I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
-
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location.
I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance.
What would your recommendation be?
-
I would have to agree. If you keep to a single domain, you don't have to spread your budget and effort out between other domains. Any piece of content you create can then, possibly, influence your entire domain.
-
Highly agree with Matt! Creating many other websites will divide your efforts and you might not be able to achieve what you can within a single website.
When all the linking will be under one domain the domain authority as a whole will increase, which will help the sub pages to come up from the desired key phrases.
When you will be working on the promotion and branding side, it will help you get tons of words out and which help you get natural links from verity of websites to single domain and branding will go high (online and offline)
Talking from my experience, Insurance in not at all an easy industry so even making separate websites will require lots and lots of work so my idea is to have sub pages under one domain so that all your efforts points to one domain and sub pages can win the business accordingly.
-
I agree with Matt. Build great content and Authority on one domain name and focus your strength and efforts there. Don't divide them too much. That way all the efforts you do within this site, helps and complements each and every page on the website. Works better long term.
-
I would probably recommend not sites, but landing pages.
yourinsurancesite.com/business
This way you keep the bulk of the SEO on one domain (as opposed to subdomains or niche site domains). You also stay with one login for all edits, etc. which helps streamline. Then, you can easily run campaigns to these main subfolders and track analytics per type of ins. more accurately.
I would say subfolders per agency would be the easiest and most logical SEO solution. There will be situations where this isn't necessarily the best (very big companies can usually afford to do proper SEO more than one domain and then having more domains can benefit you in the long run.) But for most insurance agencies and this type of sub-agency, I would think subfolders would be best. One of my best friends runs his own State Farm agency and they run it similarly.
http://www.statefarm.com/ agent/US/STATE/TOWN/AGENT-NAME-UID
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Troubled QA Platform - Site Map vs Site Structure
I'm running a Q&A forum that was built prioritizing UX over SEO. This decision has cause a bit of a headache as we're 6 months into the project with 2278 Q&A pages with extremely minimal traffic coming from search engines. The structure has the following hiccups: A. The category navigation from the main Q&A page is entirely javascript and only navigable by users. B. We identify Google bots and send them to another version of the Q&A platform w/o javascript. Category links don't exist in this google bot version of the main Q&A page. On this Google version of the main Q&A page, the Pinterest-like tiles displaying individual Q&As are capped at 10. This means that the only way google bot can identify link juice being passed down to individual QAs (after we've directed them to this page) is through 10 random Q&As. C. All 2278 of the QAs are currently indexed in search. They are just indexed very very poorly in SERPs. My personal assumption, is that Google can't pass link juice to any of the Q&As (poor SERP) but registers them from the site map so it gets included in Google's index. My dilemma has me struggling between two different decisions: 1. Update the navigation in the header to remove the javascript and fundamentally change the look and feel of the Q&A platform. This will allow Google bot to navigate through Expert category links to pass link juice to all Q&As. or 2. Update the redirected main Q&A page to include hard coded category links with 100s of hard coded Q&As under each category page. Make it similar, ugly, flat and efficient for the crawling bots. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need to find a solution as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
Creating 20+ websites with links back to central site
Hey guys, A client of ours owns an IT company with 20+ locations across the UK. He is looking for a solution to provide each of their 20+ locations with a page or website that they can manage themselves that links directly back to the main site. His idea is to create 20+ one or two page websites that could all link back to the main central site - aiding the possibility of ranking well for locally-based terms. At the moment, we have a page for each of the 20+ locations on the main site. However, the client wants to give his franchisees complete control over their web presence. Would a setup like this work? Would it be logical to have 20+ websites (likely to follow a very similar format) all pointing to one central website? Would we have to "no-follow" links back to main site in order to show we aren't trying to manipulate page rank? Would creating sub folders on the main site be a better option for each of the 20+ locations? Any feedback appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
Site speed tests
In webmaster tools my site is showing that it is taking longer and longer to load, and it has now doubled. Is there a way to check which pages are the problem? The site is quite large so I can't check them one at a time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How best to structure wordpress site.
I need help on how to structure my wordpress site to avoid duplicate content issues. Basically I have a main category page for each of my targeted keywords (about 12). From each of those though I want to create a category for each county in the uk and then about 15 towns within each county. This means I'm creating a LOT of categories. Eg: /plumbers/lincolnshire/lincoln x 15 other counties and towns /local-plumbers/cambridgeshire/cambridge x 15 other counties and towns (I have about 12 main keywords I'm going after) I'm basically creating a category for every town in the UK going after long tail keywords. What is the best way to manage this in wordpress? Advice from another question I posted on here is to write a unique category description for each one as the posts in each category are almost identical. The other problem here is I'm ending up with hundreds of links on a page. (They can't all be seen by the user as I'm using a drop down menu plugin). Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
SEO Consultant for site audit
Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0