Paste an insurance agency's web address into Google's Keyword Planner and give it a minute. The list that comes back looks like a gold mine: thousands of ideas, sorted by volume. Then you read it closely. On a captive agent's site, most of the ideas carry the carrier's name. On an independent's, carrier names are still scattered through the list.
Carrier names are the biggest insurance searches in the country, and almost none of them belong in an agency's keyword list. Nationally, the largest are people logging in, calling and paying bills. They already have a policy, a password and a bill due.
This chapter covers how we build an agency's first keyword list: see who's bidding in your market, pull ideas from rival agencies' websites and your own, sort what comes back into tight groups by line, and keep carrier names, job hunters and price-only shoppers out of the launch.
"Progressive Login" Draws 823,000 Searches a Month. Those Are Customers Paying Bills, Not Shoppers.
Here is what Keyword Planner reports for a few carrier searches across the US, as average monthly searches:
- "progressive login": 823,000
- "state farm login": 550,000
- "geico login": 368,000
- "geico phone number": 301,000
- "state farm pay bill": 33,100
- "geico claims": 33,100
Add up the carrier names on their own and the gap is enormous. "GEICO" alone draws about 2.24 million searches a month and "Progressive insurance" about a million, while "insurance agency" draws 60,500. That's roughly 50 to 1.
Google's trademark policy doesn't stop you from bidding on a carrier's name as a keyword. Intent does. A driver searching for a carrier's login page wants to log in, and a click on your ad is a dollar spent interrupting them. Even when the searcher is shopping, they've named the company they want to buy from.
Some carrier searches do ask for an agent. "State farm agent near me" pulls 14,800 a month nationwide, and every one of those people asked for State Farm by name. For an independent agency, that's not a lead that's looking for you. For a State Farm agent, it's the most valuable search in the market.
Captive agents face a different question, because the carrier's name is also on their own door. That depends on the carrier's rules as much as on Google's, and Chapter 15 covers it.
Google's Ad Preview Tool Shows Who Bids in Your Town Without Costing a Rival a Click.
Before building a list, look at the auction you're entering. In your account's tools, the Ad preview and diagnosis page displays the live results for any search you enter. Google says it won't add to your impressions. Run your most important searches there for your own town. Don't search them in your browser and click a rival's ad to look around. That spends their money and teaches you nothing the tool can't show.
The Ads Transparency Center adds a second view: it lists the ads an advertiser has run. When we checked, the gap was stark. In our example market, the Cleveland-Akron area, only 8 of the 129 local agency websites we looked up had run Search ads in the past 90 days. Nationally, in the same 90 days, 12 of 15 carriers had, and so had 9 of 16 lead sellers and comparison sites.
Check more than the city where your office sits. An agency licensed across a metro area writes business in the suburbs too, and the ads that show can change from place to place.
That's your real competition on the big quote searches: national brands and lead sellers, with a handful of local agencies. It's also why your list should lean on the searches they don't care about, starting with your town, your lines and your agency's name.
Keyword Planner Reads a Rival Agency's Site and Hands Back Carrier Names and Job Hunters Along With the Buyers.
Keyword Planner can read any website and suggest the searches it fits. Set the location to your own market first, or the volumes are national. Then give it a well-built competitor's site.
These are the results from the sites we profiled around Cleveland and Akron, our example market:
- An independent agency's site returned 1,632 ideas. About 14% carried a carrier's name, and 29 were job or licensing searches, such as how to become an insurance agent.
- Two State Farm agents' sites returned lists dominated by the brand: 94% of one list and 73% of the other carried a carrier name, mostly "state farm."
So the useful part of a competitor-seeded list is the middle: line searches with a place or a need attached, like home insurance near you, renters insurance, business insurance, commercial auto. The carrier names, the job hunters and the definitions get set aside.
Each idea comes with a top-of-page bid range. Google calculates that range from earlier auctions. In our experience, what you actually pay per click usually falls within about 30% above or below it. Use it to compare searches with each other, not as a price quote.
Your Own Website Tells Keyword Planner What You Sell. One Agency's Thin Site Returned 13 Ideas.
Then feed Keyword Planner your own website. It's the closest thing to seeing your site through Google's eyes. If the ideas match the lines you sell, your pages are doing their job. If they don't, Google doesn't understand your site either.
One independent agency in our sample gave Keyword Planner almost nothing to read. Its site returned 13 ideas in total, most of them with about ten searches a month. Agency sites built from line pages, the kind Chapter 4 recommends, return far more, because each page tells Google about one line. Pages that name the towns you serve and the kinds of customers you insure, contractors, landlords, young drivers, add local and specific ideas the home page never could.
"Cheap Car Insurance" Draws 246,000 Searches and Top Bids Near $105. Price Shoppers Are a Later Test, Not a Launch Keyword.
Now sort what's left into ad groups, one line at a time, about five or six closely related keywords in each. A sketch for a personal-lines agency:
- Auto: car insurance quotes near me, auto insurance agent near me, car insurance quote plus your town.
- Home: homeowners insurance quote, home insurance agent near me.
- Renters: renters insurance quote, renters insurance near me.
- Commercial: one group per product. US monthly searches give a sense of scale: "business insurance" 49,500, "general liability insurance" 27,100, "workers compensation insurance" 27,100, "commercial auto insurance" 22,200. Each deserves its own group and its own page.
- Brand: your agency name and your producers' names, in a campaign of its own.
Medicare and health keywords wait. Google requires certification before an agency can advertise health insurance, and Chapter 14 covers how to get it.
Then cut. At launch, leave out:
- "Cheap" and "free" searches. Price-shopping searches are huge: "cheap car insurance" alone pulls 246,000 a month, and its top-of-page estimate climbs to $104.82. Some of those searchers will buy, but they've said the thing they care about most is price, and carriers built to sell on price bid hard for them. Test them later.
- Job searches. "Insurance agent jobs" and "how to get insurance license" come from people who want to work at an agency, not buy from one.
- Questions and definitions, like "what is umbrella insurance." Chapter 2 explains why these belong to your website first.
- Carrier and rival agency names, covered above and below.
Launch these groups in exact match only, inside the Isolation campaign (our name for it): the searches you've chosen, at bids you set by hand. Chapter 6 covers when broad match joins.
Rival Agency and Carrier Names Become Negatives, and the Negative List Never Stops Growing Once Broad Match Starts.
Everything you cut becomes a negative keyword, so your ads don't show for it even by accident. Competitor names go first: carriers you don't sell, and rival agencies that turn up in your research. Running ads on a competitor's name is a separate decision, made deliberately in a campaign of its own, if you ever make it. For most agencies, that's a big if.
At launch, with exact match only, the list stays short. That changes once the broad match campaign we call Exploration switches on, with its bidding aimed at the client cost Isolation has already proven. It doesn't start on a date. Its trigger is volume, not the calendar: roughly 30 quality conversions a month. That usually takes two or three months; larger books get there sooner.
Broad match exists to find wordings you'd never think to list. Some will be carrier logins, claim lines and hiring searches you haven't blocked yet. In that first month, start each morning in the search terms report and block anything that shouldn't have cost you a click. After that, once a week. Nobody ever finishes a negative list.
Next: "Car Insurance for New Drivers" Gets 4,400 Searches a Month. Broad Match Finds It and the Versions You Never Listed.
The launch list is short on purpose: a few dozen exact searches per line that you know are buyers. Chapter 6 covers the much larger set of searches nobody lists in advance, and how broad match finds them once the account is ready. Earlier chapters cover tracking, where the shoppers are, what a client is worth and a page for every line. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
If you'd rather have the research and the negative list handled for you, that's part of our Google Ads management. Doing it yourself? Put your own site into Keyword Planner and see how many of the first 50 suggestions are a carrier's name.
