Not too long ago, to discover the mortgage rates available for a home purchase, individuals had to, at the very least, reach out to a lending institution.

Even if that isn’t true for your specific lending operation, you better believe it’s true in general. Your competitors — from major lenders that operate on a national scale to individual mortgage brokers in your neighborhood — operate websites showcasing live mortgage rates. 

If you want to be in the mix, you need to do two things. First, you need to have mortgage rates on your website. Secondly, you need to make sure people can actually find that site.

For the latter, you can use a little something called search engine optimization (SEO). This essentially means making tweaks so search engine ranking pages (SERPs) like Google rank you higher. 

If you want to get toward the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., with your keywords "mortgage rates", we have some tips.

Step one: Hone in on your keywords

A good SEO strategy starts with identifying keywords. Essentially, these are the terms you want your site to rank for. 

So, how do you pick keywords? This requires some reverse engineering. Ranking high for something random doesn’t do you much good. You want to win SERPs for keywords your prospects are actually searching. 

Let’s start with a simple example: “mortgage rates Washington.” If people are on their homebuying journey in the Evergreen State, this is a search they’ll often use. When they type that into, say, Google, they’ll see something like this:

Clearly, being local helps. While a lot of the top-ranking sites operate nationally (e.g., U.S. Bank, Zillow), you can see that Sammamish Mortgage shows up pretty early in the search results. 

In other words, if you’re looking for a strong keyword to target, something like “mortgage rates in Washington” or even “mortgage rates in [your city]” can go a long way. 

Step two: Provide detailed rate information

Once you have your keyword picked out, the next step in SEO is to optimize your website for it. We’ll show you some specific tips and tricks below, but to a large extent, good optimization means building a webpage that meets consumer expectations for the specific search term. SERPs like Google reward content relevance and quality. So to rank high, you need to provide the info people want. 

For a term like “mortgage rates in Washington,” that means — you guessed it — showing current Washington mortgage rates on your website. 

The more useful the info, the more it can help your ranking. So live mortgage rates and ones with customization options (e.g., a way to compare 15 and 30-year terms) can help your site beat out the competition. 

Take Sammamish Mortgage’s mortgage rate page as an example. They’re not just publishing, say, an average 30-year fixed rate for the quarter. Instead, they have a robust rate table with rates for a variety of loan types — and all of this information is real-time, meaning it updates regularly. 

Providing this level of detail doesn’t just help you turn website visitors into leads by giving them the information they’re seeking. It also gives your SEO a boost. 

But wait, you might be thinking. Won’t it be a ton of work to add and continually update the mortgage rates on your website? No. Getting real-time rates onto your site doesn’t have to be a big lift for you. Our team offers mortgage rate integration tools so you can easily add this feature. 

Step three: Optimize top-of-page features

Since we know that SERPs reward usefulness, you want to clearly provide the information people are seeking up top. And we mean that literally. The features on the uppermost portion of your page should include your keyword. 

Make sure you put that keyword in your:

• Headers (particularly the H1 and, when possible, at least one H2)
• Any intro text
• URL (i.e., the slug) 

Let’s look at that Sammamish Mortgage example. You can see that they’ve clearly optimized their site for the keyword “mortgage rates” because that keyword is in the header, sprinkled throughout the intro text, and in the URL. 

Step four: Tweak things for web crawlers

So far, a lot of what we’ve talked about is very user-facing. A real-life person can easily see that you’ve put in the work to point them toward mortgage rates on your website. 

But real-life people actually don’t make the decisions about how websites rank on SERPs. Instead, companies like Google and Bing use bots called web crawlers. These go over websites and look for specific information to decide if your site should rank for any keywords. 

Ticking the boxes a web crawler will check means helping your website secure a higher placement on SERPs. And that can go a long way. If your competitor ranks 30 spots higher than you, your prospects are a whole lot more likely to click on their site, not yours. 

So, what factors do those web crawlers consider when deciding where to rank you? They evaluate the:

• Title tag: When you see a result on a SERP, this is the title. Keep yours to 50–60 characters, and make sure it includes the keyword. 
• Meta description: Under the title tag on a search result, you’ll see a little description of what will be on the site. Your meta description should be fewer than 160 characters so it doesn’t get cut off. And, as you can probably predict by now, it should include your keyword. 

• Alt tags: If, for whatever reason, an image doesn’t load on your site, the web browser will show this alt text instead. That means the alt text should describe the image, but it also gives you another place to slip in your keyword to help with ranking. 
• Load times: Web crawlers check how long it takes your site to load and ding you if it’s lengthy. If you’re not sure how your site performs in this area, you can use this tool to check. Image sizes could be your issue if load times are slow. Compressing large image files goes a long way toward bumping your speed up. 
• Mobile-friendly interface: Since most people access the internet from their phones these days, it looks like SEO is starting to reward mobile-friendliness. Think through your webpage. If you choose a mortgage rate integration to display your live mortgage rates, for example, make sure it works on mobile, too. 

So, how do you make these tweaks so web crawlers can see them? You should be able to make these changes in the backend of your website. If you host your site on Squarespace or WordPress, for example, logging in and clicking on the page you want to optimize should show you these features. If you have any trouble, though, your web developer ought to have an easy time helping you out here. 

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When it comes to winning SERPs for Washington mortgage rates, there’s a lot you can do. In fact, you might feel overwhelmed here. But don’t worry — we can help. At BankingBridge, we offer SEO-optimized features — like our live mortgage rate integration tool — to help you create a website that will wow your prospects and web crawlers. 

Ready to get started? Schedule a demo with us today. 

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