How To Generate Mortgage Leads Online

Many people neglect this all important step.  Doing so can really ruin your lead generation campaign, by wasting your time and your money.  So don’t skip it!!

Seriously, I have made this mistake before and even made the mistake of choosing a keyword to target after just looking at the “broad match” in Googles keyword tool.  Well, 2 months later Im number #1 in Google and guess what?  No leads.  Yea, turns out a broad match of 14,000 searches per month was really an exact match of about 60 searches.  I just wasted all that time on a keyword that gets virtually no traffic!! That was way back in the day and I never make that mistake anymore.

Keywords are important for getting traffic, but they are also extremely important for SEO.   Having an exact match domain name GREATLY increases your chances of getting to #1 and it also makes it much easier.  So, if you want to generate mortgage leads for Orange County, CA – you would never want to use ABCrefispecialists.com! Instead, you would do your keyword research, find out the top traffic getting keywords for that county and try to get an exact match domain name like refinanceorangecountyca.com, or .net or .org.  I never use .info.

For most businesses, this is the single biggest mistake they make.  By having your main keyword in your domain name, you are already telling the search engines “hey, look at me! My website is about what these people are searching for!”.  By having a domain name like “lowratesforless.com”, you have no keywords, no location and nothing giving you an advantage for SEO.  Low rates for what?  Where are you located?

Also, if you plan on doing any PPC maketing, having the keyword in your domain name boosts your quality score and saves you tons of money in clicks!  I had a client getting clicks on a mortgage related site I built for them at 5 cents a click before!  Im sure other people were paying $2 plus for the same traffic!

So, just to make it clear – You need to find the keywords that people are searching for to find what your business offers and then use them to create your domain name in a .com, .net or .org.   If the exact phrase is taken, try hyphens.  Such as, Orange-County-FHA-Refinance.com or something like that.  If all the .com, .net and .orgs are taken of those too (which is pretty unlikely), you can add a small word to the END of the domain such as: OrangeCountyFHARefinanceNow.com.  Always have the keywords in the beginning of the domain name.

Now, how do you do the keyword research?  I use a free way and a paid way to do this effectively.  First, just go to Google External Keyword Tool.  You can type in variations of the keywords relating to your business type and see how many people are searching for this per month and how much competition there is.   Play around with this for awhile until you find a good keyword without maxed out competition and good monthly search volume.  Remember to use click the “exact match” tab so you can see how many people are searching for this exact phrase in Google.

The second way to test is by running a small adwords campaign for a day or two.  Once you have a good keyword (or a few) you are thinking about, you may want to find out for sure how many people are searching for this… You can simply make a web 2.0 blog for free or write a good article (using the keyword in the title or course!) and then run an adwords campaign using the keywords you want to test.  I suggest using a bunch of them.  You can also make the Ad have a description that people would not want to click on to save money.  Like :

“Refinance in Orange County”  We are pretty good at doing refi’s and we might be able to help you!

Add the conversion tracking code to the page they land on after you get a lead.  Usually this is a thank you type page or it can also be an Aweber page if you are using Aweber to capture leads.

Set your budget high enough so that the ad will run all day long.   Use the “exact match” setting as well.  Then, let it rip!

The next day, you just go back into your adwords account and check out how many impressions each keyword received during that time period.  If you got any coversions, note which keywords converted.  This step can take much longer than one day generate enough data, but it’s essential for targeting the right keywords that actually turn into leads.

Sometimes, it’s shocking how many people will search for something with an “s” at the end or without an “s” (like program instead of programs) and which keywords people are really searching for.  Now you know exactly how many people would see your website if you targeted that keyword and got it to #1.  If there is traffic, you will get leads!  That simple.

I hope you actually take action on this section of the tutorial!  Failing to do the proper keyword research will doom your project from the start.  Why waste time and energy on promoting a site that may never be profitable???

That’s it for this one, remember to subscribe to my rss feed (get updates every time there is a new post) and bookmark my site so you can find it again!

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