I am in school to be a CPA and am trying to learn all I can about web design. I would appreciate very much any feedback about the design, appearance, overall layout, functionality, etc. of my new Insurance Quoting website. I realize that this is a very saturated category but this site is fairly unique in that you can view health insurance quotes in real time from competing companies (Aetna, Humana, United Healthcare, etc.) and apply online rather than just request information and have to deal with 5+ agents calling you. (the real time feature is only available in FL for the time being). Please check it out and let me know how I can improve it (I am also very open to any ideas for marketing it as well). Thanks - Joel http://www.RealtimeHealthQuotes.com
Get rid of the music! (And I mean all of it including the link roll over music). Why do people think this is a good idea ? Having a live quote system is a terrific idea but it's not really clear to me that the quotes are live. You need to emphasis this more on every page including the quote form pages. Get your FREE Live quotes now. Compare quotes from major health insurance companies including UnitedhealthCare, BlueCross Blueshield, Aetna, Humana and more. No agent to talk to. Get your LIVE quotes in less than 5 minutes. Click now. I don't like step one of the form. Don't ask for a name, last name, email, address in the first step, save that for the last step. It's too intimidating. But maybe that can't be changed.
Well, two things. First, on your life insurance quoting section you should really have my live life insurance quoting plugin. If you tinker around that site I've written some docs on life insurance lead generation as well, some of which will be applicable to health. Secondly, in my browser there's a big grey square in the middle of the screen. I'm guessing that's a plugin my browser doesn't have. Thirdly, (yeah, I'm past two) you can visit my insurance agent discussion forum and chat in depth about your site, and maybe get some link swaps. Fourth, you need to have your quoting input form smack dead center on the home page. Make it the centerpiece. As soon as you have to click through to a second page, conversions drop off substantially. Fifth, I would drastically slim down the first page of the quote and integrate it into the second page. i.e., one page - then directly to results. As noted above, make it clearer than heck that they are getting an immediate quote as soon as hit the button. Assuming you are going to call them to sell them, then don't ask for permission to call. Demand the name and phone number as a criteria to get a quote - then call them. (note: if you can, call them within seconds. Sales go up by substantially if you do this). Forget the email address. If you're working through email instead of phone, you're unlikely to close the sale. Get rid of adsense. Make your money from the insurance, not $1 clicks. In fact, if I was you I would get rid of the dentalplans banners, the realtime banner, and the insurance company logo...and the drop down quoting menu. Clean up all that stuff to minimize distractions. Then at the top of the page put your domain/company name in Text (so it's indexable) and make your phone number more prominent. I think there's too much distraction going on and not enough focus on the lead generation. I believe you'll find that cross selling online won't work. if they're coming there for health quotes, they're not going to click on the dental plans logo just because it's there. - but the existence of that logo does distract from the main point of your site. (FWIW, I ran that aff. program on an insurance site where I drove thousands of clicks a month to it. And over the course of a year or two I only made one sale. No reflection on the program, just recognize that all that other stuff won't make you money, but it will distract from your lead generation). Your 'home' button goes to the file 'index.html'. It's best practices to point all that just to the root of your domain instead of the actual index.html. Just to be consistent with all your other links. You need more content (assuming you're trying to do SEO and not SEM). I didn't dig into your links, but there's a link to a lead generator on the site, that then links to some other sites that at first glance seemed potentially incestuous. if that's all your stuff, be very careful about how you're linking. If not, ignore me . I didn't delve into the other areas of the site, but if they're linking to affiliate programs, I recommend you either develop the lead for sale yourself, or remove it completely. HTH
Your site has a lot of distractions. Think like the visitor. The less clicking, scrolling, and reading they have to do, the better. High conversions happen when they don't have to click more than once or even have to scroll at all. Most visitors do not go past the first page! Ask yourself, if you were looking for a health insurance quote, would you apply for one on your site? Would you even stay long enough to find out how? Your domain is "realtimehealthquotes" - yet you have links for auto insurance and mortgages..
What are the regulations as to using the United Health Care, BlueCross, Blue Shield names? Could imply that they endorse your product. Would be my first concern. I like the call to attention as to a free quote, something people often miss. However, you are kind of overkill by having it over and over. I would make the main image larger and more centered. I'd put the navigation bar on the right side.
Technically I'm pretty sure that that's a no-no. Effectively however, as long as you're actually licensed with the insurance company, well, agents do this all over the web and while I've seen insurers go nuts over some websites, I've never seen or heard of an insurer having any issues with this kind of use. (It is implied that they endorse the product , they likely have a contract with the insurance company to sell their products - which from a legal standpoint makes them an 'agent'. But I digress..).
Aha! I like the ideas. I am going to work on a major overhaul of at least the home page and clean it up. The DP affiliate program is going to be long gone along with the AdSense. What thoughts do you have on the non-health insurance related content (well hardly any real content yet)? Would I be better off simply building a life insurance only site and then a tax/accounting only site, etc. and then just having links to them maybe in the "about us" section? - that way clients that are interested in us and want to learn more about what we do blah blah blah can find links to our other services there and at the same time it doesnt distract the first time visitor who initially could care less about us and some of our other services ...
that depends. If you're building an agency site, you might want to make all the offerings available on the same site. If instead you're doing seo or sem, then a seperate website for each product line is more reasonable - and you may not even want to link between them. And given the name of your domain - it's not the agency name - then I'd likely think you're doing seo/sem. Alternatively if you are doing seo/sem and want to have all of the products on one site, you should read up on theme pyramids and silos. One way or the other it needs to be discrete.
Ok, the AdSense is gone, the Dental Plans affiliate button is gone, the home page flash is gone, the blinking "refer a friend" script is gone, and the 1st page of the quote form is shortened. I have refined my marketing strategy which is to concentrate now on strictly SEO for the "Florida Health Insurance" keyword phrase rather than the more generic (and competitive) "Health Insurance" keyword phrase. At the mid point of the overhaul the site asthetically is probably not as good looking as before the overhaul but functionally I think that maybe it will show a higher conversion ratio for first time visitors who actually request a quote (the "20 quotes in 20 seconds" button is the centerpiece and above the fold). What thoughts does anyone have on the overall look?
Ok, new layout again. The actual quote form is on the first page above the fold. No doubt that it will scare away a lot of people BUT I tend to think that overall it might yield a higher conversion ratio for visitors to actually request quotes. Thoughts???
1. Put your Domain name back in the title of your website. Without a specific domain name your website has no identity. You want to encourage return visitors to come back to realtimehealthquotes.com not to search "Florida Health Insurance" and find a different site. Attached is a rough website outline that I think would work for you.