From the insurance agency owner perspective, a great website means one thing: TRAFFIC.  When it comes to building a great website that brings in traffic and prospects, there are a million and one things that can help drive prospects to your site.  

Unfortunately, as an insurance professional, you are likely just too busy to learn them all, so I'm here to help by focusing your attention on just the two most critical features.

The two most critical website features for maximum site traffic are...

Drum roll please...

1. INTEGRATED BLOG
2. BACKLINKS
   

What?  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) did not make the top 2?  Nope.  SEO by itself will do you very little for your insurance business without content.  

What about having a professional and high functioning insurance website?  No again.  You can have the prettiest site in the world with the coolest and most leading-edge functions available, but if you don't have traffic coming to your site, your pretty site will never even be seen.

From my years of experience I will say, without hesitation, the single most important piece is an integrated blog.  The Blog (and when I say Blog I mean an integrated Blog that is located in a subdirectory of your site, i.e., www.yoursite.com/subdirectory) provides two critical aspects and supports SEO.  It provides continuous fresh content which Search Engines love, and EACH POST YOU CREATE IN YOUR BLOG ACTS LIKE ITS VERY OWN WEBPAGE from a Search Engine perspective.  That means every post you create is growing your site and your content and your relevance while broadening your internet reach with every single post.  Skeptical?  Now hear this -- Blogging is now the #3 traffic generator on the entire internet  (behind only Google and Facebook).  Blogs are huge, blogs are powerful, and Search Engines (e.g., Google) love them.

Make no mistake -- content and reach are what you need to drive traffic to your insurance business, and an integrated blog is the #1 way to build content and reach.

So what's the second most important feature to worry about?  Backlinks.  Backlinks occur when another website owner posts a link to your insurance website on theirs -- in essence, each backlink to your insurance agency website acts as a vote of popularity for you.  When you get hundreds of backlinks to your agency's site, the Search Engines increase your Quality Score in their algorithms and all of your insurance related keywords on your site become more and more powerful.  The more power your keywords have, the higher your site will climb on the Search Engines results pages (e.g., everyone wants to get to the "first page of Google").

So forget about learning everything about internet marketing and web design for your insurance business, and focus on the two most important aspects to build a foundation upon: integrated blog and backlinks.

Want to know what Blog software is the best out there for your insurance business?  As always, I love hearing from you --- let me know if you have questions or comments.

Happy prospecting!