Captive insurance carriers have a significant competitive advantage - their proximity to millions of potential buyers - yet fail to fully optimize for local search opportunities.
"The largest insurance carriers in the country spend billions of dollars to generate brand awareness, but most miss the mark in the last mile, when consumers are making decisions about which insurance carrier to work with.” Nick Hedges, CEO of MomentFeed
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (PRWEB) June 24, 2020
MomentFeed, the leading provider of Proximity Search Optimization, today published its “Insurance Proximity Search Optimization Report Card.” The study evaluated how effective the largest captive insurance agents are at optimizing for proximity-based organic search results. The study revealed that captive insurance carriers are missing out on a massive opportunity to generate tens of millions of exclusive local leads for their agents by optimizing for organic search results based on their proximity to a potential buyer.
"The largest insurance carriers in the country spend billions of dollars to generate brand awareness and stand out from the crowd," said Nick Hedges, CEO of MomentFeed. “However, our latest research reveals that captive insurance carriers miss the mark in the last mile, when consumers are making decisions about which insurance carrier to work with. Captive carriers could dominate in proximity search with an army of agents dispersed across the country, but most fail to enact strong, comprehensive Proximity Search Optimization strategies.”
Proximity Search Optimization (PSO) is the process by which multi-location brands seek to improve their rank on search engines that use the user’s location to suggest nearby businesses in response to keywords such as ‘car insurance.’ Most notably, brands seek to show up in the Google 3-Pack, the first thing most consumers see when performing searches.
HOW CAPTIVE INSURANCE CARRIERS PERFORM AGAINST KEY PSO SIGNALS
- Local captive insurance agents did a poor job of responding to their customers' ratings and reviews – All but two insurance carriers replied to less than 50% of their reviews. In comparison, successful MomentFeed clients reply to 88% or more of their reviews, with an average response time of 7 hours. While a greater than 80% responsiveness rate may seem daunting, platforms that allow users to view and respond to reviews from all networks in one place can significantly simplify the process.
- All but one insurance carrier received a below average grade in local social, representing a significant opportunity – The average local insurance carrier posted on local social pages 90 times over the course of the 365 days measured. This fell below MomentFeed’s recommended levels of at least 110-122 per year - equating to 9-10 posts monthly. In addition, including a keyword in a post is an easy way to optimize a local agent's listing for proximity search free of charge, yet only 30% of insurance carriers used a keyword in a post.
- Majority of listing data is inaccurate for insurance carriers – Alarmingly, the average local insurance carrier was found to have inaccuracies on 55% of their data, with 12% coming from major inaccuracies and the other 43% from minor ones. Listing accuracy refers to the degree that a location’s data is accurate and consistent across the internet and is widely considered the most important controllable factor in proximity search rank.
- Some room for improvement on local agent pages – On-page signals refer to the characteristics of a location’s webpage that help search engines and consumers use the site. Google grades pages in three main categories - accessibility (ability of the page to be operated by literally anyone), best practices (overall code of health - security, page load time, load without errors, etc.), and SEO (factors that help search engines find and understand the page). The average performance for the captive insurance carriers included in this report across accessibility, best practices, and SEO was 88%, 78%, and 93% respectively, with the average overall grade coming in at 87%.
- Carriers perform best on location profile completeness, although there is still room for improvement – While most carriers did a decent job of maintaining profile completeness, with all but 3% to 15% of applicable fields containing information, even the slightest margin of error seems to knock carriers out of the Google 3-Pack. Both of the carriers who performed poorly in this category saw a significant drop off in the number of locations appearing in the Google 3-Pack.
"The lesson in this study for captive insurance carriers is that there's a huge untapped opportunity to improve how frequently local agents show up when buyers are searching," said Hedges. "There are significant financial gains in store for the firms that get it right."
ABOUT THE DATA
For its “Insurance Proximity Search Optimization Report Card,” MomentFeed analyzed the strength and comprehensiveness of the proximity search strategies for the six largest U.S. captive insurance carriers, based on the number of agents. MomentFeed identified 50 locations per insurance carrier representing a variety of geographies, city/town sizes, urban densities, and income levels, with extra sampling done around the geographic focuses of each company. Whenever possible, areas were sampled where each insurance carrier had a location within the same zip code. MomentFeed’s platform then matched locations to their corresponding network listings across Facebook, Google, and Yelp. Finally, data on each of the five controllable PSO factors was collected using a combination of automated tools and manual analysis.
The full report is available for download on MomentFeed’s website. Individual reports of the companies studied are available to representatives of those companies by request.
ABOUT MOMENTFEED
MomentFeed is the leading Proximity Search Optimization platform trusted by many of the largest multi-location brands in the restaurant, retail, automotive, hospitality, and financial services industries. Proximity Search Optimization is gaining significant interest from CMOs of multi-location, national brands and franchises as a way to show up locally, at the precise moment a customer has a need. MomentFeed makes it possible for national brands to execute hyperlocal marketing campaigns at scale – driving local awareness, in-store traffic, and more calls for appointments and orders.
Founded in 2010, MomentFeed is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. An Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Privately Held Company, it was also named a Comparably Best Company.
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