Mortgage SEO - The Wagon Wheel Concept

by Brandon Cornett

Your mortgage website is the center of your search engine optimization (SEO ) program. It represents the hub of the wheel — to begin a metaphor — and the wheel keeps everything rolling toward your online mortgage marketing success.

But your wheel needs spokes in order to function properly. Here are some essential “spokes” that will carry your Mortgage SEO program and bring better search engine visibility for your mortgage website.

Key Phrases
Key phrases should be the starting point of your Mortgage SEO program. By using a tool like WordTracker.com, you can research words and phrases to determine the search behavior of your target audience. You can actually find out which phrases people enter into search engines most often to find products or services like yours. Armed with this information, you can build the kind of web content and website they’re looking for.

Site Structure
The structure of your mortgage website has a big impact on search engine visibility. For instance, navigation menus made from Flash technology can stop search engines in their tracks. But an alternate text-based menu can help them along their way. If search engine optimization is important to your mortgage website (and it should be), you need to consider the way your website is designed.

Inbound Links
Inbound links (from other websites to your website) play a key role in search engine visibility, particularly with Google. If you want to increase your search engine ranking steadily over time, you have to increase the “link popularity” of your site as well. Related article on link building

Web Directories
Web directories can strengthen your link popularity and make you less susceptible to ranking fluctuations caused by search engine updates. I recommend to clients that they add their websites to one or two general directories (like Best of the Web) and as many niche directories as possible.

Blogging
A mortgage blog can play a major role in search engine optimization. Blogs make it very easy to publish web content, even for somebody with little or no web experience. Because of this, bloggers are more likely to publish new content on a regular basis. This kind of growth and regularity can go a long way toward search engine visibility.

Press Releases
A press release distributed over the web will often get picked up by respectable news websites and blogs. If you include some hyerplinks within your press release, all of those blogs and websites will be pointing toward your website with key phrase hyperlinks. See “Inbound Links” above.

Tools & Resources
Web-based resources improve your mortgage website in three ways: (1)  They increase your website’s “buzz” factor, (2) they give your visitors useful information that will keep them on site longer, and (3) they make your mortgage website easier to link to (see “inbound linking” above). An example might be a home buyer’s resource center with information on the various types of mortgage loans.

Good luck with your mortgage SEO efforts!