Competing Locally on the World Wide Web

SAN DIEGO – (October 5, 2010) – Unless you are a recent college graduate (or younger!) you undoubtedly remember life before the internet made its debut roughly 15 years ago. Statistics reflect the astonishing rate of its adoption in the few years since its debut. As of September, 2010, nearly 2 billion people world wide use the internet. In the United States alone the number is more than 266 million people, reaching over 77% of the population, (Source: www.internetworldstats.com).

Today the influence of the internet continues to grow and transform the way we do business. Whether you work for a multi-billion-dollar international Insurance Company, or run a local, family-owned agency, your company’s website competes for the attention of millions of potential customers each day. So if you’re ‘one of the little guys’, how do you compete?

Smaller companies can compete by ensuring that their websites turn up when potential customers search for “local” listings. “Local web listings have grown into something far more important than just being in the yellow pages,” said Chris Dixon Boggs, Director of Search Engine Optimization at Rosetta, a technology focused consulting firm. “Now that search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo incorporate local results into their main search engines’ returns – not handling the way that your agencies are represented in local listings can mean hundreds and even thousands of lost potential leads.”

Owners and web developers can take advantage of many tools to help their websites stand out locally, when relevant web-searches are conducted in the geographic location in which they do business. From local, online yellow-page listings to becoming listed on “Google Maps” to optimizing your website in order to rank higher in the organic searches results, all of these help smaller companies compete on the crowded internet playing field.

Boggs, who is teaching an online class entitled, Making Sure Your Agency Gets a Local Web Listing, says, “this class is really for anyone that has a website that they hope people will come to in search of specific products that are locally searched for.” The online class, offered by the Insurance Journal Academy of Insurance is scheduled for Wednesday, October 6^th at 1:30pm (Eastern) and will later also be available as a download.

The Insurance Journal Academy of Insurance, a division of Insurance Journal, provides specialized online training for the P/C insurance industry, in the form of live webinars and recorded, streaming, “on demand” classes. Classes are taught by leading experts in their fields and are grouped within one of five disciplines: Sales Training, Agency Management, Coverage Analysis, Human Resources and Executive Training.

Visit the Academy of Insurance website for a list of all upcoming live classes or for a list of the recorded streaming on demand classes also available.

For More Information:

Adam Dunford

VP-New Business Development

Insurance Journal

Phone: 1-800-897-9965 ex. 144

adunford@insurancejournal.com