurance searches you do, so a click costs more here than in most trades. The website decides how much of that money comes back:

• Land every ad on the line page it promises. An ad for business insurance that opens on the home page pays full price for a visitor who now has to search again.
• Count cost per lead, line by line. Divide the month’s spend by the quote requests and tracked calls it produced. Clicks alone tell you very little.
• Fix the form before raising the budget. More clicks into a form that loses people only buys more lost people.

Our post on insurance agency marketing covers bidding on line plus town and the negative keywords every agency should start with. When we run it for you, the fee is published: $800 a month for managed search, or $1,600 with Google and Microsoft Ads, and the ad budget goes straight to the platform. More on digital marketing for insurance agencies.

Keeping carrier logos and licensing up to date

Carrier logos tell a visitor which companies you can quote. They go out of date quietly: an appointment ends, a carrier changes its name, a logo links to a portal page that moved. The site still shows it, and a visitor asks for a quote you can’t write.

• Show only the carriers you are appointed with today, and review the list whenever an appointment changes.
• Click every carrier link. A broken link to a carrier’s payment or claims page sends a client straight to your phone.
• If you write outside your home state, list the states you are licensed in.
• Take down producers who have left or retired, and update the Google listing the same day.

For agencies that would rather not do the watching, Webfresh Autopilot flags a carrier link that broke, a page that loads slowly and staff details that disagree with your Google listing. It never changes coverage wording on its own. That waits for you to approve.

Example: the MOV Insurance partnership

MOV Insurance in the Mid-Ohio Valley writes coverage for individuals, families and businesses. They saw the website as the center of their online presence and had nobody in-house to maintain it. Under our Website Partnership Package we handle the monthly maintenance and report SEO rankings, page load times and traffic, measured in GTmetrix, Google Analytics and SEMrush. Updates go in before problems come up, so the site keeps pace with the agency.

The write-up covers upkeep and reporting. It doesn’t publish lead counts, and we won’t add any. Read the MOV Insurance case study.

Getting renewals out of the spreadsheet

The website brings the client in. Keeping them is a renewal, and in many agencies renewals live in a spreadsheet or in one person’s head. Policy records sit in the agency management system, carrier downloads somewhere else and claims in a third place.

Signs it is time to move it:

• A renewal gets noticed after it lapsed, not before.
• Pulling up a client’s history while they wait on the phone means opening three systems.
• Commission numbers only reconcile after someone rebuilds a spreadsheet.

We connect agency management, carrier downloads and claims tracking so renewals get flagged early and commissions reconcile without a spreadsheet. If an older Access tool tracks renewals today, it moves to the cloud with the screens your staff already know. Our page on custom software for insurance agencies covers what that involves, and the free audit starts with what you run now.

While you are at it, note the lead source on each new client. Then the renewal report also tells you which line page or ad brought the policies that stayed.