SEO Cheat-Sheet

Hi all,

I am an OLD head, as you can see, my profile was created back in 2009. I used to make money with affiliate marketing. Fun days, fun stuff.

Well, I'm back. After I graduated college I stumbled into insurance and have been here ever since.

Long story, short; I tried to Google white hat SEO cheat sheets and sort of brush up on my SEO knowledge and it is quite a bit different than 15 years ago, that's forsure. In most of the "cheat sheets" it either gives me information I already know, or half baked information which then wants me to buy their eBook for the other half, or a service (subscription usually).

I own an insurance agency and I'm doing a complete rebrand to something that's more of a personal professional website. It will be something like "insuranceby(name).com)." I want to know what the best SEO practices are for building a website. There are a lot of insurance agencies where I'm at, but nearly none of them leverage SEO or post blogs or leverage social medias, etc. I have about 3,000 article / blog ideas with about 200 already written out. This is a LOCAL agency, so I want to be topped rank in the town (and county) that I live in (both with the same name). Preferably for Michigan as a whole but at least my town.

In the little bit of research I have done I have concluded that in order for me to (eventually) rank high, please critique me.

1. Ditch WP, use a headless CMS, because it's simpler and loads faster.
1.5 Mobile-friendly (duh)
2. Have a page for each service (type of insurance) that I offer. IE, if I sell auto insurance, have a page specifically for auto insurance with a brief explanation.

1. Each with a CTA at the bottom for quotes.
2. Having 2 article sections, one that has the top 5 "Most Popular" and "Newest" articles. I was also thinking about having a top 5 "Editor's Choice" (IE, articles I personally think are important / applicable.)

3. Make my home page redirect to "website.com/city" - Does Google still like to see the product name and place in the URL?
4. Use a CDN - incredibly cheap where I live, and from what I understand Google does like smooth, FAST running websites (see #1).
5. Organic link building - join the Chamber, Rotary, etc. Get my name associated with (location) and insurance from "quality" websites.

1. I was reviewing some of those 301 redirect back link services over in the market place. Would something like that be appropriate? What's the chance my site gets blacklisted?

6. Blog would be used to drive a lot of state specific questions about insurance, as licensure is done by state. My core business is local / state-regional, but I also don't want to shut out the rest of the state. Especially when a good chunk of the blogs would be state, not local or regional specific.

7. Leverage GMB - there's a whole conversation here but it sounds like they essentially want all reviews (yelp), questions (quora), events (eventbrite), blogs (wordpress) all into GMB.

8. Leverage Reddit - have brief or summarized versions of my article on my subreddit (r/michiganinsurance). While not direct SEO because of no-follow, I can't tell you how many times I've searched something such as "Best computer deals 2024 reddit.com"

9. Maintain NAP - Name, Address Phone Number. Consistent across all platforms.

10. Schema and XML Sitemap - still trying to figure these things out but I believe I have a pretty good grasp on it.

What else might I be missing? Is that pretty much it?

EDIT: Cache

Great tips.

Regarding Reddit, even though the links are no-follow, they improve your website's ranking in google. Also Reddit content naturally get indexed very quickly and ranks very high on google, so advertising your site there pays off really well, just don't spam so you don't get your domain banned sitewide.

IcaroAugusto said:

Great tips.

Regarding Reddit, even though the links are no-follow, they improve your website's ranking in google. Also Reddit content naturally get indexed very quickly and ranks very high on google, so advertising your site there pays off really well, just don't spam so you don't get your domain banned sitewide.

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Appreciate the insight on Reddit. The idea would be to basically plug my article into ChatGPT, and tell them to reword and cut it down by about 2/3rds but then at the end of the article (on Reddit), have a link with an anchor text of the article like "For a more detailed article click the link to view the full article about Michigan Auto Insurance PIP 2024 Updates" And have "Michigan Auto Insurance PIP 2024 Updates" be the anchor text.

Do you think that would be effective?

Hagiology said:

Appreciate the insight on Reddit. The idea would be to basically plug my article into ChatGPT, and tell them to reword and cut it down by about 2/3rds but then at the end of the article (on Reddit), have a link with an anchor text of the article like "For a more detailed article about Michigan Auto Insurance PIP 2024 Updates, view the full article here" And have "Michigan Auto Insurance PIP 2024 Updates" be the anchor text.

Do you think that would be effective?

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This can work on your own subreddit, but if post on other subreddits ensure the moderators allow that first. If you start getting reported by users and getting your content removed by subreddit moderators, your will get your account banned quickly and possibly get your domain banned from the whole site.

IcaroAugusto said:

This can work on your own subreddit, but if post on other subreddits ensure the moderators allow that first. If you start getting reported by users and getting your content removed by subreddit moderators, your will get your account banned quickly and possibly get your domain banned from the whole site.

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Yeah I don't think I want to be in the business of spamming Michigan-specific subreddits. I guess as part of the funnel process of people seeing Reddit results from Google, they'd subscribe to my subreddit. If they aren't a customer now, they may be in the future the more posts they see and view me as a "trusted professional"

Great tips!

You touch on this in link building aspects, but I would add that one should look into Journalist Outreach platforms such as Featured, Connectively, Qwoted etc.

They offer great opportunities and is something that more should be taking advantage of!

Hard to avoid using WP to build sites.
It would be costly to implement features you can easily add using plugins.

GenesisOne said:

Hard to avoid using WP to build sites.
It would be costly to implement features you can easily add using plugins.

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I am by no means an SEO expert, hence why I'm here, but after tinkering with WP, and Googling their alternatives, yeah it will require a bit more work but without the bloat and I can customize everything exactly the way I need to. My websites will be a fraction of the size (bloat) that my competitors and with a much more detailed schema markup and just better on page SEO (with or without WP and their plugins)

hey buddy same over here back in 2010 ended up running away with a full time affiliate program made my millions and then google algo changes kinda killed the dream, got back into the swing of things this past year and basically your list is a very well presented and accurate list of what people should be focusing on for a full spectrum of SEO. Minus your black hat stuff that list is pure gold.

Thank for advice

BxHxW said:

hey buddy same over here back in 2010 ended up running away with a full time affiliate program made my millions and then google algo changes kinda killed the dream, got back into the swing of things this past year and basically your list is a very well presented and accurate list of what people should be focusing on for a full spectrum of SEO. Minus your black hat stuff that list is pure gold.

Click to expand...

I appreciate that, yeah, I nicked the black hat stuff. No reason to risk my website.