An insurance agent website, when your best work can't be reviewed

Discovery started with 29 questions in six areas, from Alvin's customers and what slows a sale down to his products, his competition and his brand. His customers choose an agent on speed of response, competitive pricing and knowledge. He loses deals to other agents, direct portals and comparison sites.

Where an agent proves their worth is the claim. Alvin files claims with the insurer on his clients' behalf.

No restaurant owner wants a public review thanking their agent for help with three workplace injury claims. Public reviews of the claims work, the usual way to show trust online, were out of reach. And as a business new to the web, Singapura Insurance had no reviews to draw on anyway.

We mapped how Singapore SMEs come to buy insurance, and one trigger stood out. A policy is close to expiry, and the boss tells someone in the office to look for alternatives. That person starts searching for quotes.

None of the agency websites we reviewed spoke to that moment. Most read like compliance checklists.

The homepage headline is written for that person: 'Need Work Injury Compensation Insurance, foreign worker, or commercial / private vehicle insurance? Get competitive quotes in 1-2 working days.' It names the products they need and gives them a turnaround they can report back. Each product page then lists the documents to prepare, so the quote request is ready to send.

We wrote 'Need' rather than 'Renewing'. A renewal-only headline would have shut out every visitor who isn't renewing.

If clients can't vouch for you in public, the website has to show that it understands them. Our way in was to let visitors pick their own situation.

Below the headline, the homepage asks 'What do you need covered?' and answers it in the visitor's own words: I employ workers. I manage company vehicles. I run an F&B business. I run a construction business. Each card points to the page for that need.

Discovery surfaced three ideal client profiles: F&B, construction and engineering, and medical clinics. We chose two of them, F&B and construction, and gave each a dedicated page. None of the agency sites we reviewed had industry pages at all.

Instead of generic building and insurance imagery, we chose images from the industries Alvin's customers work in: a restaurant kitchen for F&B, a building site for construction, and on the commercial vehicle page, the vehicles fleet owners run, from vans and lorries to tippers and prime movers.

Alvin sells to these two industries in different ways, and the two pages are built differently to match.

F&B owners buy a standard bundle: work injury, foreign worker medical, security bond, public liability, fire, business interruption, stock deterioration and contents. Their page maps all eight, says why each matters in an F&B business, and walks through situations owners know, like a kitchen burn, a customer slipping, or spoiled stock. The bundle itself is the offer, under the line 'one conversation, full coverage'.

Construction is consultative. A contractor describes the work, whether that's working at height, hot works, tunnelling or heavy equipment, and Alvin builds cover around it. Their page sets out ten types of cover as a menu, explains how the conversation works, covers MOM safety requirements, and says it in one line: 'Construction insurance isn't one-size-fits-all.'

Alvin's own content draft was thorough and technically accurate. It was also written the way insurance people talk to underwriters every day. The readers are SME bosses who just need to know if they're compliant.

We rewrote the product and industry pages from 'here's what the Act says' to 'here's what this means for your business'.

About three in ten of Alvin's customers confuse foreign worker medical insurance with work injury compensation. The foreign worker medical page opens by explaining the difference, and the FAQs on both pages answer it again.

Alvin's biggest time-waster was prospects who won't share their company name and UEN.

The homepage says plainly who the agency is for and who it isn't. It's for you if you're ready to share your company name and UEN upfront. It may not be for you if you want to compare anonymously.

Putting the requirement on the homepage means prospects see it before they message, not halfway through a quote.

Singapura Insurance went from no website to 11 pages, live at singapurainsurance.com. There's a homepage, six product pages written in plain English with a list of documents to prepare and an FAQ, two industry pages, About and Contact. WhatsApp is one tap away on every page.

It's early, so there are no results to report yet.

Insurance isn't the only business where the work that earns trust is the work clients keep quiet about. The key decisions on this website trace back to things Discovery and our research turned up: the renewal moment, the three-in-ten confusion between two products, the prospects who won't share a UEN, and two industries that buy in different ways.

Every Website Development project starts with that Discovery, before anything is designed. Projects start from S$1,800. If you're still weighing who should build your website, see how we compare with agencies, freelancers and DIY builders.