Driving insurance no car

If you haven't done it already, now would be a great time to take a fresh look - or even a first look - at how data feeds can reinvigorate your online marketing strategy and prepare your business for an undeniable shift in the search space. Structured data feeds are the silent drivers behind a new search experience centered around more conversational, localized and personalized search engagements. Engines are moving away from the "traditional" customer journey, where users search for a keyword, sort through text PPC search results and click onto a new website. Instead, structured data feeds front-load the search engine results pages (SERPs) with user-rich information, creating a new search experience for more personalized, localized and actionable results. Data feed = information bus Feeds, simply put, are mechanisms of structured data that enable either a platform or a person to take action. Some of the original uses of feeds were as mechanisms to automate the pulling of information … [Read more...] about How data feeds are driving new search experiences

I’m old enough to remember a late 70’s TV commercial for investment firm Smith Barney, featuring veteran actor John Houseman. Houseman, reincarnating his iconic role as the crusty Professor Kingsfield from the movie The Paper Chase, admonishes the viewers, bellowing that “good investments don’t walk up, bite you on the bottom, and say, ‘we’re here.'” He closed his mini-lecture with the tag line from the ad series: “Smith Barney, they make money the old fashioned way: they earn it.” With the advent of Google’s Penguin updates and manual link penalties, earning links (instead of buying or manipulating them) is more the new-fashioned than old-fashioned way. At SMX West 2015 in San Jose, three experts at creating and promoting content showed how they did so in ways that drove high quality links to the sites of their employers or clients. As a result, the search engine power of those sites rose dramatically. The panel was made up … [Read more...] about Content Marketing & Promotion To Drive Quality Links: Up Close @SMX West

For a long time in-car concierge services such as GM’s OnStar were a “nice to have” but not mainstream. That’s largely because the value of the services was outweighed by the cost for most people. But now, with the relatively recent addition of LTE, they’re poised for broader adoption. All the major car makers are adding connectivity to their cars at varying rates. And yesterday, ahead of CES in Las Vegas, GM announced a range of new OnStar 4G LTE services. These include maintenance alerts, driver assessment (for improved driving or better insurance rates) and “AtYourService.” This latter service is the one relevant to publishers and marketers. According to GM: AtYourService will roll out in the U.S. and Canada, where OnStar annually receives more than 35 million requests for directions and supports more than 53 million mobile app interactions. Building on these direct connections and adding more daily relevance for subscribers, OnStar has … [Read more...] about GM Turning Its Cars Into Rolling (Local) Search Engines

Successful SEO strategies demand differentiation. In today’s column, I am going to outline a seven-step process for figuring out how to differentiate your website. You may be struggling with how to do this because your product may be boring, and your space is crowded. So, I am going to start by taking a look at the auto insurance industry for inspiration. Some Auto Insurance Examples GEICO was the first auto insurance company to make a big splash by promoting their products with humor with its famous GEICO gecko. The campaign was extremely successful, and the message was very simple: “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance.” This approach helped it build a major national brand. Humor was the vehicle for getting consumer attention, but the critical element was the simple and compelling value proposition for their product. GEICO has continued to push the envelope in many ways. Its “even a caveman can do it” commercials deliver the message that … [Read more...] about 6 Things To Learn About Differentiation From The Auto Insurance Industry

Insurance-related keywords are the source of 24% of Google’s AdWords revenue, with the highest CPC coming in at a whopping $54.91, according to a study by search marketing company WordStream. The company used its own keyword database and the Google Keyword Tool to come up with the top 10,000 most expensive English-language keywords over a 90-day period. Examples of key phrases in the Insurance category included “buy car insurance online” and “auto insurance price quotes.” Next in line came the Loans category, commanding 12.8% of revenue with CPCs as high as $44.28. Typical keywords in Loans include “consolidate graduate student loans,” and “fixed home equity loan rates.” Third was the “Mortgage” category, which, one supposes, could have been put together with Loans. As its own category, Mortgages represented 9% of revenue, with the highest CPM coming in at $47.12. Rounding out the top 10 categories, in order of … [Read more...] about Insurance, Loan-Related Keywords Are Google’s Cash Cows