Optimising your online presence as a mortgage broker

Published in Mortgage Introducer Magazine February 2010

Imagine you have discovered a new restaurant. It seems a fine establishment situated in a location with lots of other eateries. You look at the menu, find it tempting, enter the premises and enjoy a memorable meal.

Next time you are in the area you go back, check the menu, it’s exactly the same. That’s fine – there are other dishes you want to try. However this time you notice that unlike other establishments where waiters use hand held credit card consuls for speedy service, you are delayed as the waiter queues with others to use the establishment’s only terminal. Annoying.

When you next find yourself in peckish mode, and in that part of the world, you return to the establishment. The menu has not changed and you remember the wait and decide to try somewhere else. Website users go through a very similar experience. Unless that experience is comfortable, innovative and evolving they will move on elsewhere.

So what makes a good mortgage broker website design and provides a ‘worthwhile’ experience for the visitor? All self-respecting finance businesses now utilise a website to communicate with their visitors and sell them products and services. But how many are truly effective? Unfortunately, not many. For while creating a mortgage website is the best way to inform an extremely wide audience about the services and products on offer, ensuring that you are reaching the largest number of potential clients is a different matter altogether.

The successful players know how to employ search engine optimisation or SEO. More specifically, SEO makes the difference between an abandoned website in a dark corner of the web and one at the top of search engine rankings. And getting close to the top of those rankings is important because the first site that visitors see attracts the largest amount of visitors and consequently more business. The most successful mortgage broker sites on the internet are the most visible ones, and this is largely dictated by search engines. In order to leverage the possible advantages of SEO for your website you need to get a clear understanding of how to use keywords to attract targeted visitors.

The basis of any SEO technology is to search for these relevant keywords that can drive a considerable amount of traffic to your site, get it displayed in the search engine result pages and found by the users who are looking for the services you offer.

Ensuring your mortgage broker business obtains high-quality links to your site and knowing to whom your site is linking is another crucial component of SEO technology. Having other relevant mortgage and related websites with high rankings pointing back to yours can be extremely advantageous. On the contrary, links from websites that are not appreciated highly by the search engines will contribute little and can even be detrimental to your rankings.

While a few mortgage brokers have good websites, plenty of firms desperately need to be more effective online as consumers and other business are now using the internet as the primary means of buying products/services and finding out more about companies they want to deal with. Ultimately the user experience is key as their journey on your website makes the difference as to whether you are successful online or not.

The key areas that determine what the user experience will be revolve around the websites usability, functunality and credibility. These components, along with many others, collectively play a crucial role in your online marketing efforts, they all are equally important and each of them taken separately can have a significant impact on the success or failure of your online business.

Proper SEO methodology, along with the eye-catching website design and interesting content, will greatly improve your site rankings and deliver more targeted traffic.

It is important that you select a web development company that is ahead of curve and are ahead of latest developments online and embrace these ideas. That company should also be familiar with the nuances and specialities of your industry. Having your site developed by a website design specialist that can provide expert advice adds real benefit by obtaining better search rankings, improved online promotion and adds to the usability, credibility and functionality of your online businesses.

Of course there are other processes that must also be adhered to, principally regularly providing fresh content. Your site must continually be updated if you expect your visitors to keep coming back. The site must also have useful content, as well as tools that will help your target audience. Make your site as easy to navigate as possible and be sure that your links work the way that they should. There is nothing that frustrates people more than a “broken” link or webpage, and if your site is labeled as such, chances are slim that many people will want to come back.

There are an almost infinite number of web development companies but those who specialise in mortgage broker websites are fewer on the ground. Indeed there are many that will say they are specialists in whatever industry that happens to come their way but are they really knowledgeable and sensitive to the regulatory constraints of this industry while being able to design effective, sales driven online experiences? Get the basics right by having a professional insurance/finance website with good SEO and the benefits of reaching out to new customers as well as servicing and retaining existing ones will be evident.