Search Engine Marketing for Brokers...

Mortgage Support Network gives some advice on making sure your site produces as much business as possible.

 

The Goal: You want as many prospects coming through your site as possible. The Strategy: Get your site ranked as highly as possible in the search engine rankings.

 

Today, search engines represent one of the single most important sources of targeted visitors to your website. The amount of people habitually using search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) to quickly find providers of goods & services continues to increase, so if you are investing money in a website, bearing this huge audience in mind ensures your site works as effectively as possible in generating business.

 

When you type in “Mortgage Advice” to a search engine like Google, the blue line at the top of the results page reads “Results 1-10 of about 39,000,000”. What has happened in the last split second is that Google has found nearly40 million web pages containing the words “Mortgage” & “Advice”. It has then (through a number of complex filters we will not go into here) managed to rank these 40m pages, so that the first website listed is deemed the most relevant to our search.

 

How Google (& other search engines) do this is too large a topic for an article like this, but what is possible is to list a series of “Rules” that when adhered to, can drastically improve your website’s ranking within the major search engines.

 

As we have touched on in previous marketing articles, the key to making your website work as an effective business tool is getting as many well-targeted visitors coming through it. By targeted visitors, we refer to a god match between what you are offering & what they are searching for.

 

Earlier in the article, I gave the example of typing in the term “Mortgage Advice”  into Google, which rendered nearly 40m results. If this “search term” is made more specific by typing in “Mortgage Advice Leicester”, the number of results listed drops from 40m to 866,000 – a drop of 97%!!!!

 

If we refine the search term further still and type in “Mortgage Advice Syston” (Syston being a town within the city of Leicester), we are down to 789 results. Now 789 results is still a lot of web pages, but as you look further and further down the listings, you will notice that the fit becomes increasingly tenuous, with the search terms appearing further apart on in totally different areas etc.

 

The point here is that it is not too difficult to rank highly for a specific search term when your site is optimised with that search term in mind. As mentioned in previous articles, certain businesses are geographically dependent from a search term perspective. For example, people looking for a dentist will never type in “Dentist” on it’s own. Instead, they will type in “Dentist Leicester” and research shows that people are becoming increasingly specific in their search terms, so they may in fact type in “Dentist Leicester whitening costs” or similar!

 

As financial advice is generally something people want to find in a specific locality, brokers have a great opportunity to use search engine optimisation to their advantage. This term basically refers to an effort to ensure a website is built in a way that increases the chance of it’s discovery by interested parties. The words (content) within a website is “crawled” by programmes called “Spiders” which analyse the content & decide where to index the site for specific key terms. So to bring in the above example, if you have a mortgage broker business based in a certain locality, ensure that your site is full of content which includes locality information. Include reference to the surrounding locations and try to include details of as many product types as possible to increase the chance of a searcher finding you. The trick is to put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for your product – while one may search for a “Mortgage Broker in Leicester”, another may be searching for “Buy to Let Mortgage advice Midlands” or “100% mortgage Nottingham”.

 

The key is to write content which is readable, logical & informative, while ensuring you include as many relevant details as possible to ensure spiders, and therefore searchers can what you are offering. There are a number of other search optimisation methods, which we will cover in future articles, but a phrase often used within optimisation discussions is “Content is King”, which basically means that if you write the website content well, including as many search elements as possible, you stand a good chance of seeing good levels of traffic.

 

For more details, visit our site Mortgage Support Network & look at recent news articles.