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The Internet offers great potential for the general insurance industry

The Internet has had a profound effect on the UK general insurance industry and it has proved to be a natural extension of the original direct telephone model pioneered by Direct Line.

Insurance products sold directly over the Internet have to be relatively easy to underwrite and include a host of personal lines (home, motor, travel, PMI etc.) products and small commercial (office, marine, agriculture etc.) offerings.  But companies are also extending this to programs that need to be underwritten individually and using the Internet to generate enquiries via the telephone and through form filling.

So how many people are using search engines to find general insurance products?  The latest data (monthly search volumes in the UK for May, 2010) shows some interesting results:

These figures are significant. And they only include search engine traffic.

Of course, the competition for the top phrases is intense. Type in the word “insurance” into Google, for example, and your get the likes of Direct Line, GoCompare and Money Supermarket – the big players spending a lot of money who you would expect to be there.

But don’t forget that you can go more niche to target your audience more precisely and suit your budget.  Focusing on local searches, for example, will produce lower search numbers but the competition to be on Google’s first page will be less fierce.  And there are lots of other digital marketing techniques you can use to generate traffic aside from Google’s search results pages like link building campaigns, article marketing and social media.

So the Internet does present significant opportunity for those working in the general insurance arena.  But you need to be smart about how you go about trying to exploit them.