How to Choose the Best Keywords for a Website

[lagunaitech]

I am working with an insurance agency that wants to target the below types of insurance in Dalton GA, Ringold GA, Chattanooga TN and and/or Georgia.

Home Insurance
Auto Insurance
Health Insurance
Life Insurance
Restaurant Insurance
Contractor Insurance

They are a new agency that doesn't have a website yet and only a small online marketing budget. Right now, I'm starting to work with them on their new site and want to make sure the on-site SEO works with the insurance/locations they want to target.

What I'm having trouble with is the volume of monthly searches and trying to find keywords that they could realistically get some traffic and leads from.

Most of the keywords I check with the Adwords tool are less than 50 exact match searches or just show a dash. The only keywords with a decent amount of exact searches are the main insurance types like "restaurant insurance" or "home insurance Georgia".

How can I get an idea of the number of leads and amount of traffic this site might get when most of the keywords searched for only a handful of times per month?

I can build the site to easily target all the above types of insurance in Dalton, GA, which has a population of about 33,000, but I don't know what kind of results this agency might expect if they were to rank in the top 3 spots.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or advice!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Kevin, you've received some great responses. Did any of them answer your question?

[Ant71]

Insurance is never going to be an easy one to compete on as competitors often have big budgets! I would be aiming at the longtail and local as people say. Decent blog posts are a good way of finding keywords that attract visitors. I use analytics to see what people are finding me by, check it out in moz tools to see if decent volume and then turn the keyword from the blog into its own page and then go all out on optimisation and links.

[MoosaHemani]

Pretty much agree with Chris as you cannot anything with location and the area they choose. I believe when local people search for more clients they usually have to use inbound marketing channels like hosting an event, t-shirts, community and more...

I believe you should try to invest some budge on PPC to get an idea of how much leads they should expect each month and to increase the number of leads probably inbound marketing methods can be a great idea!

[ProjectLabs]

The data that the Google Adwords tool is not very accurate, it is more of a rough estimate. If you wanted to better data you might consider buying Adwords Ads for those keywords for a limited time like a month. Then you could look at the number of impressions for your ads to get a better sense of how many people are searching for those keyword phrases.

[NakulGoyal]

I completely agree with Chris's comments. You can do well with Local Search. It again depends on the competition. There are always agents out there. So I would suggest you get started with your website and initiate your Local SEO ASAP, specially GetListed.org

[Chris.Menke]

1.) Before  sure to deal with Local Search to it's fullest extent.

2.) What other options do they have but to target place names combined with types of insurance?  I mean, you can't do anything about where they're located, right?  They made that decision.  All you can do is drive as much traffic as is looking for them to their site. In a smaller market, it is what it is and you'll find out what that is when you get there.

The crux of the matter often boils down to how much are they willing to pay you to get the traffic that' available to them.  Less available traffic usually means less competition. Less competition usually means its easier to reach the top of the search results. The easier it is to reach the top of the search results, the less time you have to spend with them as a client.  So, do you charge them for your time, do you charge them for the value you bring them, or do you charge them based on the value they believe your going to bring them?