SimplyBusiness.com Organic Ranking Analysis & SEO Review
An analysis of SimplyBusiness.com and SEO factors that are limiting it from reaching high organic non-brand search rankings.
Simply Business Summary
Simply Business is a digital broker agency based out of the United Kingdom and owned by U.S. insurance giant The Travelers Companies. The website focuses on driving inbound B2B traffic looking for business insurance or small business insurance. The primary website goal is to drive users to complete a form about their business, in return they are offered multiple business insurance quotes by third parties. The website relies heavily on high-volume, non-brand searches to continually grow these leads in the highly competitive insurance space.
Disclaimer: The below data and observations represent my own personal opinion based on a manual analysis of the public-facing SimplyBusiness.com website.
Organic Search / SEO Rankings
Unsurprisingly, Simply Business ranks #1 for their own brand-search terms but interestingly ranks poorly for the most significant high-volume generic searches such as "business insurance" or "small business insurance". In fact, according to Semrush, the website ranks #86 for business insurance, and #80 for small business insurance. This is unusual for a large enterprise (700+ employee) website that relies heavily on organic traffic.
Website Speed
The homepage has an overall page load speed of 4.5s, which is significantly better than the average enterprise website. However, the website fails Google's Core Web Vitals Assessment due to a significant "Interaction to Next Paint" delay. As Search Engine Journal reported recently, Google updated it's documentation to confirm the Core Web Vitals results and overall website speed are a factor in how websites rank organically.
Based on this, it's clear how slowly elements are visualized (based on Next Paint Delay) are negatively impacting SImplyBusiness's organic ranking ability.
Website Architecture
The Simply Business website architecture (ie. website folder structure) is clearly built to optimize traffic towards business insurance, as the page/sub-folder /business-insurance/ has 297 sub-pages, which represent almost half the total website pages. I prefer to visualize site architecture with an image like below. The green circle represents the relative amount of total website pages under /business-insurance/, with half-circles representing similar tier 1 folders like /resources/ and their sub-pages.
Looking at competitive top 5 organic results for business insurance, such as The Hartford, Geico, and Next Insurance it's clear to rank competitively for this search websites have to have a top-level page with a URL like /business-insurance/, which SimplyBusiness does achieve.
Based on the above and competitively, website architecture is comparable, and in some ways better (based on the volume of sub-content) and not a cause for poor non-brand rankings.
On-Page Content
Compared to organic competitors, the SimplyBusiness business insurance on-page content is significantly weaker. Notably:
- Missing Content: The page lists many insurance types, but SimplyBusiness offers significantly more business insurance types than are listed on the page.
- Poor Linking Text: All the links to pages use the generic "learn more" vs. using target anchor text (ie. "General Liability Insurance") to link to specific sub-pages, which competitors do.
- Lacking Authority: Given how competitive generic searches are, the page lacks enough content and authority to rank competitively. From a third-party view, the page functions like a listing page vs. an authority page on why Simply Business is the best option for small business insurance.
Looking at the marquee page for the high volume "business insurance" searches, especially when compared to high-ranking competitors the on-page content is very likely negatively impacting their ability to rank competitively.
Backlinking
External Backlinking
Diving deeper into overall website backlinks with a tool like aHrefs, it's clear SImplyBusiness drives the bulk of their external backlinks to the homepage with branded terms like "Simply Business Insurance". Unfortunately, for competitive non-brand searches, you rarely want your homepage to rank (which is always going to rank for brand terms), especially if competitors are pushing deeper non-brand content authority pages in top organic links.
Backlinking to your homepage with branded terms is not a practice I recommend, as companies will almost always rank on your homepage for branded terms. It's much more effective to back-link deeper into your site with non-branded terms, as these are the pages that will have more relevant user content than the homepage which is usually very high-level.
Internal Backlinking
SimplyBusiness drives all their internal backlinks through two areas - the navigation and footer, rarely using in-page links to backlink to relevant pages with relevant terms. Notably, both the header and footer are saturated with the same link anchors like "business insurance" to the same target page, which is a poor strategy for SEO. What competitors do instead that helps them achieve better rankings, is to back-link to key pages with a variety of keyword stems, like "small business insurance", "internet business insurance", etc.
Other Observations
When comparing SImplyBusiness to other leading top SaaS B2B websites, the other notable weakness is relying fully on one single lead form, especially one that in this case has 30+ required fields for users to complete and where partial form data is not saved for users who reload the page or encounter an error.
Additionally, SimplyBusiness has zero customer case studies, which are a significant differentiation driver and a key way SimplyBusiness could stand out in the competitive internet-based business insurance space.