 This is one of those questions that cause some great anxiety. The internet as we now know it started in the mid 1990’s. It was fairly easy to create and submit a web site to a search engine and get indexed so you could be found by the customer. It was kind of the new frontier in marketing. Not many during those early years were ready to accept the internet as a place to find products and services they needed. A lot of companies have come and gone since then as well. Technology was way behind the curve and access was not readily available to the average consumer. Search engines would gobble up any web site in order to build their databases of web sites with little attention paid to relevancy. Money poured into companies like Yahoo.com, Altavista.com, Lycos.com, LookSmart.com, Inktomi, MSN.com and others. They survived on revenues generated from the rush of advertisers willing to spend stupid money on these sites.
Then many within the internet bubble crashed in the late nineties. The good news was a complete shake out of the industry and a clear perspective on how the internet would best service the needs of the consumer slowly began to surface. Most agree that the internet’s best use is still gathering information in an easy to use, graphical format. Search engines today are leaner and meaner and they now have vast reservoirs of information to draw from. This is good for the consumer. This is bad for those who own and maintain a web site as we are now one site in many hundreds of millions of sites.
Relevancy is more important than ever before. But what happens when you are selling a product that is essentially the same for every sales person. Health insurance is one of these types of products. The products, the rates, the applications, everything associated with a health plan is the same information used by every authorized agent. The only factors that are truly different is you the agent and your customer. It is true that selling insurance is a people business. But we all still use the same information.
If you maintain your own web site you do have some artistic freedom with how the information is displayed and how the site navigates. But once this is done your site must be found by the public. The search engines are the biggest delivery system for bringing new customers to you based on relevant searches and relevant results. For years this was not that big of a deal.
Today it has all changed. Bid for placement has quickly become the revenue replacement for banner advertising. With fewer than 5-20 key placement slots typically available for display this form of advertising has quickly become a hole to pump money into. Those with deep pockets can easily shift their competitor out of the placement game. Annual submission fees now exist with most of the majors with no guarantee of placement. And more important we do not own the rights to the names many bid on. To make matters worse fraud can consume as high as 35% of your advertising dollar and these numbers grows each year.
Now enter the insurance companies who essentially own and can control the use of their names – they now can command the most prized spots on the search engine pages. And they are doing just that. Many of the major carriers are investing big money into this form of advertising competing directly with the broker. They are investing in their own platforms to drive customers to, completely bypassing the need for the broker. It’s all about money. There are also platforms that the carriers invest in to guarantee placement within their sites. These site too compete with the broker. Then there is everyone else. The good news is that beyond the habitual clickers are those internet savvy users (whom are growing in numbers) who look beyond the top five sponsored listings to find quality content. How and where you are positioned is clearly the difference between success and failure of a site. And of coarse there is your marketing that allows you to drive traffic to your own site.
 As broadband continues to make its way into our homes, and essentially most everyone gets connected, the net is quickly becoming the first place to shop. If you are not listed within the first 100 listings you are essentially lost. You can successfully drive traffic to your site using traditional forms of marketing and in many cases traditional forms of advertising are being abandoned in favor of the net. Consider phone book advertising - fewer people are seeking direction from the phone book as the internet offers more relevant information with direct links to the companies that sell the product they are seeking. Thus the cost of each lead from phone book advertising is on the rise.
Sharing one platform with other users is another alternative. For example there are tens of thousands of insurance agents now selling in California alone. Many thousands already have some form of web presence although most are incomplete and few are up to date. Others subscribe to template based quoting platforms that all offer the same information, and most all require some information from the viewer. You are competing with all of them for placement and a chance to lure the consumer to your pages. To simply throw money at the open auction format is quickly proving to be an expensive forum with questionable results. Then on top of this you can add those websites that do not even sell health insurance. They are simply culling the internet for leads and in turn sell these leads (multiple times) to you the agent and insurance companies like UniCare.
We propose that you link yourself to single platform that provides a common gateway for information all agents use and help share the cost of placement with all that register for use. The more agents subscribing to the site the more our buying power as a platform increases. Search engines do give consideration to the amount of traffic a single site receives and calculates this in their logarithms and thus helps improve the positioning and relevancy given to any one site. This is in addition to the marketing you already do and should continue.
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