I keep hearing out there that online marketing for mortgage professionals is a waste of time because you’ll never be able to rank high enough in the search engines to get significant traffic. Of course, being the internet type that I am, I have never bought into this logic. But I couldn’t prove that it was possible for a regular, non-tech-saavy loan officer to crack the search engine rankings and achieve significant “organic” (unpaid) search engine traffic until now.

About two months ago, I decided to create a simple mortgage blog of my own, and see what it would take for me to get decent search traffic. It’s safe to say that the initial results have been very positive. So much so that I believe I now have the proof necessary to positively assert that any loan officer can create and maintain a website that ranks high enough in the search engines to get solid, significant traffic translating directly into more closed loans. And I’m going to tell you exactly what I did to achieve a top ten ranking in Google and MSN.

It’s Homework Time!

The first step for success in any undertaking is to do your homework, and for my experiment it was no different. If I want to get search engine traffic to my mortgage website then I have to know my target market and what words they are using to search online for a mortgage. Since I live and work in Salt Lake City, I decided that I’d start with Utah residents, or people interested in Utah, as my target market.

I assumed that Utah, with a total population of just over two million, might be small enough to be my targeted area. If I had to, I would further limit my target to Salt Lake City or perhaps Salt Lake County, depending on what my research uncovered.

I chose to target a geographical region but you may choose to target another demographic. This process is not unlike traditional (offline) marketing.

Are There Enough People Searching?

So the first thing I want to find out is how many times people search for “Utah mortgages” or “Utah mortgage loans” online. If there’s enough search volume, then I can move on to step two in my research. I used this handy tool from Yahoo to find out last month’s search volume for “Utah mortgages” and “Utah mortgage loans”.

• “Utah mortgages” had a search volume of 2,003 last month
• “Utah mortgage loans” had a search volume of 1,303 last month

Not too bad. Combined, that represents about 110 searches per day for those two keywords on Yahoo alone. Google, the largest search engine, doesn’t disclose it’s data but it controls at least four times as much of the search market as Yahoo. So if I can rank in the top ten for “Utah mortgages” in Google, I can probably expect to get 100-400 unique visitors per day from these two keywords alone. That’s not including traffic from other search terms that my site would probably rank for if I’m ranking well for my primary terms.

If my site got 100 visitors a day and I got a single inquiry, or 1% action rate, then I’d be looking at about seven pre-quals a week. If I managed to close just one of those leads a week that would still represent four closings per month. I know many loan officers who would love to consistently close four deals per month, but I also know many loan officers who close at a much better rate than one in seven.

The numbers are looking good so far. It looks like my chosen search terms could realistically send me some nice traffic.

Your Site Name Is VERY Important

As a loan officer or any other independent sales agent, one of the first things you learn is that branding yourself is one of the most important things you can do. You want people to do business with you, regardless of which company you are with. Online marketing is a little bit different. You still want to brand yourself, but you want your domain name to match your chosen search terms as closely as possible.

In other words, after choosing “Utah mortgages” and “Utah mortgage loans” as my keywords, I wanted to find a website name with those words in it. UtahMortgages.com or UtahMortgageLoans.com – something like that would be terrific. Unfortunately, both of those names were already reserved. However, I did find that UtahMortgageLoans.net was available so I quickly purchased it for a cheap $9.99. You can buy domain names from several sites on the net, but I’m most familiar with GoDaddy.com and RegisterFly.com.

Getting a domain name that includes your keywords will help you rank higher in the search engines. Period. It won’t automatically put you at #1, necessarily, but you immediately stand a much better chance of ranking for “reverse mortgages in Arkansas” with a domain name like ArkansasReverseMortgages.com than with BobTheLoanOfficer.com.

If you’re following this article along and using it as a guide to create your own site, you may well find that most of the keyword intensive domain names are already registered by someone else. Not to worry. Since this article advocates creating a blog as your mortgage website, you can sign up for a free blog at Blogger, WordPress, or another blog hosting company. When you use one of these free sites, you’ll be able to choose a name like ArkansasReverseMortgages.Blogspot.com or ArkansasReverseMortgages.WordPress.com, which will be almost as good as having ArkansasReverseMortgages.com.

So anyway, I searched for a name relating to “Utah mortgages” and found one in UtahMortgageLoans.net.

Create The Site

This is the part where people’s hearts begin to beat faster, a cold sweat begins to form on palms, and eyes begin to search for the nearest exit. I understand the anxiety but anymore you can get a simple site up and going without knowing much at all about computers or the internet, especially if you create a free blog on Blogger or Wordpress.

If you have chosen to go with a free blog, then all you really need to do is follow the instructions provided to get your account created and your site configured. There isn’t much to it at all.

If you’ve decided to buy a domain name then there are two major steps involved. First, you’ll need to get web hosting. Second, you’ll need to install blog software on your hosting account. If those two steps freak you out then you can either change your mind and go for a free blog, dedicate a few hours to learning about web hosting, or you can pay someone to help you get set up. Once you’re set up, there won’t be much maintenance or other technical help you’ll need. If you go this route, I recommend using Wordpress because it’s free (open source) and there is a large community of developers that have created many plugins, which help extend your site’s capabilities. In fact, Mortgage Broker Land uses a modified form of Wordpress to handle it’s articles and I use it on the site I created for this experiment – UtahMortgageLoans.net.

Regardless of which blog software you choose, be sure to enable search engine friendly URLs (should appear in your options) and include the post title as part of the URL (web address for the post).

Add Content To Your Site

Once I had my site up I began to add content. The nice thing about blogs is that you can add new information as simply as you can create documents in a word processor, and search engines flat-out love blogs due to all the great words they have. So I began posting about things relevant to my site, and remembered to use my chosen keywords in the posts I made. By mentioning Utah mortgages and Utah mortgage loans from time to time, I help the search engines know what my site is about. However, if I mention my keywords too often the search engines will notice and ignore my site completely. So the best thing to do is to post information using natural language. Don’t try to cheat by posting your keywords over and over and over again. That won’t get you anywhere.

If you take a look at UtahMortgageLoans.net, you’ll see that I’ve posted on a variety of topics. The more you post, the more opportunities you give yourself to get search traffic because each post creates a new page. When I look at my server logs now, I see traffic coming in on keywords that are quite varied. I noticed just the other day that someone found me by searching for veggie burgers. They must have found my story about a waitress who likes bacon on her veggie burgers. While this isn’t my target audience, it just goes to show there are an infinite number of ways that people can find you online.

Another great thing about running a blog is that you can update your content regularly without much hassle. Search engines love sites that are constantly updated with fresh information.

Get Links From Other Sites

Once I had my site up and running with a few posts made, the next thing I needed to do was to let the world know that my site was online. The way you do this is to get links from other established websites pointing at your new site. All search engines operate by scanning a website and following the links from one page to another.

In order to get some links pointing at my new site, I started by submitting the site to a few mortgage directories including LoanInfoHome.com and Mortgage-X.com. There are many other directories on the web where you can get free links back to your site with new ones appearing all the time. Mortgage-B2B.com is a new directory specifically for the mortgage industry, where I have now submitted UtahMortgageLoans.net.

Link building is one of the major aspects of Search Engine Optimization, and if you Google link building you’ll find gobs of information about all sorts of strategies, suggestions, pitfalls, and probably even shady spam techniques. As a matter of “keeping it simple, stupid” I like to stick to a single principle: Get as many links as possible from as many quality sites as possible that are related to my site. In other words, a link on a quality site about mortgages to my mortgage site is good. A link on a quality site about dog food to my mortgage site isn’t all that great.

One final word about linking is that I like to place links on my site that point to related sites of quality. After all, you can’t expect to get a bunch of links from other sites without ever linking back. If everyone did that there wouldn’t be very many links going to other sites at all.

Links Should Contain Your Keywords

Now it’s time for a bit more explanation regarding my choice of domain name: UtahMortgageLoans.net. The reason I think it’s so important to get a domain name that contains your chosen keywords is because you will rarely get a link pointing to your site that does not contain your keywords. Almost all your inbound links will describe your site in the manner that you want to be described.

There are several ways a link can be made and some ways are better than others when it comes to search engine rankings. For example,one site may link to my site like this:

Erik Baty’s Mortgage Blog

And another like this:

Utah Mortgage Loans

The first example does accurately describe my site, but it doesn’t do so in a manner that will achieve maximum value in terms of my search engine marketing objective. Not nearly as many people are searching for “Erik Baty’s Mortgage Blog” or “Erik Baty” as they are for “Utah Mortgage Loans”. The link text tells the search engines what the site being linked to is about, and it’s a major factor in what the engines use to determine what sites show up in their results when a particular keyword is searched.

When your keywords are included in your domain name, your inbound link text will include your keywords even when a webmaster links to you like this (and this happens quite often):

UtahMortgageLoans.net

Keyword based domain names are my favorite simply because they are easier to rank in the search engines. Natural linking tendencies by other webmasters is one of the major reasons why it’s easier to get ranked with a domain like UtahMortgageLoans.net.

However, all is not lost if you’ve already got a website that does not include your target keywords. You can get new links that point to ABCLoanMasters.com that contain your keywords as text. If ABCLoanMasters.com has the target keywords “Orange County Mortgage Rates” they would just need to get links that look like this:

Orange County Mortgage Rates (pointing to ABCLoanMasters.com)

Getting enough links like the above from enough quality sites will indicate to the search engines that ABCLoanMasters.com has information about “Orange County Mortgage Rates”.

Post, Link, Repeat

If you don’t rank right off the bat like my new site was able to do, it’s mostly a matter of repeating the process of posting and link building. However, I’m convinced that if you select your keywords carefully, choose a good domain name that contains your keywords, post relative information on your site that contains your keywords, and get links from quality sites that contain your keywords in the text – you can get a top ten ranking in Google, MSN, and Yahoo within a short period of time.

Other than what I’ve described thus far, I didn’t do anything else to achieve the rankings currently enjoyed by UtahMortgageLoans.net. Everything I did is within the skill set of 99% of loan officers out there. There’s not a huge difference between creating a free blog at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com compared to hosting your own Wordpress blog, at least as far as getting the site ranked goes.

So if you don’t have a site yet go start one today. The sooner you get in the game the sooner you’ll begin to enjoy search engine traffic. If you’ve already got a site but it doesn’t have a blog then go start a blog. And get links to your site(s) that contain your chosen keywords.

I’ll see you in the search engine results!

More Search Engine Marketing Information and Resources

There’s an abundance of information out there that delve deeper into the finer points of search engine optimization and marketing. A good resource for the serious search engine marketer is an eBook by Jennifer Laycock. Click here to get more information or click the image below.

Digital Point Keyword Tracker is another very useful tool that will help you keep an eye on how your site is ranking for your chosen keywords. You can even track your competitors and how they rank compared to you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Marketing Online, Mortgage Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.