Part 3 of 4. — The term “insurance” is too broad, and is subject to fierce competition. If your business isn’t listed in the first two pages of search results then its likelihood of being noticed is quite low, and most of the top insurance companies are billion dollar businesses. As such, the chances of a small business ranking favorably with such a keyword are quite low.

– Just as with our flower shop example above, Matt could benefit by specializing. There are many types of insurance: home, car, life, etc. Unless he sells every type, it makes little sense to use such a generic term. Even if he does sell many types of insurance, it makes more sense to create a unique site customized for each type than it does to lump them all together.

Upon sharing our concerns, Matt decided to specialize in car, home and boat insurance. While this was a great first step, even these terms are quite competitive, so the next phase in Matt’s web marketing strategy was finding the right terms to help get him noticed.

Our research led us to three terms that had very little competition and, as such, would garner more notice for Matt’s business. These were “homeowners insurance,” “classic car insurance” and “yacht insurance.” While your first impulse may be to believe that businesses and terms with no competition are most desirable, unless you are a pioneer in your field, no competition also means no demand.

Matt chose to specialize in homeowners insurance, as it was a subject with which he was most familiar, while leaving the opportunity ope for future expansion into his other specializations later. Matt’s choice was sound on several levels. While representing himself as a homeowners insurance salesman online, nothing prevents him from building trust with clients and selling them classic car or yacht insurance at a later date. Had he positioned himself as a generic insurance salesman, he likely wouldn’t have gotten noticed. Similarly, had he specialized in car or boat insurance then his future expansion would be limited by the fact that those purchasing these types of insurance already owned homes.

OK, so he chose to have a site built about “homeowners insurance” but, because he’s an insurance agent licensed in Florida, having people call him from Oregon (or even from Georgia) would actually be a waste of his time. Therefore, we focused his site on “Florida homeowners insurance” and chose the domain name “Florida-homeowners-insurance-choices.com” for the benefit of the search engines. Yet, while that’s a good name for the search engines, it’s not easy to tell people or put on a business card. So that he’d have the best of both worlds, we simply registered another domain name (“MossHomeownersInsurance.com”) and redirected it to his main domain name.

All this is to say that you shouldn’t register a domain name first. Instead, let us do the research to find the most profitable keywords for your business.

The second biggest mistake made by many businesses is in purchasing web hosting before they know what their needs are. Hosting environments are quite different, offering a vast array of environments and features. In nine out of ten instances, the environment you choose will meet your needs. However, in the remaining instance, a wrong choice can waste your valuable time and money.

Furthermore, we have found one system that’s simply the best way to conduct business online: Site Build It (SBI). Basically, SBI is a hosting system plus much more. For the price of typical hosting, SBI provides a Website with dozens of built-in, automated tools that practically assure your success. Frankly, SBI is the right choice for about 95% of all of our clients and because SBI actually takes care of registering your domain name and setting up your hosting, it’s another reason that you should not do it yourself. Be sure to checks Parts 1, 2 and 4.

Since you read all the way through this page and are reading this right now, we understand you want the best Web Search Engines… That’s Ace SEO & Web Design! for Search Engine Marketing 6092VZBC