SEO for an insurance agency is two jobs that run side by side. The first is local: showing up in the map results when a business owner nearby searches for a commercial insurance agent, which depends mostly on a complete, accurate Google Business Profile and a website that backs it up. The second is industry search, where a contractor, a trucking company or a restaurant group looks for the coverage they need by name and finds a page on your site written for exactly their kind of business. Do both well and you'll show up for the people you most want to write.
Here's how each one works and where agencies tend to get stuck.
Two kinds of search, two different jobs
Think about who's on the other end. An owner who just signed a lease searches "business insurance agent near me" from a phone. A CFO whose renewal jumped searches "commercial insurance broker for manufacturers." An HR director looking at benefits types "group health insurance broker small business." A fleet manager wants "commercial auto insurance for trucking companies," and probably doesn't care where your office is.
The first search is local. Google answers it with a map and three businesses. The other three are industry searches, and they're answered by web pages. Different work.
Local: what the map results run on
Google names three main factors for local results: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known you are, which Google says draws on things like links to your site and the reviews you've collected.
You can't change distance. Relevance is yours. Pick the most accurate primary category, list the lines you actually write, add your hours, and make sure the name, address and phone number match your website and the major directories exactly.
Agency profile or agent profiles?
This trips up a lot of agencies. Google's Business Profile guidelines name insurance agents as individual practitioners, who can have their own profiles alongside the agency's. Where an agent is the only public-facing practitioner at a branded location, Google's format is a single profile named "[brand]: [practitioner name]." The guidelines also say a practitioner shouldn't create several profiles to cover different specialties.
So decide on purpose. If clients call specific producers by name, practitioner profiles can help them find the right person. If clients think of you as one agency, one strong profile is usually simpler to keep accurate. Either way, don't make extra profiles for each line of business. Google's rules don't allow it.
Industry search: pages for the businesses you insure
Most agencies have one "Commercial Insurance" page that lists twenty coverages in a bulleted column. It ranks for very little. It doesn't help the owner reading it, either.
Build pages around the businesses you insure best. A page for contractors. One for transportation companies, one for manufacturers, one for property managers, if those are the books you're strongest in. On each one, talk about the risks that kind of business actually worries about, the coverages they tend to ask about, the questions you hear at renewal, and what it's like to work with you. Use the words owners use. Few of them search for "inland marine."
Then add pages for the coverages people search by name: workers' comp, commercial auto, general liability, cyber, group benefits. Link each industry page to the coverages it mentions. A buyer who lands on one page should be able to find the next one without thinking about it.
Answers that an AI assistant can use
Buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant to explain a coverage, compare two kinds of policy or recommend an agency in their town, and for many questions Google now puts its own AI-written answer above the regular results, which means a page that answers the question clearly has two ways to be seen. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and normal SEO practice applies. In practice, a plain question as a heading with a clear two or three sentence answer beneath it is easy for both Google and an assistant to use.
To see what an assistant says about your agency today, run our Free AI Visibility Check. It looks at your website, your mobile speed, whether you come up in a local search, and what an AI assistant says when a buyer asks who to call. No email needed.
A note on what you publish
Keep claims general. Describe what a coverage is for and who usually asks about it, and leave specific terms, pricing and eligibility to the conversation with a licensed producer. Your carrier agreements and state rules may shape what you can say online, so have whoever handles compliance at your agency look over new pages before they go up. It's slower. It's worth it.
If you'd rather hand it off
Agency owners usually know which industries they want more of. What's missing is time. Writing twenty good pages, keeping the profiles and directory listings clean, and then publishing something new week after week once the first burst of effort fades is a lot to ask of a team that's also quoting, servicing and renewing accounts every day.
That's the work Inbound SDR covers. We build your website, up to 100 pages, in the first month, planned around the coverages you write and the areas you serve, then host it and keep it healthy. We optimize your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing and keep your name, address and phone consistent across more than 65 directories. A new blog goes out every business day and is posted to up to 3 social platforms, and a dedicated strategist reports to you monthly. Packages start at $1,000 per month on a 12-month term.
Two limits worth knowing. We don't post to your Business Profile and we don't manage reviews. If your agency's growth plan depends mainly on paid ads or email campaigns, this isn't the right program, because it includes neither.
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