Helping customers and prospects find your Web site

Rough Notes, Apr 2001 by Ashenhurst, John

SOUND INTERNET SOLUTIONS

Some practical steps to make your Web site more visible

In the brick and mortar, physical world, your customers can find their way to you via the .telephone, mails, or a face-to-face visit. If they've misplaced your business card or don't have agency correspondence in front of them, they can go to the telephone directory white pages or Yellow Pages and find your address, phone number, and perhaps some information about your agency. And in the traditional world, suspects can find you via referrals, the Yellow Pages, advertising, or by noticing your office on Main Street.

Traditional, physical world search mechanisms are well understood and ingrained into our culture. But what if you want customers and prospects to find your Web site? What do you do then? Traditional search mechanisms won't work-at least as currently constituted. In this column III outline the problems the Internet presents, industry-wide action that could address those problems, and then make specific suggestions for what you can do to optimize the chances that your customers and prospects will find your Web site.

The Web is worldwide

Traditional search mechanisms, such as the phone book, assume a geographically bounded world. The Web is not bounded. Increasingly it includes the whole world. Traditional search mechanisms are generally organized alphabetically, by topic, or by neighborhood. The Web is chaotic and on its own has no organizing principal. Customers and prospects in the physical world can follow a few well-traveled paths to find you. The Internet provides no universally used and successful search mechanisms. From the point of view of finding an independent agent, the Internet is a mess. The consumer suspect has no simple, dependable way to find your site. And you have no easy, reliable way to make your site visible among the millions.

The Allstate agent does not face the problems an independent agent faces. A consumer interested in finding an Allstate agent through the Internet need only go to the Allstate Web site. Allstate has been building a national brand for more than 50 years, and the value of the brand transfers well to the Internet.

Don't independent agents have a national brand as well, the IIAA, and can't consumers go to the association's Web site to find links to local agency Web sites? In the halcyon days of Raymond Burr ads, the IIAA probably had a recognizable brand, but it's less obvious today. How many consumers would think to look at www.independentagent.com to find links to agency Web sites? My guess is very few. And even if a consumer gets to the IIAA site somehow, the IIAA agency site finder is next to useless.

The IIAA agency finder has four serious shortcomings. It has virtually no brand recognition, the database is incomplete and incorrect, the process for retrieving only agencies with Web sites is broken, and no mapping/driving instructions are included. Try linking from the IIAA site to your agency Web site. Chances are good you can't. Though the IIAA provides many valuable services to its agency member, some through the Internet, making it easy for consumers to find agency Web sites isn't one of them.

What about company Web site agency finders? Can't consumers make use of them? Probably not. Most of the companies that agencies partner with have little brand recognition. It would be unlikely that consumers would ever go to the company site in the first place. And even if they did, probably fewer than half the company sites provide links to their agency sites. A few independent agency companies have some national brand recognition, but they may also be trying to sell insurance direct. Their Web sites focus more on selling insurance than on promoting their agencies and their sites.

Insurance portals such as InsWeb may have significant brand recognition-that is, consumers might be likely to go there to get insurance information, but the portals have their own ax to grind, and it isn't to simply send consumers to agency Web sites.

Another approach a consumer might take in finding an agency Web site is to use online Yellow Pages supplied through a general-purpose portal such as Yahoo! Several different online Yellow Pages services exist to supply portals and none, as far as I know, will list an agency Web site link for free. The agency must pay a subscription fee tied to the geographic and business classification areas the agency is to be listed in. Few agencies know about the online Yellow Page extensions or have chosen to do anything about it.

Finally, a consumer might just do a general search, for instance: "concord independent agency" through Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, or any other general search mechanism. But the results are likely to be completely useless.

As it stands today, the consumer has no easy path to finding independent agency Web sites. The national and state associations don't appear to be the answer. Even if companies are well intentioned about linking to their agents' sites, they generally are as invisible as their agencies. Insurance portals aren't the answer; they have their own agenda. Online Yellow Pages don't automatically list agency Web sites. General searching doesn't work. What to do?