Mortgage Website Design Is An Important Component in Mortgage Marketing
Basics of Mortgage Website Design
Mortgage Website Design involves building mortgage websites utilizing the search engine friendly techniques that give end users unique, helpful, and relevant tools and resources.
As the mortgage industry has become more and more competitive, most mediums used by mortgage companies have become increasingly saturated and less effective overall. Faced with decreasing conversion rates and lower revenues due to market conditions, many mortgage companies are rethinking their marketing strategies, and more specifically, their online strategies. For these reasons, generating leads online as opposed to buying them provides more value than ever for mortgage companies, loan officers, and mortgage brokers.
When a mortgage company is able to generate their own mortgage leads, they save money they might have otherwise been paying to a third party lead provider and they gain an exclusive lead that has a much higher conversion rate as opposed to a typical purchased internet lead that has been sold 4 or more times. There have also been many trust issues raised by lead providers as overall conversion of internet mortgage leads has trended downward and the overall quality of leads has decreased.
For many mortgage companies, the first step in starting their online mortgage marketing strategy is obtaining a mortgage website or upgrading their existing website. Many have issues with their mortgage websites. This is often due to two factors, the quality of their website and lack of an internet marketing campaign to drive traffic to their website or other traffic driving mortgage marketing campaigns. For these reasons, mortgage website design has become of critical importance to mortgage companies when they are working mortgage web site design companies or mortgage web developers. If a website is not built correctly, online lead conversion can suffer greatly and most mortgage website design companies today engage in faulty tehcniques and strategies that greatly hurt mortgage lead conversion.
Mortgage Website Design Factors - Mortgage website architecture, on-page seo, high quality mortgage related content, visitor friendly navigation, calls to action, and mortgage tools and resources are some of the elements that make up a high converting mortgage website and are key to having success with an online marketing strategy. These are the building blocks of building successful mortgage web sites and mortgage website design, but are by no means exhaustive. It is important to maintain a focus on the usefulness of the website for the end visitor while still keeping in mind the importance of implementing calls to action and conversion on each page as well. All of the components in mortgage website design work together to result in a destination that can convert many visitors into mortgage leads if executed properly.
Important Elements in Mortgage Website Design
Authority / Trust - A mortgage lead generation website should be authoritative and should be trustworty source of information. The key is quality, not quantity. When high quality content on mortgage related topics is presented to website visitors, it helps educates visitors and builds trust. Mmortgage website tools such as mortgage calculators, mortgage blogs, rate tracking tools, and home-related resources help visitors understand their mortgage options more clearly and also help establish your mortgage website as a trustworthy and authoritative source for mortgage information to help satisfy their need for information relating to mortgage loans and refinacing. You are the authority and your website must reflect this if you are to gain trust and increase your conversion potential.
Technical Considerations / SEO - There are many important technical aspects of mortgage website design that must be taken into account as well. On-page Search engine optimization entails optimizing your content, page URLS, page titles, H1 tags, H2 tags, alt tags, and meta tags to help induce the highest search engine rankings possible. Additionally, there are other server side script, page layout, code structure, and architecture considerations that affect your web site speed, search engine ranking, conversion, and performance. If you have no idea what the previous sentences mean, that's okay, as long as you realize that they are elements that cannot be ignored. You don't have to know what they mean as long as you have somebody working or you that does. Ignoring these elements because they are foreign to you is not an option if you want to generate your own leads.
Applications - Having the correct style of Mortgage Applications on your website can make or break your online conversion. The most common mistake made by mortgage website design companies is utilizing the Full 1003 application. The full 1003 is non-starter in generating leads as it is too long and visitors refuse to fill out such a long form. A short form 4 page app has proven most successful among major lead aggregators. Note that you will never see what I call the "heavy artillery" lead generators like lowermybills.com or mortgageloan.com using a Full 1003 online mortgage application. They spend countless millions A/B testing their applications to insure they use the application with the highest conversion rate possible. The most important topic in this article is that you should never use a Full 1003 Application on your website.
Architecture - In order to make sure your content, tools, and mortgage calculators are visible to website visitors, the layout and architecture of your site is very important. A user friendly navigation structure that is simple and intuitive help visitors find what they need. When you can satisfy your visitor's needs, you are building trust and exposing them to the benefits you offer as a service provider. This will help increase online conversion and increase your mortgage lead generation ability. Calls to action on every page are critical to conversion of visitors to mortgage leads and you will never get the sale if you don't ask.
Summary: There are many elements in mortgage website design that work together to help generate mortgage leads. These elements work together to achieve two goals: providing an useful source of mortgage information for website visitors and by generating mortgage leads by converting these website visitors. It is also important to consider than many of the prospects that you reach with your other marketing activities such as radio, direct mail, flyers, etc., will end up on your website to learn about your company and build trust. If you don't have a website, or it is a poorly built website, all of your marketing campaigns can be adversely affected, regardless of which medium they are in. For these reasons, investing in a quality online presence is no longer an option, but a necessary strategy for surviving and thriving in the mortgage world of today. Your mortgage website is simply an extension of your off line marketing that you cannot afford to ignore.
The Myth of the Online Full 1003 Application
When mortgage brokers or loan officers decide they want to generate their own mortgage leads online, choosing a mortgage website design company is the first step in starting the process of stopping the reliance on outside lead providesr. This means that one of your biggest concerns is being able to generate the most leads possible by having the highest internet mortgage lead conversion rate possible.
One common theme you will see among various mortgage website design companies is that most or all of them highlight their "Online Secure Full 1003 Application" as a benefit they can offer you on their mortgage websites. It makes sense that you would trust them as they appear to be an authority in the business and you may even know colleagues that are customers of such companies. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and as such, the customers of such mortgage website design companies have the following things in common: 1) They employ the Online Full 1003 Application on their mortgage website 2) they are unable to generate mortgage leads. They are simply not successful. Why? The Full 1003 doesn't work. It's that simple.
Online Full 1003 Mortgage Application + Your Mortgage Website = FAIL
The results of our extensive A/B testing, feedback from hundreds of Mortgage Brokers, and my personal experience is that having an Onlin Full 1003 Application on your mortgage web site will significantly reduce or completely eliminate mortgage lead generation on your mortgage web site. In this day and age, most borrowers are simply not willing to take the excessive time necessary to fill out a Full 1003 and are even more unwilling to divulge all of their personal and financial information until they have built a rapport with a loan officer or mortgage representative. In fact, as a mortgage broker, I prefer to have the basic short form mortgage application information so that I can get information about assets, social security numbers, detailed credit information, etc. when I am building a rapport with the client anyways.
The Full 1003 is a proven non-starter out of the gate. I see confirmation of this on a regular basis when one of our clients calls us in excitement in their first week using an Ipagio mortgage lead generation website to tell us that they are generating leads for the first time in years. I always explain to them that our website is simply converting their existing traffic, which their previous website was unable to do because again, they used an Online Full 1003 Application. The implication is clear: if you are using a Full 1003 application on your mortgage websites, than you are not only losing valuable leads from online prospects, but are losing leads you could be converting from your marketing activities in other mediums (direct mail, radio, flyers, etc.) when those prospects visit your website to build trust in and learn about your company and are not converted. This means quite simply, that all existing mortgage website design companies today are hurting their clients when they force their clients to offer a Full 1003 Online Application and are charging to do so.
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