Not feeling the search engine optimization (SEO) love? Your website may benefit from extra attention this Valentine’s Day.
Your brand is probably already benefiting from digital marketing strategies, like email marketing and paid search. But how is your organic traffic holding up? Regular website enhancements can boost your SEO rankings. And, odds are, you don’t need to entirely revamp your website for it to perform well. Your site acts like your brand’s home base, serving as a digital business card or brochure. It’s often the first introduction a borrower has to you and your business.
Giving your content and site organization some attention can also help improve the user experience (UX), which should encourage users to visit your site again.
UX blends proper, functional design with the user journey, providing a seamless and intuitive experience. A strong SEO strategy that brings organic traffic to your site combined with an enjoyable UX that helps website visitors easily navigate to actionable content can make it love at first sight for your prospects.
To help you give your site some extra love, here are three simple SEO and UX tips for mortgage marketers.
1. Keep Your Mortgage Content Organized
Before creating mortgage-specific content, consider which topics will be most searchable for your target audience of prospective borrowers, and adopt the mindset of being a resource for prospects. Publishing insightful content can help build your brand a positive reputation and loyal following.
Start by identifying important keywords for which you want to rank. Then, consider using questions to position your copy for possible ranking in Google answers. If your content populates in the Google answers accordion, your brand may gain more exposure as a reliable resource.
Keep your content organized and easy to scan by using headlines and subheads to break up your copy. Headers (indicated by using H1, H2, H3, etc. in the code) allow search engines to scan your content and determine the topic of discussion, thus allowing your pages to populate on relevant search results pages. Headers also help your audience find and understand your content.
Be sure to use just one H1 on each page, as the H1 indicates to Google (and your readers) the primary intent of the page content. Each page can have multiple H2- and H3-level subheads incorporating your targeted keywords within them.
If you’re aiming to have full, robust pages, consider turning subheads into anchor links so people can quickly travel to the topics they love. This levels up your site’s navigation, resulting in a more intuitive UX.
2. Ramp Up Your Mortgage Site Speed
Love takes time, but loading your site shouldn’t. For both SEO and UX purposes, your lending site should never be slow.
Slow pages can deter borrowers from staying on your website and might increase bounce rates. In fact, last year, MachMetrics, a site speed monitoring platform, found that most mobile pages took an average of 22 seconds to load, and 53% of mobile users left pages that took longer than 3 seconds to load. Test your page loading speed with Googe PageSpeed Insights to find out if visitors will love or loathe your site-loading experience.
Does your site need help? Compressing photos and images is a first step you can take to decrease load time. Here’s a list from Google with more ideas to reduce website load times.
3. Keep The Customer Journey In Mind, And Don’t Ignore Engagement Metrics
Beauty is skin deep. The aesthetic of your site doesn’t indicate its performance capabilities. So don’t ignore Google Analytics engagement metrics, which are categorized as acquisition, behaviors and conversions.
“Acquisition” Refers To How Your Website Gains Traffic
Acquisition stats report on your top traffic channels, like referral, direct, organic search and social. Analyze your website’s traffic sources to better understand how your audience finds your site. Then, think about the user journey. If a page is ranking well for unbranded mortgage terms, evaluate that page’s content to make sure you’re making a strong first impression. Adjust your content to address the unbranded terms, but avoid making it aggressively conversion-heavy. Make sure you produce content your audience wants to read and give your audience a clear path to progress to the next milestone of the borrower journey.
“Behavior” Monitors What Visitors Do On Your Lending Website
Behavior metrics show what visitors click on and what actions they’re taking. Looking at behavior data, you’ll see how many pages visitors view, the average time visitors spend on your pages, the percentage of single-page visits and the share of visitors who immediately exit. Behavior metrics also include the path visitors take when they land on your site.
“Conversions” Track The Success Of Your Website’s Calls To Action
Conversion metrics are broken down into four categories: goals, ecommerce, multi-channel funnel and attribution. These metrics allow you to understand how often your calls to action (CTAs) were followed so you can optimize conversion paths and enhance your website’s performance.
Read on for more SEO best practices.
Boosting your site’s SEO rankings and overall user experience can be done incrementally over time. And you can start by giving a little love to your website this week.
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About the Author
In 2018, Best Rate Referrals expanded into the world of personal finance with the launch of Loan Advisor, a new online marketplace designed to provide consumers with simple and fast personal loan quotes from lenders for free.
A leader with more than a decade of combined financial services and direct marketing experience, Raymond has spent his career providing lenders with the strategies and insights to better connect with consumers amid an ever changing rate-driven market. Raymond was instrumental in building one of fastest growing online mortgage marketplaces, www.MortgageAdvisor.com, which now generates demand from thousands of consumers monthly looking for purchase, refinance and home equity loans. A 2017 recipient of the HousingWire Insiders Award, Raymond also made the “National Mortgage Professional” magazine list of the top 40 under 40 in 2012, 2015 and 2016. He also was a Mortgage Professional Association “Hot 100” in 2014 and 2018.
