Decoding SEO Success: Revealing the Top Performers in the Car Insurance Sector

Our SEO report, in partnership with the Financial Services Forum, uncovers the benefits of ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) as a car insurance brand.

Selling a service consumers hope they never have to use can pose a challenge as it is, let alone when this is combined with a highly and often bureaucratic registration process, making little opportunity to stand out. Perhaps small differences in excesses and a headline price will help, but marketing any type of insurance poses a challenge in the digital age.

The research

In the UK, there are at least 76,000 commonly used car insurance keywords. These keywords account for 4.5 million searches a month.

Due to the enormity of this market, the report narrowed down the top 100 car insurance themes based on keyword popularity. The total search volume of these keywords was still huge, so we narrowed it down further, focussing on generic terms such as ‘cheap car insurance’ and ‘compare car insurance’.

Mainstream insurers and comparison sites heavily dominate the search results for these keywords. This makes it hard for small or challenger brands, who have little hope of ranking for them.

Where they can compete, however, is in specialist car insurance:

• Temporary car insurance
• Young driver insurance
• Multi car insurance
• Classic car insurance

Temporary car insurance

1. Comparethemarket.com
2. Confused.com
3. Aviva.co.uk

Key topics:

• Temporary Car Insurance
• One Day Car Insurance
• Short Term Car Insurance
• Monthly Car Insurance
• Weekly Car Insurance

The ‘one day’ and ‘short’ term topics generate 94% of all searches for temporary car insurance. The slightly longer term monthly and weekly car insurance searches prove less popular, but the market for this search term overall is being dominated by comparison websites like Compare the Market and Confused.com, claiming over half of the estimated market share.

Despite this, specialist providers such as Veygo and Day Insure are also performing well in the search results, with just over 10% of the market share and an estimated traffic total of 27.5K combined.

Young driver insurance

1. Moneysupermarket.com
2. Moneysavingexpert.com
3. Comparethemarket.com

Key topics:

• Young Driver Car Insurance
• New Driver Insurance
• First Time Driver Insurance
• Car Insurance for ‘X’ Years Old
• Car Insurance for Teenagers

Despite most of the demand is surrounding ‘young’ and ‘new’ drivers, other keyword topics also have the potential to drive quality traffic to your site.

A large portion of the market share has been claimed by money-saving websites, which makes sense considering car insurance for young drivers can be expensive.

However, there are a couple of specialist sites, like Endsleigh and Marmalade, that perform well for ‘young driver’ keywords, but have the potential to do even better.

Classic car insurance

1. Footmanjames.co.uk
2. Confused.com
3. Comparethemarket.com

Key topics:

• Classic Car Insurance
• Insurance for Old Cars
• Vintage / Antique Car Insurance
• Collector Car Insurance

The overall search volume for classic car insurance keywords is smaller than the others, but is still a relevant segment of the insurance industry.

To win in this market, targeting lower volume keywords with blog content is a recommended. With not much diversity, it’s important to hone in on the high-quality consumers that are really relevant.

Due to the low overall search volume, specialists are more noticeable in this space. The best performing site is Footman James, holding a third of the market share. Lancaster Insurance and Adrian Flux, another two specialist sites, also appear in the top five searches, showing how the competition in this area is lower, meaning specialist websites are more likely to achieve a higher market share.

Multi car insurance

1. Lv.com
2. Gocompare.com
3. Admiral.com

Key topics:

• Multi Car Insurance
• Second Car Insurance
• 2 Car Insurance
• Dual Car Insurance

In these key topics, the keyword ‘multi car insurance’ sees 92% of all total interest. LV is currently dominating this niche, claiming approximately a third of the market. Admiral is also performing well. However, it’s important to note that both sites are not limited to automotive insurance, so they focus traffic to their homepage.

How you can compete

In order to improve the ranking of your website in the SERPs, one of the most essential steps is on-page SEO. This involves optimising your pages for relevant keywords, updating page titles, copy, the structure of your HTML and reducing page load speed. Doing this can create a better user experience, and help Google to position your content to the correct audiences.

Generally, the home page is the most important part of any website, so you’ll want to drive most of your traffic here.

You’ll also want to ensure your on-page copy is optimised for featured snippets, as this can push you up the rankings if Google finds content that answers prospects’ questions, featuring relevant keywords.

Of the brands mentioned in this blog, most home pages are optimised for the automotive insurance industry. However, Compare the Market and Confused.com are not. Instead, these sites have pages dedicated to each topic – which makes sense, as it keeps the homepage brand-focussed.

The journey doesn’t end once your website is optimised, though. The next step is building brand trust and authority. A content-led approach can help you do this – answering prospects’ questions through blogs and on-page copy.

However, in order for Google to understand the authority of your brand, it will attempt to understand online relationships by detecting hyperlinks from other relevant content, back to your site.

Each link is determined by Google as validation. And, because it’s the most popular, trusted, and relevant content that ranks well in the SERPs, opting for the organic approach of building backlinks to your site through blog posts and guest posts is a great option.

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If you want to find out more about how you can compete with the top-performing brands in the car insurance sector, download the full report or get in touch today!