In the fall of 2021, I created a piece of content that soared to the top of Google’s search results in less than six weeks. It outperformed mega-publishers and companies with big budgets and teams of marketing professionals in an industry that spends billions of dollars annually to attract the same target audience. So, what made my effort so successful?
Here’s how I did it…
The Context
Access to insurance coverage is a problem many Americans know all too well and one that many companies are trying to solve by using a deep knowledge of the insurance sector and innovative technology to make coverage easier and more accessible.
A former client developed a solution for people interested in assessing their financial resilience and receiving recommendations on ways to close their coverage gaps. The solution provided community members access to a mix of financial and insurance products to protect against future financial setbacks. One of these insurance products was accident insurance.
In a crowded industry notorious for spending billions upon billions of dollars yearly to connect with prospective customers, standing out from competitors meant providing a more compelling offer and establishing expertise, authority, and trust — a challenging task for a not-yet-known brand in the FinTech space.
That’s where I came in.
The Business Problem: Unknown Brand and Low Visibility in a Highly Saturated Market
The goal was to launch a blog and use it as an awareness and engagement tool. The client wanted to gain visibility with consumers actively searching for ways to improve their financial resilience and position their brand as a trusted resource.
In addition, they hoped to grow their membership base while surfacing affordable, innovative insurance products, like accident insurance, with members that could benefit from the type of coverage the product offered.
With this intent in mind, the client faced two key challenges:
- Unknown brand and low visibility: The brand launched in June of 2021. With a new online presence that included a website, blog, and social media, the company had a lot of work to do to establish the brand’s EAT (expertise, authority, and trust). Considering the average time for websites to rank on Google through SEO techniques is about three to six months, we knew this was a long-term strategy.
- Saturated market: Typing “insurance coverage” into Google generates more than 4.2 billion results. If you search “accident insurance,” Google returns over 439 million results. This makes it near impossible for a new company with no domain authority to organically rank against well-known insurance providers, agencies, online marketplaces like Policygenius, and industry mega-publishers like NerdWallet. The brand would be competing for visibility on Google, which was dominated by well-established brands engaged in fierce competition.
The Strategy: Increase Brand Visibility and Target Low-Difficulty, Highly Relevant Terms To Drive Organic Traffic To The Site
The first step was establishing a blog as the hub of the content marketing program. I crafted a content plan designed to publish SEO-driven articles every week. I targeted low-difficulty, highly relevant terms around the broader theme of financial resilience to start driving organic traffic to the blog and establish the client’s online presence.
Next, I analyzed search trends around lower-funnel, conversion-focused product-based content that targeted lower-volume, long-tail keywords.
These two steps struck a balance between higher volume but lower difficulty keywords related to financial resilience and long-tail, lower volume keywords related to products and purchase intent.
To bring this to light, I identified “is accident insurance worth it” as one such opportunity with an average monthly search volume of 1,300 and a keyword difficulty of 27/100. I also noticed a spike in volume that occurred every November.
To leverage this insight, I published an article on September 28, 2021, with the title, you guessed it, “Is Accident Insurance Worth it?”
Was my strategy successful?
The Result: Google Ranked The Article #4 In 6 Weeks
The result of my strategy was successful and continues to pay dividends.
A mere six weeks after publishing, you can see Google crawled, indexed, and started ranking the article.
Even more exciting was that the article ranked #4 of over 112 million results, outperforming content from major publishers and well-established marketplaces like eHealthInsurance and Policygenius.
What differentiated my client’s article from the other results? Two things:
- Long-form content: When I researched the topic and existing content, I noticed most results were short-form (500-800 words). This was an opportunity to provide a much more thorough and in-depth answer to the question, so the article I created was long-form with over 1,100 words.
- Video content: I also noticed most of the results were text-only. To make my client’s article more engaging, I created and embedded a video summarizing the article’s points. This made the article stand out.
In a relatively short period, “Is Accident Insurance Worth It” became the top page on my client’s site, generating significantly more impressions than any other page including the home page.
What If You Want Results Like This Too?
Unlike paid advertising, where the content disappears when you stop paying for it, your organic content remains—passively sending traffic to your site perpetually. To this day, this one blog post continues to rank on the first page of Google, providing visibility for the brand and a path to purchase.
If you’d like to find out what’s possible for your business, schedule a 30-minute consultation to learn more.