How Do I Get Started With SEO As A Mortgage Broker?

With mortgage originations taking a dip recently, you might be feeling more urgency to get in front of anyone in your area who’s looking for a home loan. Fortunately, there’s a tool at your disposal that you can use to do precisely that: your website.

No, we’re not talking about plastering your URL over benches and buses. Instead, you can turn your attention to the digital realm to reap results. With search engine optimization (SEO), you get a way to move your website up Google, Bing, etc. As a result, SEO is a powerful tool in the pocket of any mortgage broker in 2024. 

If you want to start wielding this instrument, we’ve built this guide to help you get started. 

Step 1: Understand SEO

First up, before you can use SEO, you need to wrap your head around it. Google has an excellent guide you can use here, but we’ll warn you: it’s pretty involved. 

To give you a quick overview, SEO works by telling Google what’s on your site. This way, if you have information that someone is searching for, Google can show them your webpage in their search engine results page (SERP). 

Here’s an example. Say your mortgage brokerage operates in Sacramento, California. A renter living in the city is ready to buy a house, but they want to know what kind of interest rates to expect. They search “mortgage rates in Sacramento.” If you have mortgage rates on your site, you operate in Sacramento, and you’ve done SEO work to tell Google about your rates and location, you have a good likelihood of showing up on that SERP. 

And the better your SEO is, the higher you’ll show up on that page.  

(SEO also applies to other search engines, but we’ll use Google moving forward for simplicity’s sake.)

Step 2: Pick your keywords

Now that you have a decent understanding of what SEO can do for you, it’s time to decide which SERPs you want to try to move up. That means identifying keywords — or the word or phrase people will type into the search box. 

Generally, it’s best to assign one keyword to each webpage on your site. For example, you might perform search engine optimization for the following keywords and phrases:

• “Mortgage broker in Sacramento” for your homepage
• “Mortgage rates in Sacramento” for your rate table page
• “How much will my mortgage payment be in Sacramento?” for the page that has your mortgage calculator

You can also build blogs and landing pages for other keywords you want to target. If you offer VA loans, for example, you might create a page on your website that you SEO for “VA loans in Sacramento.”

Note that we’re including location in these example keywords. That makes the SERP easier to win. Instead of competing against VA lenders across the country, including your location in the keyword narrows the pool, making it easier to rank higher.

To play with keywords and suss out the competition for each, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner. Here’s a screenshot to give you a quick feel for how this tool works:

And to help Google best position you in front of local potential borrowers, make sure you set up your Google Business Profile. 

Step 3: Add your keywords to your site

Once you decide on the keywords you want to target, it’s time to actually implement them into the pages you’ve identified. Here, our on-page SEO checklist should help. 

The main places you want to put your keywords include:

• Throughout your content (but make sure they read naturally)
• In the page title
• In any headers 

You’ll also need to use your website’s backend tools to add the keywords into some strategic locations, including the:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• URL
• Alt tags on any images on the page

If you’re not sure what those first two are, don’t worry — we’re getting into some slightly technical SEO terminology here. The title tag and the meta description control how your webpage shows up on SERPs. Here a quick example from our own site:

Writing a title tag and meta description that includes your keyword does two things. First, it signals to search engines that your webpage has content about that topic. Secondly, it encourages real people in search of that information to click through to your website. 

This is a quick-start guide for mortgage brokers curious about SEO, but we’re barely dipping our toe in here. In addition to on-page SEO, there are a bunch of off-page strategies you can deploy, like getting other websites to link to yours. A little internet research can give you a good idea of the wide realm of possibility available within the world of search engine optimization. 

If you’re curious to talk to a team that has experience helping mortgage brokers generate and convert leads with their websites, we’re here. We create tools to make brokerage’s sites more enticing to potential borrowers, so we’ve got a good feel for what tends to work. You can book  some time with us to discuss strategies to help you turn your website into a powerful lead generation tool.

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