How I Took Three Competitive Non-Brand Insurance Keywords to #1—and Saved The Hartford Millions in Paid Media
In October 2016, I joined The Hartford as an SEO contractor, brought in to help the SEO lead change the culture, organization, measurement and strategy of the organic search practice at TheHartford.com. By February 2017, I was offered a full-time role to lead SEO initiatives for the Small Commercial & Personal Lines Insurance business. The task ahead was ambitious but clear: take high-value non-branded keywords that were buried in search and bring them to the top—organically.
Key targets included:
- Small business insurance
- General liability insurance
- Workers compensation insurance
At the time, all three terms were ranking on page 2 or lower. That meant we were spending millions annually on paid media just to maintain visibility. The goal was to reverse that trend—and own these SERPs organically.
Step 1: Build a Performance Engine
Working with my colleague Garrett, then an SEO Analyst, we created a comprehensive SEO performance dashboard. This system measured:
- Organic entrances
- Time on site
- Quote initiations
- Policy conversions
We wanted to prove SEO’s value not just in traffic, but in revenue-driving actions. The dashboard became a crucial tool for validating impact, prioritizing optimizations, and evangelizing SEO across teams.
Step 2: Content Overhaul & Keyword Mapping
One of the most significant efforts was restructuring the Business Owner’s Playbook, which was a messy archive of disconnected articles. I turned it into a strategic content hub, aligned to search demand and the buyer journey.
I led the SEO content strategy, delivering keyword targets and SEO prompts to two in-house writers, who produced dozens of optimized articles based on my direction. This content became the foundation of our climb up the search rankings.
Step 3: Boost Authority with Strategic Backlinking
Great content alone wouldn’t cut it. We needed backlink equity to compete.
I sourced and led the RFP process for a backlink agency, launching an outreach program that earned high-quality organic backlinks to key pages. This helped build domain authority and push our rankings to the top faster than internal linking alone could manage.
Step 4: Platform, Partner, and Process Leadership
I also led the RFP and onboarding for our SEO platform, ultimately selecting Conductor.com as our measurement and content optimization tool. Shout out to Seth, the CEO who’ve I’ve known since he started the business sometime around 2009. Anyway, I worked directly with both internal teams and external agency partners to manage:
- Technical SEO
- Content audits
- Measurement and reporting
- Link-building strategies
The Results: From Page 2 to #1
Within three years, all three target keywords reached #1 organic position on Google.
The impact was massive:
- Millions in paid media savings
- 67% increase in Small Commercial organic entrances
- 40% growth in organic quote initiations
- Significant lift in quote-to-bind rates and policy revenue
The Chicken Suit Bet (and Lack of Credit)
I’ll never forget one of company town halls that followed. My boss—who had made a bold bet with the VP Small Commercial that if “workers compensation insurance” hit #1, he’d wear a chicken suit—got up and told the story to thunderous applause.
There was a barely a passing mention of myself or Garrett, of course. Just the chicken suit story and a room full of people clapping for a win they didn’t know who was behind.
But that’s OK. The data—and the business results—speak louder than applause.
This experience shaped my belief in quiet leadership and data-backed execution. From turning scattered content into structured strategy, to building the funnel measurement that connected SEO to revenue, this was about much more than keywords.
It was about transforming an underperforming digital presence into a sustainable growth engine, one ranking at a time.
And hey—sometimes the people in the chicken suit aren’t the ones doing the real work. And that’s fine by me.
