As an independent agent, you likely already know how important online local business listings are for helping consumers in your area find your agency. Yet far too often, the true value of an agent’s listings becomes underestimated when they aren’t properly maintained — from both an SEO perspective and a consumer’s perspective.
View this webinar on-demand as Digital Marketing Coordinator Chelsea Peterson unpacks six powerful benefits your agency can realize when you consistently monitor and update your local listings.
6 Reasons Why Accurate Local Listings are a Must
Watch the webinar, read through the full transcript, or jump ahead to the section you’re most interested in to see how accurate local listings can boost your agency’s local SEO efforts and get your agency found across the web.
- Improve Search Engine Rankings
- Get Found on Mobile & Voice Search
- Enhance Customer Experience
- Build Social Proof
- Provide Better Communication
- Increase Engagement
Watch the Webinar
Additional Questions?
If you have any questions about this webinar, our Local Listings Management service, or our Ultimate SEO Bundle, please schedule a call with sales.
Webinar Transcript
Hello everyone! My name is Chelsea Peterson, and I’m a Digital Marketing Coordinator here at BrightFire, as well as your host for today’s webinar. Thank you all for joining us.
In March, we covered The Rule of 7: How to Win Your Website Visitors Back. If you missed it, or any of our previous webinars in the 20 Minute Marketing Webinar series, you can access the whole series on-demand by visiting brightfire.com/webinars.
Our goal with these webinars is to provide you with digital marketing advice and discuss current digital marketing topics in a brief 20-minute format followed by a Q&A period to answer any questions you may have. If you have questions during the webinar, please use the Q&A feature in Zoom found at the bottom of the screen. We’ll do our best to answer all of the questions that come through; otherwise, we will personally reach out to you afterward.
Today’s webinar topic is 6 Reasons Why Accurate Local Listings are a Must. As an independent agent, you likely already know how important online local business listings are for helping consumers in your area find your agency. Yet far too often, the true value of an agent’s listings becomes underestimated when they aren’t properly maintained — from both an SEO perspective and a consumer’s perspective.
In this webinar, we’ll unpack six powerful benefits your agency can realize when you consistently monitor your local listings and keep them up-to-date. Then, we’ll share how you can effectively manage and leverage your listings so you can stay ahead of the competition and more easily get found across the web.
Today’s webinar is being recorded, so everything we discuss will be saved and emailed to you in the next business day or two so you can watch it later on-demand.
Lastly, we do have a couple of polls for today’s webinar. When launched, you’ll see the poll pop up on your screen with the question and response options. You can select more than one response, and every poll is anonymous. We’ll give you roughly 30 seconds to share your response, and then we’ll discuss the results with the group.
About BrightFire
Before we discuss the importance of accurate local listings, I’d like to share a brief background on BrightFire, since we have a mix of current customers and agents that are new to BrightFire attending today.
BrightFire began by providing insurance agency websites in 2000. Over the years, as the needs of insurance agents grew, we expanded our digital marketing services beyond agency websites to also include:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Reviews & Reputation Management
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Local Listings Management
Currently, there are over 2,500 independent agencies across the nation using at least one of BrightFire’s digital marketing services.
So with that background on BrightFire, let’s get started.
What’s Ahead
Accurate local listings can make a significant difference in boosting your agency’s search engine rankings, customer experience, and credibility. In fact, according to Google, consumers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they find a complete Google Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. And yet, 56% of businesses still need to claim their Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business.
So today, we’ll discuss how claiming your listings and keeping them accurate and up-to-date can give your agency a higher chance of getting ranked in search engines, whether it’s on desktop, mobile devices, or in voice search results. We’ll also share how your local listings can enhance your agency’s overall customer experience, help you build stronger social proof for prospective customers, provide faster and better communication, as well as increase consumers’ engagement with your agency.
Finally, we’ll discuss how BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service and Ultimate SEO Bundle can strengthen your overall SEO strategy and support your agency’s efforts to get found across the web.
Get Ranked Higher in Search Engines
Diving into the first reason why accurate local listings are a must, let’s talk about how listings can get your agency ranked higher in search engines.
Google, Bing, and other search engines place a lot of value on the accuracy and completeness of local listings when ranking search results. By claiming all of your listings, your agency has the opportunity to take control of the information on each listing and ensure they’re accurate.
Now when we talk about accuracy, I want to further define an accurate listing as one that is completely filled out and appropriately conveys who your agency is and what your agency provides.
In other words, it’s important to provide more than just an accurate phone number and address. In order to really strengthen your listings and ultimately your search engine rankings, your agency should also incorporate relevant keywords, products you offer, and the geographic areas you serve into the company bios and descriptions on your listings.
By filling out your listings more completely in this way, you can help Google and other search engines be more confident in your business and display your agency to someone in your service area who searches for a policy you sell.
But it’s also critical that you don’t simply fill out your listings and then forget about them. Your agency’s contact information may change over the years, or your information could be overridden in a listing update. And as time passes, listings platforms may roll out new features and attributes that could help improve your rankings when you utilize them.
So your agency should be regularly reviewing each listing to make sure the information is updated and that you’re taking advantage of any new listings features. You should also confirm that no new duplicate listings of your agency have been made, as these can negatively impact your rankings.
Finally, you should ensure that the information provided across all of your listings is consistent with one another. Inconsistent information can confuse search engines and lead to lower search rankings for your agency.
Get Found on Mobile & Voice Search Results
The next reason that accurate local listings are a must is that mobile searches and voice searches are on the rise, making it more important to be able to rank on these search engine results. Currently, over 50% of insurance searches are performed on mobile devices, and 18% of voice search queries are related to insurance.
Unfortunately, ranking on mobile and voice search results is harder to achieve than on desktop because Google on desktop now shows in an infinite scroll of results, while mobile searches typically only generate three responses. Voice searches only generate one response, or very rarely two.
Even if your agency does rank on desktop, you’re not guaranteed a similar spot on mobile or voice search. According to a study by BrightEdge, only 35% of the top-ranking websites on desktop were also in the top rankings on mobile.
This is because search engines will rank businesses differently on mobile based on the experience that consumers will have. We’ll dive a little deeper into the customer experience your listing has to offer consumers on the next slide. For now, it’s important to note that in order to be more likely to rank on mobile or voice searches, your agency needs to focus on mobile optimizations for both your local listings and your website.
Incorporating relevant geographic keywords into your bio is even more important for mobile than for desktop searches. In fact, mobile queries that contain “insurance near me” have grown by over 100% in the past two years. So highlighting the cities that are in your service area, ensuring your address is updated, and maintaining consistent information across all of your listings is critical.
Another action you can take to better optimize your listings for mobile is to write more naturally or conversationally in your bios and descriptions. This kind of content will still contain the specific keywords people search on desktop or mobile, while also better representing how people would search through a voice assistant like Siri, Alexa, or Google.
For example, like I just mentioned, someone searching for insurance on a desktop or mobile might say “insurance agency near me.” But that same person in a voice search might say, “Hey Siri, what insurance agency near me has the best reviews and customer service?”
Adding a more conversational tone that addresses common questions about your agency or the industry as a whole can help to more accurately complete your listings and increase your agency’s chances of appearing in the voice search results.
Improve Your Customer Experience
Now let’s move on to how accurate local listings can help improve the customer experience your agency provides. Because according to Google, almost half (46%) of all insurance consumers who use mobile devices for research say they’re looking for companies that offer a seamless and similar customer experience across all channels.
The first point here is simple — accurate and complete listings make it easier for consumers to find your business online. If someone has difficulty finding your business online, whether it be a phone number to call you or finding the correct address to get to your office, they will become frustrated and may decide to go elsewhere. This is also why it’s important to make sure your listings across all platforms are consistent, even for smaller details like whether you included a suite number in your address or an extension in your phone number.
Another way accurate listings improve your customer experience is by saving consumers time. When you have a complete listing on every platform, people don’t need to look up multiple listings to get all the information they’re looking for. They may not even need to go to your website. Consumers want reliable information at their fingertips quickly, so it’s crucial that you treat every listing like it’s the only way someone will learn about your agency and be able to contact you.
That means your listings should include all pertinent information such as your business name, address, and phone number, or NAP for short, as well as your website link, business hours, any holidays the office is closed, what products you offer, and any other relevant information that will help them make informed decisions about whether or not they should contact or visit your agency. This also includes key attributes such as whether your office is wheelchair accessible or requires an appointment before someone can visit.
By filling out the attributes and features offered in each listing, you can more accurately set realistic expectations about the experience consumers will receive when interacting with your agency.
Say for example, your Google Maps listing shows that you are open for President’s Day, but Apple Maps or Yelp says you’re closed. Consumers may not even give you a courtesy call to find out which listing is correct. Instead, they may just move onto the next agency near them that appears on their search results with reliable and consistent information.
The same goes for checking for duplicate listings. If someone gets confused because there are multiple listings that have your agency’s name on it and even the slightest inconsistencies in information, they will be more likely to look for a different agency altogether.
Build Your Agency’s Social Proof
In addition to creating a great customer experience, consistent and accurate local listings also build credibility and social proof for your agency.
Social proof is the idea that people are more likely to trust your agency if they believe the testimonials your policyholders share online. So the more you are able to prove that your agency delivers on its promises through online customer reviews, the more likely consumers who encounter your listings are to trust your brand and decide to contact your agency.
In fact, 92% of consumers read online reviews when considering a local business, and 73% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust a business more.
Because of this, it’s important to encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews in order to strengthen your agency’s social proof. But it’s also important for your agency to engage with your online reviews and respond to them in a timely manner.
Receiving and responding to reviews not only helps your listings appear to be more complete and trustworthy, but it also can improve your search engine rankings and make your agency look more active online. If you’re responding to reviews, people who come across your listings will see that your agency is easy to communicate with and pays attention to what customers have to say.
Even when it comes to responding to negative reviews, your agency has a great opportunity to redeem a customer’s poor experience while also reassuring new consumers and prospects that your agency works hard to make sure every customer is well taken care of and satisfied.
And to show you just how important it is for your agency to consistently generate new reviews, a study by Search Engine Land found that 85% of consumers disregard local reviews that are more than 3 months old.
So in order to successfully build social proof and credibility through local listings, your agency should be regularly sending out online review requests to your policyholders.
Provide Better & Faster Communication
Let’s move on to our next point. Studies show that 69% of insurance consumers ran a search before scheduling an appointment. This means people will likely come across your listings online before deciding whether they want to contact your agency. It also means that each of your listings should provide a quick and easy way for consumers to contact you.
This goes hand in hand with the point we discussed earlier about making the customer experience on each listing seamless so people can quickly learn about your agency. Part of having a strong customer experience is making the process of contacting your agency easy and seamless.
So, a complete and accurate listing should take advantage of the different features that make communicating with consumers better and faster. That includes adding your phone number and potentially also a button to request a quote online. Some listings like Google Business Profile and Yelp even provide messaging chats within the platform so consumers don’t have to take another step to visit your website in order to contact you.
Making it easy to contact your agency on every listing can also help improve your conversion rates and move people down the sales funnel faster. That’s because the more steps and searches people have to go through to contact your agency, the more likely they will be to stop trying and simply find a different agency to contact.
Help Individuals Engage With Your Agency
The last reason we’ll dive into today about why accurate local listings are a must is that they can help individuals engage with your agency in a number of ways. The more opportunities people have to interact with you online, the more loyalty they will develop for your agency, and the more likely they will be to advocate for you in the future by publishing a customer review or recommending your agency to others.
The first way you can help individuals engage with your agency is to add your website URL to each listing. Not only does this complete your standard information in a listing, but it also can point individuals to learn about your agency and potentially read your website’s blog.
You should also add your social media links to each listing that supports social media links so consumers can easily view and follow your social media accounts. While this is a great way to strengthen your relationship with current policyholders, it can also help you build a foundation for new relationships with prospects.
That’s because if you publish educational or entertaining social media posts that encourage prospects to follow you, every new post you publish afterwards will help your agency stay top of mind as that prospect continues their research process for insurance.
Another way you can help individuals engage with your agency through your listings is by publishing posts directly on your Google Business Profile. Similar to your social media accounts, you can create Google posts to show consumers researching insurance agencies online that your agency is active and legitimate. You can even include links on your posts so any calls to action your content has can better guide them on how to take the next step to contact your agency or get a quote online.
How BrightFire Helps Agents Get Found Online
At BrightFire, we know how challenging and time-consuming it can be for agents to keep track of all of your local listings and monitor them regularly for duplicate listings, necessary updates, or new reviews.
Fortunately, that’s where our Local Listings Management service comes in to take the burden off of you and help your agency give search engines and consumers the accurate and consistent information they’re looking for.
Our team of digital marketing experts will handle all of the setup, maintenance, monitoring, and updates of your listings so you don’t have to.
Our Local Listings Management service consists of several features to boost your local SEO efforts, including:
- Fully managing over 50 local listings networks,
- Incorporating your agency’s branding,
- Updating your existing local listings to ensure each has accurate and consistent business information,
- Removing duplicate listings that can negatively impact your SEO,
- Claiming your unclaimed listings,
- Updating your listings at no additional cost when your business information changes, and
- Providing a user-friendly dashboard so you can view all of your listings in one place.
Finally, our trusted guidance doesn’t end at onboarding. Our friendly Support Team is readily available to answer any questions you may have about your listings, so you can rest assured knowing your listings are accurate, updated, and compliant with each network’s guidelines.
Local Listings & Your Overall SEO Strategy
Now, local listings are just one of a few digital marketing tools that your agency can take advantage of at BrightFire to strengthen your overall local SEO efforts.
If your agency is interested in developing a robust SEO strategy and getting everything you need to start ranking higher in Google, you can take advantage of our Ultimate SEO Bundle.
In addition to getting the benefits we mentioned on the last slide pertaining to local listings, you’ll also get an amazing custom-designed agency website that’s optimized to rank in search engines, as well as attract and convert more insurance buyers online.
And because search engine rankings thrive on positive reviews, the Ultimate SEO Bundle also includes our Reviews & Reputation Management service, which helps your agency consistently generate new reviews, collect client feedback, and protect your online reputation.
The best part is that when you sign up for the Ultimate SEO Bundle, you’ll save on the standalone prices of each of those three services.
How to Get Started with BrightFire
You can sign up for our Local Listings Management service for only $50 per month.
If you’re interested in more leads from search engines, you can take advantage of the Ultimate SEO Bundle for $210 per month. As a reminder, that includes our Local Listings Management, Insurance Agency Websites, and Reviews & Reputation Management services, and saves you $50 per month off the standalone prices.
Another way to think about that is getting the Local Listings Management service for free when you sign up for the Ultimate SEO Bundle.
Our digital marketing services never have any setup fees or contracts, and we also include a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Onboarding for Local Listings Management typically consists of one 30-minute phone call, and we’ll handle the rest for you.
As a thank you for attending today, we’re offering a $50 promo to webinar attendees. You can receive a $50 account credit for signing up for our Local Listings Management or Ultimate SEO Bundle services. This promo ends next Wednesday, May 31st.
To get started with BrightFire, please schedule a call with us. On our website, you can submit your purchase, start a live chat with us, or schedule a call with a BrightFire expert.
Q&A on Local Listings for Insurance
This concludes our presentation on 6 Reasons Why Accurate Local Listings are a Must. Now we’ll head into our Q&A session, if anyone has any questions!
Should insurance agents have one listing for multiple locations?
Great question! No, you will want to have a separate listing for each physical location your agency has. This allows consumers to easily find the specific location closest to them, and it helps improve your local search rankings since your bio can better describe the location of that office. Another reason to have separate listings for each location is because your customer reviews will better reflect that particular location, which will improve the customer experience and create more realistic expectations of what consumers will experience when they visit that location.
If you have multiple offices and you’re interested in signing up for Local Listings Management, you will need to enroll in the service for each of your locations so our team can ensure all of them have their own set of managed listings.
How can I see and respond to all reviews from different listings?
In general, the owner of each listing should receive either email or push notifications on their smartphone whenever there is a new review of your agency. However, to better keep track of each listing, I would recommend creating a spreadsheet that lists and links to each listing. That way, you can check on them once a month or so and ensure all of your information is up to date and there weren’t any new reviews you missed.
And then of course, if you sign up for BrightFire’s Local Listings Management service, we’ll take care of the heavy lifting for you. So you’ll be able to sign into your listings dashboard and easily see all of your listings in one place. You’ll also be able to view any reviews you’ve received from the different listings in your account and respond to them from a single platform.
Well, I think that is all the time we have for questions today. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question and we’ll follow up with you individually after the webinar if we didn’t get to your question today.
But before we close, I’d like to remind everyone of our upcoming 20 Minute Marketing Webinar.
Upcoming 20 Minute Marketing Webinars
Our next webinar is in July and will cover Planning a Month of Social Media Content for Agents.
As a local independent agent, being present and active on social media can have a huge impact on your brand awareness and relationships with customers. But constantly creating relevant, insightful, and engaging content can often feel like an impossible feat.
Join us in this webinar as we offer an inside look into our social media experts’ process at BrightFire. We’ll offer practical tips to help you stay on top of your social media content and develop a robust social media marketing strategy.
This webinar will be held Thursday, July 27, at 2 PM Eastern or 11 AM Pacific.
You can reserve your spot at these webinars by visiting the webinars page on our website at brightfire.com/webinars.
So that does it for today! From me and the rest of the BrightFire team, we’d like to thank all of you for attending.
