Posted by John Scott Smith on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 03:12 PM
There are three main ways to look at your mortgage web site.
- You can use it as a pamphlet, to let prospective customers know who you are and what you do. For this approach, all you need is to have your site on your business cards, in your print advertising, or recited in television and radio commercials. Like a pamphlet, it's a way to provide much more information to your prospects than you could fit, otherwise.
- Your site can be an aid to your existing customers. This method usually has a way for your customers to "log in" and check on the status of the mortgage application or see where it is in processing. This is a membership function.
- And, the third way to look at your page is as a way to produce your own FHA mortgage leads. For this, you need to drive traffic, either through Inbound marketing (which we'll cover in another post) or through advertising, or a combination of the two. This article is going to discuss how to get started in advertising through Google.
What is advertising with Google? Any time that you search on Google, it will show you two different types of results: organic and paid. Organic results are the ones that you see below the shaded box. These are the ones that Google "thinks" will be the most relevant to your search. The paid results, also called "pay per click" (PPC) will appear in a shaded box, directly below the search box, and also on the far, right-hand side of the screen. Every time that you "click" on one of those ads, the advertisers gets charged a fee. This is Google's main source of revenue.
In order to get started, you'll need to open your advertising account, called AdWords, with Google. Doing so is very easy and is a testament to both Google's success and its stock price.
First, head on over to AdWords. If you already use Gmail or iGoogle, it will allow you to add AdWords to your existing account. If not, enter a valid email address that you use and choose a password.
Set your timezone and currency. In my case, Eastern Time, US dollars.
Google will send a verification email to your account with a link that you have to click to validate. Once clicked, viola! You're ready to get started.
Select a budget. (And, keep it small on your first time around the block!)
Now comes the REAL work. (Or, put another way, Welcome to My World!). When focusing on paid advertising you'll want to look at a number of things, always keeping one mantra at the top of your mind: how are my customers using the Internet.
Choose the kinds of ads that you think will appeal to the kinds of customers that you'd like to attract. Customize your ads so that they will only appear in states in which you can originate FHA mortgages. Select the page(s) that you want your customers to land on when they click the ad. Note: your "home page" is NOT always the best place to direct the click. (Nor is your "application page," for that matter.) Instead, choose a landing page that makes the most sense for both the ad and the search term. For example, if they click on an ad that is specifically about a 203K mortgage after searching for the term "FHA 203K loan", you may want to have them "land" on a page within your site that is specifically about 203K mortgages.
You can, and should, do endless tweaking to this new advertising program. The overarching theme is that if your website is not on page one for a particular search term, like "FHA mortgage Boise, ID", you can run an ad to insure that those people searching for desired term will find you.
What questions do you have? Ask me, below, and I'll answer to the best of my ability.
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