Is your insurance agency’s website ready for AEP?
It’s that time of year again! We’re looking at all aspects of our marketing materials to refile with carriers and CMS compliantly but one thing agents often forget is to prepare their insurance agency’s website for AEP. After spending the past two years adapting to doing almost everything from home, more beneficiaries are turning to technology. They are demanding the ability to conduct research, schedule appointments, and be completely self-service when enrolling and scheduling appointments. To ensure your insurance agency’s website is ready for AEP, we’ve compiled these 6 things you must do:
Update your contact information
Regularly review your contact information to ensure it is optimized. Double-check your phone number, email address, physical location address, mailing address, and hours of operation — all of the information customers or prospects need about your insurance agency are correct.
Optimize your site for Local SEO
While confirming your contact information, another best practice for your insurance agency’s website is to ensure you optimize for Local SEO (search engine optimization). The first step in this process is to ensure all of your social media pages have the same contact information as shown on your website. Then, taking it a step further for local SEO efforts, make sure your map pack has the correct address (Note: this helps with local intent shoppers). You will want to submit your site to big players like Apple Maps, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Bling Pages, and Facebook.Also, don’t forget to submit your website to other popular directories in your area.
Conduct a website audit
An audit of your insurance agency’s website is crucial. This also impacts your overall ranking on search engine pages. If you have broken links on your insurance agency’s website, Google will ‘crawl’ and decrease your quality score. Broken links also indirectly harm SEO by affecting bounce rate, time on site, and the signals you send back to Google (e.g., your insurance agency’s website is old and outdated.) If you review your pages and double-check your backlinks or internal links, you can quickly identify the broken links and replace them with the updated URL. You may also find if you’re receiving an error message, you will need to remove the hyperlink entirely.
Add Your MedicareCENTER PURL
Clients want to be self-service! They want the ability to quickly search and review plans in their market and conduct research to feel empowered when making important decisions about their health care. If your insurance agency’s website includes a link to your MedicareCENTER PURL (personalized URL), you give your prospects and customers the ability to run quotes and shop for plans, update their prescription drug and provider information in their client profile, and enroll in a plan at their convenience.
Add a Link to Appointment Setting Technology
Technology like Calendly and Microsoft Bookings is a great tool to ensure your prospects and clients are scheduling times to connect with you. If you have a link to an appointment setting technology on your insurance agency’s website, you can cut back on the number of calls you may attempt to connect with a prospect and schedule an appointment. The great thing about appointment setting technology is it can connect to your calendars and check your availability. You can also customize your availability based on your hours of operation. The technology will do a quick check of your calendar and office hours and provide appointment times available based on your schedule. Send a quick email out to your clients and let them know they can begin scheduling their annual reviews at a time most convenient for them using your appointment setting technology.
Refile to obtain carrier logo approval
Last but certainly not least, don’t forget to work with your upline and refile your website to obtain carrier logo approval. Carriers often go through rebrands, so making sure you have the updated insurance company logo is important. You will also want to work with your upline to determine the filing process for approval. Most insurance companies require you to provide a link to your website, and their compliance team will review all the pages. Connect with your marketer to learn the rules of the road for approval use filings.
Now that you know 6 ways to prep your insurance agency’s website, it’s time to get started! Don’t wait until the last minute to prep your insurance agency’s website for AEP. If you’re looking for additional guidance on compliance or web design, you can reach out to the team at Agent Pipeline by calling 800-962-4693 to speak with a professional.
