Local SEO for Medicare agents
What makes your office show up when someone in your county goes looking for help with a plan, what is probably wrong with yours right now, and how to fix it before the season.
Nothing to install, nothing to connect, and no jargon. The checks below are the ones Verand runs, worded the way it words them.
- Name
- Example Insurance Group
- Phone
- (555) 010-0184
- Counties served
- None named
Address, city and hours read too, on /contact and 2 other pages, from your page text and your page code. Nothing connected, nothing extra billed.
An example, not a real agency. The tabs, the wording and the score line are the product’s; the findings are invented so you can see the shape of one.
A search for help with a plan is answered county by county, not city by city.
Relevance, distance, prominence. Google publishes those three and nothing else. The awkward one for you is the middle: distance runs from wherever the person is standing to a point on a map, while the plans that person can enrol in are set by the county they live in. Those two facts do not line up on their own.
Does anything say what you sell?
Your listing carries one primary category and your pages describe the agency. Both have to state, in a form a machine reads rather than infers, that this is an insurance agency at this address. A site that talks about plans and never about the agency has not said it.
Which county is the searcher in?
You cannot move the office and no tool can move it for you. What you can do is write the counties you are appointed in somewhere a machine can read them, and make sure the address every source holds is right to the character, including the part after the comma.
How sure is Google that you exist?
It settles that by counting independent sources that agree on your name, address and phone number, and by reading reviews from real clients. Agreement is the signal. Disagreement is the problem, and any agency that has changed offices or phone systems has some.
Eight checks on your own website, and the one that decides your county is the one nobody writes down.
Verand already reads every page of your site on a schedule, for everything else it checks. Your office details fall out of that same read. Nothing to install, nothing to connect, no cost on top of a crawl that was happening anyway.
Nothing on your site says which counties you serve
- What we found
-
the tri-county area on /aboutTwo sentences. No county named.
throughout the region on /contact - Why it matters
- Which plans a person can buy is set by the county they live in, so your county list is a fact about the agency rather than a line of marketing. Left in prose it is invisible to the thing choosing between three agents, and it is the one check here that means something different for you than it does for a dentist.
- Doing it yourself
- Half an hour to write the list out, then an edit every time you add or drop a carrier appointment.
- Who fixes it
- You Verand writes the list into your page code the moment you give it one, and not before. Which counties you are appointed in is not readable off a website.
Nothing on your site says you are an insurance agency at an address
- What we found
- No business entry anywhere in your page code. Search engines have to work out what you are from your page text instead of reading it directly.
- Why it matters
- That entry is what ties your website to your Google listing. Without it you are relying on a guess about whether you appear in the local block at all, and the guess gets worse the more your pages talk about plans rather than about the agency selling them.
- Doing it yourself
- About thirty minutes to hand-write, plus an edit every time an address, a number, your hours or your county list changes.
- Who fixes it
- One click, Verand It writes the whole entry, and leaves out anything it does not know for certain.
{ "@type": "InsuranceAgency", "name": …, "address": { … }, "telephone": …, "geo": { … }, "openingHoursSpecification": [ … ], "areaServed": [ { "@type": "Place", … } ], "sameAs": [ … ] }
The other six: your name, address and phone all present; the three agreeing across your pages; a contact page; map coordinates; opening hours; a link from your site to your Google listing. Each comes back with the same four lines, and nothing sits behind a button.
The page about your office is an advertisement too.
There is no gentler rule for the page carrying your address. If a page exists to bring you appointments it is marketing, held to the same standard as everything else your agency publishes. Which would be a footnote, except that the sentences that get agents in trouble are the ones people write on exactly that page.
“Our office is approved by Medicare and has helped neighbours here since 2004.”
StoppedAn appointment with a carrier is not an approval, and Medicare does not endorse agents. It is the sentence that turns up most often on an agent’s about page, and the one the insurance rules exist to stop. The page does not move until it is gone.
“We will find you the cheapest plan in the county.”
StoppedCheapest is a claim about every plan on the market at once, made about a market you hold appointments in part of. Cut back to what you can stand behind, it becomes a sentence about comparing what you carry, which is truer and more useful. No override on this one, on any plan.
“Come in for a risk-free review of your plan before December.”
Asks youThere are places that phrase is perfectly fine, and a machine cannot tell them apart. So it stops, says why, and asks. You release it in writing, and the reason stays attached to the page. The ones you cannot release at all are guarantees, “you can’t lose”, and anything implying the government sent you.
Stops, and will not move
No reading of the sentence is acceptable. No override, no exception, on any plan.
- approved by Medicare
- government-approved
- guaranteed acceptance
- guaranteed benefit
- cheapest plan
- you can’t lose
- a missing disclaimer
Stops, and asks you
Two claims with a legitimate professional use a machine cannot see. Release them with a written reason, which stays attached to the page.
- risk-free
- zero-risk
A third kind comes back as a note rather than a stop: “everyone needs a supplement”, “one size fits all”. Flagged for you to look at, because suitability is individual. A note never blocks anything from publishing.
And what this is not. Verand does not check the CMS marketing requirements for Advantage and Part D, and it does not insert or look for the TPMO disclaimer. Separate regime, separate review, and it stays with you and your counsel. What runs on your office page is the cross-line insurance rule set and the YMYL floor. A Medicare and ACA rule set is written and sitting on disk, switched on for nobody, and we will say so on the day that changes.
Every local SEO tool will happily write this page for you. None of them read it back against the rules you are licensed under. That is the only reason this page exists. Validated against the NAIC’s rules. AI-researched and operator-reviewed. Your counsel confirms applicability. Not legal advice.
Four things happen to your office, and three of them are already paid for.
You have seen the diagnosis, which Verand gives away, and the gate, which nothing else in this category runs at all. Here is the whole of it in order, with the honest status of each.
It reads your office
Out of the pages you already publish, inside the crawl that was running anyway.
Running · no extra costIt hands you a list
Eight checks. Each says what is wrong, why it matters, and what fixing it yourself would cost in time.
RunningIt writes, and it gates
The machine-readable entry in one click. The page itself goes through the same checks as every article you publish.
RunningIt gets you repeated
Your details submitted, deliberately, to the places every other source copies from.
$500 once, per officeGetting your details repeated, before the season and not during it.
Search engines decide a business is real by counting independent sources that agree about it. Most agencies leave that to chance, then wonder how a call centre three states away is sitting above them. Five wholesalers and around fifty directory listings, one submission per office, $500, and nothing goes out until your own details are consistent and you have read every character yourself. It is not work you want to be starting in November.
We could call the whole ninety-four-site pool “established directories, selected for your category”. About eighty of them are not that, and you would find out the moment you opened three. So here is the real split.
Two rows carry initials instead of a mark. GPS Network is a distribution network rather than a site you can visit, so it has none. Neither does most of the long tail, which is the point of that row.
- Category
- Insurance agency
- Rating
- 4.9
- Reviews
- 6
- Hours
- Published
- Phone
- (555) 010-0126
- Address
- 128 Example Street
Read from the public listing. No sign-in, so nothing to authorise and nothing to revoke.
It reads the listing. It cannot change a word of it.
There is no sign-in for this one, and there cannot be. The check reads only what any member of the public sees, so there is nothing to authorise and nothing to revoke. A listing is accepted as yours only once your own website address, phone number or street confirms it. If nothing lines up you get the candidates and choose, rather than Verand attaching a listing that belongs to the agency upstairs.
More counties is not more offices.
Most agencies in this line are one address and a long list of counties. That is one location record with a long service area on it, not nine locations, and getting it the wrong way round is the most expensive mistake available here. Twelve pages carrying the same four hundred words with the county name swapped is the oldest way there is to get a whole site treated as thin.
Invented addresses. The three-variant pattern is the common one.
Example Insurance Group128 Example Street, Suite 300 · (555) 010-0184
- Its own Business Profile1
- Its own directory submission$500
- Its own page, its own checks8 + 6
- Every county it serves, on one record9
Added by hand, once400 Example Parkway · (555) 010-0139
- Its own Business Profile1
- Its own directory submission$500
- Its own page, its own checks8 + 6
- Its own county list, not a copyits own
What is running, and what is not.
Running nowLive
- Reading your office out of your own pages. Inside the crawl that already runs. No extra cost, nothing to connect.
- The eight on-site checks and the list they produce. Each item carries the finding, why it matters, and an honest estimate of doing it yourself.
- The Google listing check. Six checks against the public listing. No sign-in.
- Writing the business entry, service area included. One click. Counties you have given it, never counties it guessed.
- The gate on the page itself. The cross-line insurance rules and the YMYL floor, the same ones your articles hit.
- Directory submission. $500 once, per office. Nothing goes until you have read every character.
Not builtHonest
- The Medicare and ACA rule set. Written, on disk, assigned to nobody. What gates you today is the cross-line insurance pack and the floor.
- The CMS marketing requirements, and the TPMO disclaimer. Verand checks for neither and inserts neither. They stay with you and your counsel.
- Anything that writes to your Google listing. No posts, no review replies, no edits.
- The deeper look inside your own listing. The one needing you to connect it. It waits on a Google approval we have not got.
- Working out on its own that you have two offices. It says it sees more than one address and stops. You add the second by hand.
- Writing your contact page in one click. A contact page is a published page rather than a block of code, so it takes the normal writing route.
The four things agents ask first.
Does this check the CMS marketing rules?
No, and nothing here should be read as saying it does. What runs against your drafts is the cross-line insurance rule set and the YMYL floor: guarantees beyond the contract, implied government affiliation, unsupported superiority, six more from the floor, the insurance disclaimer, and three sources with one from the primary tier. The CMS marketing requirements and the TPMO disclaimer are a separate regime with their own review, and Verand neither inserts nor checks them. A Medicare and ACA rule set is drafted and waiting. It is not switched on.
I work from home. Should my address be on my website at all?
That is your call, and for a solo agent it is a real one: Google lets a business serve an area without publishing a street address, and plenty of agents use it. What to know before you run this is that the address checks will come back incomplete, because Verand cannot tell an address hidden on purpose from one that is missing. The service area, the category, the hours and the link between your site and your listing all still apply, and that is where most of the work is anyway.
I am appointed in nine counties. Do I need nine pages?
No, and nine pages is the likelier way to do yourself damage. Nine counties is one list on one record. A page earns its place when there is something true and specific to say on it that is not on the other eight, which for a county usually means the carriers and plan types actually available there. If you cannot write that, the county belongs in the list rather than in a page of its own.
Can I get all of this done before the season?
Yes, and the order matters more than the speed. Your own site settles on one phone number, one address and one county list first, because a directory copies exactly what it is sent, and an error here becomes the same error in dozens of places, each needing its own correction. Then the entry gets written, then the listing is checked against it, then the submission goes out. Start while the phone is quiet.
What to read after this.
Verand and Google Business Profile
What the listing check reads, how it decides a listing is yours, and every field it will never touch.
/google-business-profile The whole pictureAI content for Medicare and ACA agents
Which rules load when you name your regulator, what the gate stops before a draft reaches you, and what the label honestly says.
/health-insurance-agentsRun the eight checks while the phone is still quiet.
Seven days, every feature unlocked, one click to cancel. The diagnosis is free and none of it is blurred.
Nothing publishes until someone at your agency presses publish. Verand does not check the CMS marketing rules. Not legal advice.