A Step-by-Step Framework for Auditing Your Insurance Agency's SEO

This guide is for independent insurance agents and agency owners who want to evaluate their current organic search presence — not as an abstract exercise, but as a diagnostic that leads to clear actions.

You don't need to be technical. You need to be systematic. This framework works whether you're a single-agent shop writing personal lines in one county or a multi-producer agency licensed across several states.

It's particularly useful if any of the following describe your situation:

• You have a website but aren't sure whether it's generating leads from organic search.
• You've worked with a web developer or marketing vendor but never received a clear SEO explanation of what was done or why.
• Competitors seem to appear in Google searches for your city and product lines, and you don't know why they rank and you don't.
• You're about to invest in SEO services and want to understand your starting point before signing a contract.

This framework won't replace a professional audit — a skilled SEO analyst will surface technical issues, backlink gaps, and crawl errors that require specialized tools. But it will give you enough diagnostic clarity to have an informed conversation with any agency you hire, and to identify quick wins you can address immediately.

A note on scope: This guide focuses on the organic and local SEO dimensions of your website. It does not cover paid search (Google Ads), social media presence, or email marketing. Those are separate channels with separate audit frameworks.

Technical SEO problems don't always cause visible symptoms. Your site might look fine to a visitor while Google's crawler struggles to index it properly. Start here because technical issues make every other SEO effort less effective.

Core checks to run manually or with a free tool like Google Search Console:

• Is your site indexed? Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. If you see far fewer pages than you expect, indexing problems exist.
• Is the site mobile-friendly? Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test. Most insurance searches happen on phones — a site that renders poorly on mobile loses those visitors before they read a word.
• Page speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and your top coverage-area page. Slow load times affect both rankings and conversion rate. A score below 50 on mobile warrants attention.
• HTTPS: Your site should load on https:// with no mixed-content warnings. Browsers flag non-secure sites, which reduces visitor trust — particularly important for a financial services website where visitors may submit contact forms.
• Crawl errors: Google Search Console's Coverage report shows pages Google couldn't access. Pages returning 404 errors or redirect chains waste crawl budget and can orphan content that should be ranking.
• Duplicate content: Insurance agency websites commonly have duplicate city pages, duplicated product descriptions pulled from carrier templates, or multiple URLs serving the same content. This dilutes ranking signals.

Assign each item a pass, needs-attention, or critical status. Technical issues rated critical should be addressed before any new content is created — publishing more pages onto a technically broken site compounds the problem rather than solving it.

For most insurance agencies, the Map Pack — the three-business listing block that appears at the top of local Google searches — drives more phone calls and form submissions than any other organic channel. Auditing your local signals tells you how competitive your Map Pack position is and what's preventing improvement.

Google Business Profile (GBP)

• Claimed and verified? If not, this is your single highest-priority action. An unclaimed GBP is an open door for competitors or spam listings.
• Primary category: Most insurance agents should use "Insurance Agency" as the primary category. Secondary categories matter for product-line searches — auto, life, home, commercial.
• Services listed: GBP has a Services section. List each policy type you write. Google uses this data to match your profile to product-specific queries.
• Reviews: Volume, recency, and response rate all affect Map Pack ranking. Review recency matters — a profile with many old reviews and none in the past six months is treated differently than one with consistent recent reviews.
• Photos and posts: An active profile with current photos and occasional posts signals to Google that the business is operating.

NAP Consistency

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — your core identity signals across the web. Insurance agencies have specific directory presence that affects local SEO: TrustedChoice.com, Yelp insurance categories, Insureon, and your carrier agent locators are the most authoritative. Check that your name, address, and phone number are identical across all of them — not similar, identical. "Suite 200" and "Ste. 200" are technically inconsistent to citation-matching algorithms.

Mismatched NAP across carrier locators is particularly common when an agency has moved offices, changed phone numbers, or been acquired. Audit each one individually.

This is the gap we see most consistently across insurance agency websites. An agency serves six counties and writes a single page titled "Service Areas" listing those counties as bullet points. Meanwhile, a competing agency has individual pages for each city — each one optimized for searches like "auto insurance [city name]" or "homeowners insurance [county name]".

The single service-area page cannot compete with dedicated geographic pages for location-specific queries. Google can't rank a bullet point.

Audit questions for coverage-area pages:

• Does each primary city or county you serve have its own URL? (e.g., /auto-insurance-austin-tx/)
• Does each page include unique content — not just a city name swapped into a template? Thin or duplicated city pages can be worse than having no page at all.
• Are local landmarks, neighborhoods, or county-specific coverage details mentioned naturally in the copy?
• Does each coverage-area page include a locally relevant call to action — a phone number with a local area code, a specific office address, or a link to get a quote?
• Are these pages internally linked from your homepage and product pages — or are they orphaned, accessible only from a sitemap?

When auditing, prioritize by search volume. A coverage-area page for a mid-size city where you write significant premium is more valuable than ten pages for rural townships with minimal search traffic. Use Google Search Console to check if any existing coverage pages are generating impressions — even low impressions confirm Google has found and indexed the page.

If you have no coverage-area pages, this is typically the highest-ROI content investment an insurance agency can make. Industry benchmarks suggest dedicated local landing pages consistently outperform generic service-area mentions for location-specific queries.

Abstract SEO best practices are less useful than understanding what's working in your specific market. Competitor benchmarking translates a general audit into local context.

Step 1: Identify your real competitors

Search your three to five most important queries — "[city] auto insurance agent", "[city] homeowners insurance", "[city] commercial insurance broker". The agencies appearing in the Map Pack and the top organic results are your actual competitors for those terms. They may not be the agencies you think of as competitors in daily business.

Step 2: Audit what they have that you don't

• Coverage-area pages: How many location-specific pages do they have? What's the URL structure?
• Product-line pages: Do they have dedicated pages for auto, home, life, commercial? Are those pages thin or substantive?
• Review volume and recency: What's their GBP review count and when was the last review? This is publicly visible.
• Domain authority signals: Free tools like Moz's Link Explorer or Ahrefs' free tier can show roughly how many external sites link to a competitor's domain versus yours. A significant link gap often explains persistent ranking gaps even when your on-page content is comparable.

Step 3: Find the gaps you can close

Not every competitor advantage is worth pursuing. A competitor with 400 backlinks from a decade of sponsorships and press coverage is a long-term gap. A competitor with three coverage-area pages to your zero is a gap you can close in weeks.

Document competitor advantages by effort-to-close: quick (content and page creation), medium (citation building, GBP optimization), and long-term (link acquisition, authority building). This turns benchmarking from an observation into a prioritized action list.

After running each section of this audit, you have observations — but observations need to become decisions. Use this simplified scoring approach to prioritize.

Scorecard categories

• Technical health: Pass / Needs Attention / Critical
• GBP completeness: Pass / Needs Attention / Critical
• NAP consistency: Pass / Needs Attention / Critical
• Coverage-area pages: Pass / Needs Attention / Missing
• Product-line pages: Pass / Needs Attention / Missing
• Competitor gap (content): Small / Medium / Large
• Competitor gap (authority/links): Small / Medium / Large

Any item rated Critical or Missing should be addressed before investing in additional SEO activities. Adding blog content to a site with critical technical issues or no GBP is building on an unstable foundation.

When a self-audit is enough

A self-audit using this framework is sufficient if your goals are modest — you want to fix obvious errors, improve your GBP, and create a few coverage pages. Many agencies can execute those steps without outside help.

When to bring in professionals

A professional audit adds value when: your self-audit identifies problems but not root causes; you've made SEO investments in the past without measurable results; you're entering a competitive market with established agencies; or you want a prioritized roadmap rather than a list of observations.

In our experience working with insurance agencies, the self-audit typically surfaces the what — a professional audit surfaces the why and the in what order. Both have their place depending on your situation, budget, and how competitive your local market is.

If your audit results are mixed or you're unsure how to interpret what you found, a second opinion from someone who works specifically with insurance agencies — not a generalist web shop — will get you to a clearer action plan faster.