How Mortgage Lenders Can Improve Mortgage SEO

Your mortgage lending institution probably has a number of marketing assets that it regularly uses, from its logo to a particularly well-loved flier. But there’s one asset that you’ve probably put more money, effort, and time into than almost any other: your website.

While modern website platforms and sophisticated web developers make it easier than ever to have an effective, beautiful site behind your lending institution, it’s still a big lift to get a website launched. It’s a must-do to compete in 2024, but it’s far from easy. 

Fortunately, you can turn your website into a powerful lead generation tool that continually pays returns on that investment. How? By using search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO 101

Mortgage SEO gives you a way to get your team and your loan products in front of the people searching for them online. 

Specifically, with SEO strategies, you work to move your website to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). This way, if someone’s searching for a mortgage in an area you serve, you’re more likely to show up toward the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. Most people don’t scroll very far before clicking through to a site. The higher you can be toward the top of the page, the more likely it is that that searcher will choose your website.

Technically, you can pay to be at the top. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing helps some mortgage lenders generate more web traffic and, in turn, more leads. But you don’t necessarily need to shell out a bunch of money to secure a spot toward the top. With SEO, you get a way to move your website up the ranking page with little to no money spent.

That, in turn, begs the question: which ranking page? In other words, what search terms do you want to show up high for? To answer that, mortgage lenders need to think through their keywords. 

Choosing SEO keywords for mortgage lenders

Fortunately, choosing the keywords you want to target — and, consequently, the SERPs you want to try move up — doesn’t have to be complicated. To some extent, it can be intuitive. 

The loan products you offer are a great place to start. If you offer loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), for example, you might want to target the keywords “FHA mortgage” and “FHA loans.” To do that, you need to add those keywords to the right places on the webpage(s) you want to rank (more on that below). 

Winning the top of Google and other search engines takes time and a strong SEO strategy. But we have a hack to help you move upward faster. Instead of just targeting “FHA mortgage,” meaning you would be competing against lenders all across the country, optimize your webpage for “FHA mortgage in [CITY].” 

Google and other search engines tailor SERPs based on location. So if you operate in Longs, South Carolina and you’ve optimized one of your website’s pages for the keyword “FHA mortgage in Longs, SC,” someone searching for that loan product near you is more likely to find you. 

You can try this for yourself. Enter “FHA mortgage” in your favorite search engine and see how far you have to scroll before you start seeing localized options. 

Two Google tools to support SEO for mortgage lenders

If you’re not sure which keywords to target, Google’s Keyword Planner tool is an excellent resource. Click “Discover New Keywords,” type in a keyword you’re considering and click “Get results.” The tool will then tell you:

• How many searches that keyword gets per month, on average
• How much that search volume has changed in the last quarter, and compared to this time last year
• How much competition you would have in trying to move up the SERP for that keyword (“low” is ideal)

Below that, you’ll also see other suggested keywords and all of the above details for each of them. 

The second handy Google tool you should know about is your Google Business Profile. Setting this up helps with your local SEO efforts, making it easier to get in front of potential borrowers in your area. 

Plugging keywords into your mortgage lending website

Once you have keywords identified, you need to insert them into your website — this is the actual work of search engine optimization. We have an on-page SEO checklist you can use to put those keywords into the right spot. 

A lot of the places to insert your keywords are fairly obvious, like your page headers and throughout your on-page content. But there are a couple of behind-the-scenes spots you also need to put them. Specifically, in the backend of your website, look for a place to change the page’s title tag and meta description. This gives you control over how the webpage’s snippet will display on the SERP. 

Generally, you should apply your most general keywords (e.g., “mortgage in Longs, SC”) to your most general webpages (e.g., your homepage). If you want to target more specific keywords, blogs and landing pages are excellent options. 

If your mortgage website offers specific tools — like live rates or mortgage calculators — it can also be advantageous to search engine optimize those pages for the appropriate tool (e.g., “current mortgage rates in Longs, SC” for your rate table page). 

SEO doesn’t work overnight. It takes time for search engine’s bots to crawl your page, to see that it’s offering information pertinent to the keyword, and to move it up the ranking page. Start now and see what traction you get over the coming months. Fine-tuning your strategy based on which keywords are most effective allows you to generate the most web traffic possible with the least amount of marketing effort. 

This is a super quick overview of what SEO can do to help mortgage lenders generate more leads with an asset they already have: their website. But we’re only scratching the surface here. If you want to talk with an expert about how to best get started with SEO, our team is here. As specialists in helping mortgage lenders leverage their websites to generate leads, we have plenty of guidance to offer here. Book some time with us today.