How is this for a business proposition: Let me diminish your visibility in search results and charge you for it. How does $1,000 a month sound?

How is this for a business proposition: "Let me diminish your visibility in search results and charge you for it. How does $1,000 a month sound?"

I can't imagine not getting laughed right off the phone after that pitch, yet that is actually a service that is being presented to small businesses, including many insurance agents.

Know Your Baseline:

It's always advisable to know how many inbound leads your current marketing or passive referrals are generating for you, and it's a good idea to know your conversion rate for those leads - a measure of lead quality.

It's simple enough to take a look at website quote and contact requests (it should be anyway). The thing that often gets missed is the tracking of inbound phone leads. Special tracking phone numbers make this easier (more on that below), but tracking phone numbers aren't strictly necessary. A tick mark on a paper call log will do - it will give you a pretty reliable measure of inbound phone leads. Add these to your website requests and you have established your baseline.

You may want to know the 'source' of these inbound leads, particularly if you are spending money on a marketing program to generate them. This can get a little murky, however, since most consumers utilize multiple channels in the insurance purchase process.

For example, suppose my neighbor gushes about their insurance agent after I express dissatisfaction with my latest car insurance premium increase. Being naturally skeptical, I do a quick Google search on the agent's name, and up pops links to the insurance agency website, a link to the agency Google+ page, a link to a Yelp review and links to the agency profile in a few insurance company agency locators.

And since I'm the type to indulge my curiosity, I check each of these out, as well as the agency Facebook page, which is linked to the website. So when I ultimately submit a quote request through this agent's, where goes the credit for the lead?

• To the word-of-mouth referral?
• To the website?
• How about social media? I did check out the Facebook page.
• Maybe it was the reviews I saw on the Google+ or Yelp profile.
• And how did I get to the website? Through the Google+ link or the agent's website link that showed up in the organic results when I did my search?

What we are searching for is the proximate cause of the lead, as we like to say in insurance-speak. Discovering that information is a worthy cause, but for the purpose of evaluating a sales pitch for all we really need to know is the baseline: how many inbound leads are coming in now?

When 1 Plus 1 Doesn't Equal 2...or Even One

Two websites aren't better than one, they are worse. Why? For one thing, a second website is going to cost something in terms of money and time to build, maintain and optimize. For another thing - and this is really more important - if your second website features the same products and services as your first website, your websites will compete with each other and the aggregate change in your search visibility and website traffic will almost certainly be less than you were achieving with your original website alone.

But let's just pretend for a moment that a second website could add some benefit. The reality is that any benefit likely won't show up for some time. It could take the search engines a few months to index your new website and even then, a brand new domain and website will be a SEO liability - Google's Page Rank algorithm includes a domain maturity factor and new domains have no maturity by definition.

A Clever Domain will Make it Rain

Keywords in a website domain name, like www.thebestcarhomebusinessinsurancequotes.com matter...almost not at all. What if getting favorable search rankings were as simple as that? Oh the humanity! All those poor souls working their fingers to the bone search optimizing and SEOing would be out on the streets. The next time you come across someone who wants you to believe that there is magic in a domain name, consider that Google uses over 200 factors in their search algorithm and tweaks it over 500 times a year, and that's in a slow year. If only it were as simple as getting a domain name with some awesome keywords. And before you get too hung up on magic keywords, consider that daily, 500 million search queries are submitted to Google that Google has never seen before.

All Reviews are Not Created Equal

Online reviews are important for your insurance agency - they can both increase visibility in search results and boost click-throughs and lead generation. But there are many online review services. George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm that, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The same is true of review platforms.

Google+ is widely viewed as the most important review platform, but many insurance agencies have had excellent results with reviews on Yelp, and even though Citysearch and Kudzu get only a fraction of Google's traffic, they are also important review properties. There are many lesser ones, and if you are just getting started with reviews, you are better off beginning with the review platforms that actually show up in search results - like Google+ and Yelp...and you should add Facebook to the list. If a marketing company charges you to get reviews on some obscure review platform, you are wasting your marketing dollars unless you are already receiving reviews on the important review sites and you are just looking to expand your insurance agency's digital shadow.

Dialing Identity Theft

In the section above on establishing your baseline, I mentioned tracking phone numbers - numbers that differ from your listed phone number and are generally used for the purpose of establishing lead sources, like a landing page from pay-per-click advertising. But populating this tracking phone number across many many local search and review profiles for your insurance agency is a really bad idea. There is one overarching reason for this: it will create discrepancies between your agency business profile across the local search ecosystem and ultimately reduce your agency's visibility online.

Unsophisticated or disingenuous marketing companies will swap out phone numbers on third party directories and local search profiles so they can track the leads they are bringing to you.

Is it a Shell Game?

Suppose a marketing company updates your agency profile in a number of online listings to include, instead of your current website and actual listed phone number, a new 'free' website and a tracking phone number. When inbound leads materialize they now come into the tracking phone number and requests submitted through the new website, it will appear that the marketing company is generating results. However...to the extent the marketing company did not create any new listings, there is probably no net gain in inbound leads, only a redirection in the contact touch point. How would you know if there was a net gain in inbound leads? By knowing your baseline.

Is Pay Per Click Part of the Package?

Pay Per Click - PPC - can have a place in a marketing mix, but whether or not it has it's place in a marketing program presented to your insurance agency is a question that requires hard consideration. Insurance keywords are the most expensive of any industry; we blogged about this back in 2011 and the picture hasn't changed much. Part of the reason for the competition is the number of competitors with deep pockets (GEICO, Progressive, State Farm, etc.). PPC is essentially an auction, with paid search visibility going to the highest bidder. It's tough to outbid a competitor who's marketing budget clocks in at 9 or 10 figures. To the left of the decimal point.

The more generic are the keywords in a PPC campaign, the more expensive that campaign will be - think 'car insurance' or 'homeowner insurance'. A more cost effective campaign will target groups of more specific keywords, and this will require some research. Research costs money, and if you are being sold a marketing campaign that doesn't include some substantive set up costs, that research isn't being done.

At a minimum, it's fair to ask what keywords are being bid on...maybe your agency name is in the mix - incredibly (or not) we have seen that. If your website, Google+ profile, and maybe a few review website pages are already ranking in search results, why would you pay for the privilege of competing with yourself?

Finally, any marketing company selling your insurance agency a PPC campaign will provide reports on impressions and click-throughs from your PPC ads. But that doesn't really tell the whole story. The aforementioned blog post walks through a method for calculating the cost of customer acquisition, which can easily be north of $1,000 or $2,000. At those prices, a PPC campaign had better be landing some really sizeable accounts that stick around for more than a few renewals.

So What to Do?

At a minimum, you want to know your baseline. If don't already do so, do a little basic marketing planning. Identify the who, what, where, why and how:

1. Who are your target prospects? Can you describe them in demographic and psychographic terms?
2. What products can you sell to them?
3. Where do they live and work?
4. Why should they buy from you? This is your value proposition.
5. How will you get in front of them?

Different marketing tactics are more effective getting you in front of different audiences. Make sure your tactic matches your target.

A little basic marketing will also help you decide if program costs make sense for you. Marketing budgets are all over the place, IIABA survey benchmarks show most agencies budget between 1% and 2% of revenues on marketing but the more aggressive and successful agencies budget 10% and more. Just know where your agency budget before seriously entertaining any sales pitch.