Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a critical marketing strategy for any serious mortgage business.
The simple fact is that the majority of consumer looking to buy or refinance a home start with an online search. Therefore, to get a sustainable flow of sales leads you need to be in as many of those search (especially in your local area) as possible.
The good news is that the basics to being found more often, by mortgage prospects in your local area, are not quite as hard or mysterious as you might think.
5 Mortgage SEO Basics to get you in more searches (money) faster…
Before we even get started with the basic mechanics of mortgage SEO, I encourage you to think about what you are trying to accomplish. Your main objective is to attract people preparing to buy a new home or refinance their existing mortgage.
Consequently, you should always be asking yourself these two important questions when you are working on your search engine marketing:
- What do my customers search for?
- What do they expect to find?
Oh, and here are a few words we with use when we talk about SEO that you may not be familiar with:
Backlinks – Links from another website to your website, often referred to as “incoming” or “inbound” links. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in helping search engines determine the relevance or quality of a web page to specific keywords being searched.
Keyword Research – Keyword research is used to determine the actual keywords that people use to search for certain types of products, services, or information. One of the most popular was to do that is by using Google’s Keyword Tool.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - Sometimes simply referred to as search engine results, these are the lists of web pages that are returned by a search engine in response to a search on a particular keyword. The results normally include the web pages title, one or more link(s) to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page.
Social Media – Content, media, or tools syndicated or used to syndicate through online social interaction. Some common examples are “Tweeting” or ReTweeting” a blog post via Twitter, publishing or “Liking” pictures or videos to Facebook, or “Digging” a particularly interesting news article on Digg.
Web Content – Web content is text, sound, images, video, or mixture that makes up the user experience on websites. SEO uses all of these to increase search engine rankings or SERP. However, text in the form of articles or blog posts are often the most popular tools of SEO.
Now, lets get ourselves in some search results:
1. Google Places
This is probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to show up in more Google searches. Google Places is simply a free listing of your business and the services you offer. The power of this listing in search is that Google returns this listings, with high priority in many different local searches. Since mortgage is closely associated with real estate you will often find home buyers and mortgage refinance customers search for mortgage related terms in conjunction with their local city or state. Google Places is a quick way to get at the top of these searches.
2. Get a Website
If you don’t have a mortgage website your mortgage business doesn’t exist. That may seem like a harsh statement, but phonebooks are dead, newspapers are dead, and mortgage referrals fall in to what we call “Hope Marketing.” All strategies that require you to “hope” you’re going to be in business next month.
Very Important: What’s worse, if you don’t get a mortgage website then all those people searching the web to find you (even your referrals) will be finding and calling your competitors.
A mortgage website is your modern business storefront. It’s the only way for people to find your mortgage business. It’s the only way to reliably attract more search engine results to your mortgage business.
3. Write Mortgage Articles
Getting into search engine results requires you to convince search engines (i.e., Google) that your web pages are relevant and helpful. Simply state that means when someone searches for a specific keyword you have the best answer.
Mortgages are naturally complex and confusing, which means customers have lots of questions before getting or refinancing a mortgage. For mortgage SEO and your mortgage business that becomes a big opportunity. All those searches present many opportunities for you to attract a new customer to your mortgage website. But, to grab those searches you need to create the web pages with the answers to all those questions.
Ideally each mortgage article (web page) specifically addresses one question a borrower might have. This creates an endless possibility of mortgage articles to write. And the more articles (web pages) you have the more likely you are to be ranked high in the search engine results for one or more mortgage keywords.
4. Market Your Articles
The World Wide Web has become an enormous place with billions of web pages. Even the amazing engineers are Google can’t craft software that perfectly finds and indexes all of the web pages on the Internet. Therefore, you’re going to have to do a little marketing to get your mortgage website, mortgage articles, and web pages found and ranked high in the search engines.
The simplest way to do this marketing is to simply share the mortgage articles you write with friends, colleagues, and customers. That can be adding helpful web page links in your email signature file or in emails to clients you are trying to help, linking your web page to online profiles like Linkedin or Facebook, or sharing your mortgage articles via social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, or Stumbleupon.
Believe it or not Google has gotten sophisticated enough to pick on all these kinds of sharing as “social signals” of good quality Web content and will reward your search engine rankings the more your mortgage articles are shared.
5. Get Links, Get Links, Get Links
Backlinks are the gold standards of SEO. They are the currency that gives you the best ROI on your SEO marketing dollar.
Collecting and counting the number of times other websites link back to your website or web pages was the blockbuster innovation that made Google a billion dollar company. As such, you should put a lot of effort into getting as many people as possible to link to your mortgage website and mortgage articles. This would be an example:
You need to get someone to add something like this to their web page:
<a href="http://mortgagewebinabox.com">Mortgage Websites</a>
Which will look like this and will become a backlink for Google to count and improve your search engine ranking:
Getting links can be as simple as asking other website owners, listing in Web directories, adding to social profiles, social bookmarking, social media sharing, and so many more. Getting backlinks are only limited by your imagination and marketing creativity.
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