If you’re in the mortgage industry and make money off of offering them, then you know that a mortgage lead is any prospect or potential customer who is looking for a mortgage loan. Many mortgage loan professionals, including loan officers, mortgage loan originators, and mortgage brokers, all rely on getting mortgage leads that you can turn into actual borrowers. There are quite a few ways to generate mortgage leads, and this process is known as lead generation. You can do everything from print advertising and combing through your network of contacts, but unless you are trying to capture mortgage leads online, you’re not doing all that you can. It’s not enough to just have a website up, although that is obviously important. Keep reading to learn some tips and advice you can use in terms of using SEO for mortgage leads.
Does the terminology of SEO for mortgage leads confuse you? You know what mortgage leads are, but what is SEO? It’s an acronym for search engine optimization. In short, that’s a group of techniques done both on your site and off the site that help your website show up higher in search engine rankings for the keywords that you compete for. The higher you rank in search engines, the more the users of that search engine are going to visit your website when they’re looking for mortgage loans, information, and advice. This is not just a growth in the traffic coming to your site, but it’s organic and interested traffic that you can really cash in on.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to just sprinkle some of those competitive keywords around your site and win. Including keywords at the right density is one SEO technique, but it’s not enough. If you want to see what you’re up against, you should use your favorite search engine to look up the keywords or search phrases that you think should bring up your site. How many pages down are you? Are you even there? You have competition out there, but you can get ahead of the curve, if not become the leader of the pack.
As mentioned already, the various attributes which wind up determining your search engine rankings can generally be classified in two different categories. Those are the on-page and off-page factors. In a basic context, on-page factors deal with various attributes inside your website, whereas off-page factors have more do to with the numerous factors occurring outside of your site. One way to look at it is that on-page factors are what tell the search engines what you think about yourself, and off-page factors tell search engines what the rest of the Internet generally thinks about you. Both of these angles matter a lot.
First, let’s take a look at the on-page factors. The initial step is figuring out what keywords people actually use when they are trying to find mortgage products/ services that you or your business offers. These might be similar to what you tried earlier trying to find your site when seeing how it does and who you’re up against. Then again, this list isn’t the search strings you use, but what people generally are using. They’re out there looking for a mortgage or related things, and that’s the traffic that you want visiting. You can use keyword tools like KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker help you find out how many folks are searching for specific search terms and even get suggestions in regards to related keyword terms. SEO consultants or firms can also do this for you. Whatever resource you use, find at least two or three appropriate keywords to match up with the various pages of your site. Once you pick the first keywords to focus on, move on to incorporating them into the many HTML elements of your website, such as the title tags, the meta tags, the header tags, the ALT tags, and of course your body content. This will help the search engines properly categorize all your pages for the very keywords that you’re targeting.
In terms of off-page factors, what you really need to know is that backlinks are what matter more than anything. Search engines analyze these links to see how popular, reputable, and relevant your website is when determining your ranking. It used to be that the more backlinks you had, the better, but that’s not the case anymore. You do want a good volume of backlinks, but you also want quality backlinks more than anything. One backlink from a good website is better than a hundred from bad sites.
What are good and bad websites in terms of backlinks? A bad website might be a generic WordPress blog that content about all kinds of things. A good website would be something formal or professional that is relevant and reputable. A site that also focuses on mortgages is going to give you a better backlink to your own mortgage website. Also, if that backlinking website already has trusted and authoritative status in the eyes of a search engine, their link to you is a stronger endorsement of your own site.
In addition to backlinks, there are other things that can help. For instance, Facebook Advertising for Mortgage Leads could help as well. Google likes to see traffic coming from high authority websites to yours. so while Facebook Advertising on it’s own could be great for gaining leads, it can also help with your SEO efforts as well. Quality PPC for mortgage leads, whether it be Facebook, Google, LinkedIN, or other PPC options is generally a good idea for marketing and advertising diversification.
Now that you’ve read this article, you know how you can possibly use SEO for mortgage leads. With the right techniques to generate organic traffic from search engines, your website can convert the growing number of prospects into a growing number of actual mortgages that you provide.