Creating a Great Mortgage Website?
The following is a list of what we think are the most critical factors in creating a successful mortgage website. Oppenheimer Group® is a high quality mortgage website supplier, we are not trying to build the most websites just the best mortgage websites available. We work closely with our mortgage broker and loan originator clients to meet each of their special needs and frequently add custom pages during our standard setup at no extra cost. We know that no one shoe fits every foot and neither will one canned mortgage website work for every broker or LO. If you have questions please don't hesitate to contact us either by phone at 888-247-4837 of fill out our short contact form and we'll call you!
Professional appearance
A great mortgage website should have a clean, professional, uncluttered appearance. Consider colors that will be warm, welcoming and appealing to both sexes.
Great website navigation
The most important pages of your mortgage website should be listed in your main menus. And as much as possible your menu should be consistent throughout the entire website. Don't forget the application page, how many websites have little or no navigation on the application form? A potential client may feel trapped once they click on your application and don't find an easy way out/back. Remember a big part of your business is built on trust and you need to nurture this trust from the start, on your mortgage website.
There is nothing more frustrating than having to use the back button on your browser because you've reached a dead end on someone's website.
Exceptional website content
The point of a great mortgage website is to cause borrowers to contact you either by phone or filling out your contact or application form. Your website should tell potential borrowers instantly on the home page what differentiates you from every other mortgage broker. What you can offer a borrower in terms of mortgage service and programs.
If your interested in organic (free) search engine results you'll need plenty of good content about mortgage lending, borrowing and real estate. The more topics your website covers on the subject of mortgages the more likely your website will appear in search results for related mortgage searches.
You can't build a successful mortgage website with the idea that once you're highly ranked for a search phrase like"your town mortgage" that your all set and you can sit back and watch the traffic and applications pour in. The fact of the matter is your looking for a broad array of potential borrowers and you need to address each borrowers potential search with your website. A simple example would be a search for "your town commercial mortgage" or "your town condo mortgage" while you may list well for "your town mortgage", if you don't address the topic of commercial mortgages and condo mortgages on your website you won't list when potential clients search these terms.
Remember that many searchers use the internet to answer their questions. If your website serves a searcher well when they have a question, you can bet they'll remember you when they're ready to apply.
Ease of access to the application form page
Your application form must be easily accessed from every page on your site. Either the first or last button on your main menu or even an animated flashing icon. Don't make clients hunt for the page you want them to use the most!
When you have long sections of text, alternate text topics with a link to your application to remind them every so often that they can apply online.
Ease of access to contact information
Have you ever had to hunt for contact information on a website? Frustrating isn't it! We suggest that your contact information should be easily found on every page of your site. Don't make a potential client hunt when their ready. Furthermore a large number of searchers are impulsive, they want to speak to someone right now, putting your telephone number or even better your toll free telephone number right on the top of every page will promote phone calls. And our experience proves you'll get more calls than online applications with a properly designed mortgage website.
Sufficient links from other websites
If you want to rank highly in the search engines organic results (read free listings) you'll want an equal or greater number of other websites linking to your website as your competitors. Check the back links for the top ranked mortgage websites that appear for the search terms your interested in.
You should check links across all of the top search engines as they don't all report the same number. For example at the time of this writing, Google which is the most difficult search engine to rank highly without sufficient links, only reports a sampling of every websites back (incoming) links. While Yahoo currently reports not only all back links but also registers a link for each page of your website listed in their database.
Links are only half the story of obtaining high rankings in the search engine results, the other half is search engine optimization. And, all search engine optimization is not created equal. There is white hat seo and black hat seo. seo for travel websites and seo for hotels. But you're interested in mortgage website search engine optimization. And while the same principles may apply whether your optimizing a website for travel or mortgages, experience can not be discounted. Years of experience allows an optimizer to know what works and what doesn't for a given search market. If the optimizer isn't specialized in mortgage website optimization then you should think twice before employing them.
Yes mortgage website search engine optimization is the other half of the rankings battle. We recently ranked a new clients site #1 in Google for their two most important search terms against a competitor with 40 times more links, for very competitive search terms in a large market. How you ask? The other half - search engine optimization. When completed our clients on page, on site, optimization out performed the competitors. Have a look at the kind words we have received from past clients.
Patience
In today's internet market this may be the hardest part of your mortgage website project. While your mortgage website may go live in less than one week and link requests can be completed shortly there after, you need to be prepared to wait months to begin to see the results of your investment. This may be hard to understand for many outside the world of website design and promotion considering that the internet is just a large network of computers. And computers are fast right? Well the reality is that search engines may begin to spider (look into) your website within days of it going live, it will take them months to actually determine the relevance of each of your pages and let them drift up to their proper place in their rankings.
And don't forget the human factor of reciprocal linking. We can request any number of links that you may require in a reasonably short amount of time, however we can't say exactly when the webmasters we request the link backs from will actually post your link. Some webmasters may post the link the same day we request it, while others may take to a month or more. Once your links back are actually on other websites pages, you'll wait again while the search engines spider every website on the internet (huge and growing) to find your links and credit them to your website.
At the time of this writing, while you may see some early results within the first three to four months on some search engines you should be prepared to wait a year before you begin to see the real results of your investment. These time estimates are for brand new domain names without previously having links established. Times for established, under performing websites that already have a link base can be much shorter, in some cases within weeks depending on the competition and the number of established back links.
If you have questions please don't hesitate to contact us either by phone at 888-247-4837 of fill out our short contact form and we'll call you!
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