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 I'll 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, AskJeeves, 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?
A commonsense proposal
Today the consumer faces a fragmented and frustrating experience when trying to find independent agency Web sites. The industry should cooperate to provide a single, nationally branded path that consumers can use to find agents or companies.
Who should sponsor the national agency finder? How could it be funded? Who would design and implement it? What's the first step?
Clearly nothing will happen until enough agents see the potential value of Web sites for marketing, sales, and service--and understand that the potential will be realized only when consumers can easily and reliably find the sites--something not possible today. In other words, the need for a national agency Web site search function needs to emerge as an industry issue.
In the February issue of Rough Notes, AMS User Group President Bev Coats authored an article titled "Pulling Together" in which she described the formation of AUGIE (ACORD User Group Information Exchange)--reminiscent of CUGL (Congress of User Group Leaders) of a decade ago. The group plans to meet in April to focus on coactive planning, XML standards, and the emergence of ASPs. I respectfully encourage AUGIE to include the national search function issue in the agenda for its upcoming meeting.
It's fine to focus on interface and in-agency automation. They are important topics. But so is the relation of the industry to its customers and their needs. I'm concerned that the industry tradition of focusing on internal industry issues (in-facing concerns) rather than customers' interests (out-facing concerns) will result in the loss of a great opportunity.
Independent agents are at a fork in the road. They can continue to live in the old world and find themselves disintermediated by new players who make effective use of the Internet. Or they can extend their offices into the Internet, provide rich out-facing services, and strongly re-intermediate themselves. But Internet success depends in part on being found by your customers and prospects and that's a problem today.
What can you do on your own?
Though you can encourage your user group, your association, and your companies to create a national agency Web site search function, it wouldn't be wise to depend on its appearing anytime soon. But you can take some simple steps to improve the likeliness that your site will be found by the people who are (perhaps unknowingly) looking for it.
1) Publicize your site.
Include inserts in all your mailings telling your customers about your Web site, its advantages, and how to find it. Make certain all your stationery and business cards contain your Web site address. Your (paper) Yellow Pages ad and all other advertising should include your Web site address. Have your CSRs make it a practice to let customers know about your site and ways they can use the site to serve themselves. A one-time announcement about your site won't do the trick. Every form of communication, from now on, should remind and inform about your Web site.
2) Investigate reciprocal links.
Check with your community and Chamber of Commerce Web sites about being listed--including a Web site link and provide reciprocal links from your site. Look into reciprocal links with attorneys, accountants, realtors, and other businesses that create transactions that may require an insurance element. Think about how consumers and businesses relocating to your area would try to use the Web to find an agency and position yourself on sites relevant to relocation.
3) Insist on company and association agency finders.
Make certain that all your companies and your associations provide complete agency finders and that your agency is included--with complete and accurate information. The agency finders should include city-state and ZIP code searches and perhaps area code searches as well. Links to your Web site and general e-mail should be included. Your company and association partners owe it to you to do an effective referral job--but they might not figure that out on their own. They may need your encouragement.
4) Look into online Yellow Pages.
Though online Yellow Pages Web site links may cost you a small monthly fee, look into them as a possible way of directing suspects to your site. You may want to investigate the most popular portals first--for instance, AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN. Go to their Yellow Pages area and check on their services for enhanced Yellow Pages listings.
5) Be aware of search engine positioning.
Indexing spiders search the Web continuously indexing information in Web pages. Web searches use the indexes to find Web pages that match keyed-in search criteria. Today, for the most part, indexing spiders have to be invited to your site to do their work. That means you have to register your home page with the search engine. Some search engines index the visible text of your pages. Other may focus on hidden text (keyword and description fields) to find words to index. Search engines drop pages at various intervals so you need to re-register every few months. Presumably your Web master has taken care of the registration and page content issues--but you might want to confirm that. By the way, Yahoo! now charges businesses a fee to be registered. I'm not certain that very many people successfully use search engines to find insurance agents so it's not clear how elaborate an effort is justified--unless you market special or unusual insurance products.
6) Make your Web address simple.
If you don't already have a Web site address reserved or in use, you ought to reserve one right away. You're competing with the whole world and it's reserving names at a frantic pace. Generally speaking using your agency name as a Web address is a good idea--unless it is too long or already reserved by someone else. Your address should be something people can easily remember and spell.
And finally ...
Publishing a Web site and all the activities associated with it isn't a one-time event. It's a continuing process. You need to establish a procedure for regularly checking that what you've put in place persists and is still relevant. Pretend you're a personal or commercial lines suspect and then try to find your agency Web site. Can you? If not, what can you change to improve the likelihood?
Via e-mail or in person, tell your companies, associations, and user groups how important you think it is for the industry to create a national independent agency Web site search function. Right now there is no such facility. There are bits and pieces but many are badly broken. You, other independent agents, and your companies are at a distinct disadvantage compared with the captive companies and big brands. Technically it would be easy to fix. It's not rocket science. All that's needed is the shared will. Contribute yours. *
The author
John Ashenhurst is president of Sound Internet Strategy, and publisher of "Sounding Line," a monthly newsletter that focuses on insurance and the Internet. Ashenhurst has created and written about insurance technology since 1975. For more information, visit the "Sounding Line" Web site (www.soundingline.com).