In the second of our series on 5 minute SEO Site Audits, we have our first insurance company in the crosshairs. I've noticed that the insurance field amazingly is not the sharpest collective group of Insurance providers out there.  This seems to be a field that willingly and openly throw money at Pay Per Click, but fail to invest properly in organic search engine optimization.  Regards of who it is, and even the large companies such as Nationwide Insurance really miss the mark in terms of SEO for their site, these companies should have a plan in place to reduce their pay per click spend significantly with higher converting organic SEO.  This is a great opportunity to be more intelligent than your competitors rather than simply trying to outspend them.

Anyway, this five minute video clip targets Grange Insurance, and it shows immediately that they either have never heard of SEO or just have never put even the basic ounce of effort into SEO.  The page title for their homepage is "Welcome".  Seriously.  That is it.  There are junior high kids with blog sites that do a better job of optimizing their web site. Grange is saying right off the bat that hey... we want to rank right at the top anytime someone goes to Google and searches for the word "welcome".  That will help us domintate the insurance field.  Obviously, that is sarcasm.  But this might possibly go down as the single worst homepage title for a major corporation ever. 

So we'll move on, despite this blunder that is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted advertising dollars by not taking advantage of proper SEO elements.  The content on the home page is very, very weak - as in, there really is none.  The image they use has no alt tags, the text is not descriptive...  I didn't even see at quick glance the word insurance used on the site at all, in a manner that is indexable by a search spider. THe only time it is used is in an image with no alt text, which spiders can't see, so it literally doesn't even exist in their "eyes".

The information architecture is very weak, and they use words such as Auto, Homeowners, and Life.  Sure, we can guess that this is in regards to insurance, but a search engine may think they are selling cars, houses and board games for all we know.  Again, the word insurance is not even used.

In those lower level pages, the page titles are no better (ie. the title of the Car Insurance section is literally one word again - 'Auto'.)  Again, there is no sitemap xml anywhere to be found, not that the pages Google should index would ever rank anyway, but still.  The site is very poorly laid out and is not built to ever be found by anyone on the internet - and when you do that, why bother even having a web site.

The frustrating thing is that the site has a PageRank of 5.  Not that this should necessarily matter to you anymore, but it show just how valuable the site is.  And it is being completely wasted by poor, actually non-existant, SEO practices. 

Taken from Compete.com, you can see in this graphic that almost 55% of all of their organic search engine traffic comes from people searching for Grange Insurance. Another 9% for 'Grange', and another 9% searching for some variation of thier URL.  75% of all of thier traffic is coming from people that are looking specifically for them!  Virtually nobody is finding them when doing comparison shopping or at the single most critical juncture in capturing new business.  As someone that is so very passionate about good SEO, it is literally heartbreaking to see how much they are wasting such a great opportunity.  And it wouldn't even be a significant investment.  A basic site cleanup and overall SEO training package costing them under $20,000 total, would help them earn millions of dollars in recurring and free marketing.  It is absolutley heartbreaking to see a company not take advantage of that kind of return on investment.  

If you don't realize the importance of SEO, take a look at this graph below.  The green line is State Farm's monthly web traffic, the number one ranked company on Google for the word Insurance.  The blue line is Grange's web traffic.  Last month, it was 2.2 million visitors for State Farm, and 48,000 visitors for Grange. By looking at the SEO for the site, it is pretty obvious why. These numbers aren't 100% accurate as they are pulled from Compete.com, but they are a good representation of the importance of SEO. 

Just imagine if they were using a good, Columbus SEO provider.  If those numbers were even 10% fo what State Farm is pulling in, it would triple their traffic and I'm guessing would have a pretty good impact on their sales.  To be honest, it would be very easy to do.  This is the kind of site that is easy to make a big impact - when the on-page optimization is a train wreck, there is nowhere to go but up.  Tripling their web site traffic would be something a good SEO firm could do in their sleep. It wouldn't be unreasonable to increase traffic by 1000% or better within 6 months - if only the effort were made.  

Did I mention how heartbreaking this is to see?

Until next time... have a great day and get ranked.