The Definitive Guide to Mortgage Broker Marketing

The real estate market is invincible.

It doesn’t matter what shape the economy is in because people will always need shelter.

This is why commercial real estate sales have more than doubled since 2010.

While selling and renting out property is lucrative, acting as a middleman as a broker is incredible, too.

You get to set up deals between banks and consumers while taking a commission.

Imagine if you helped a client get a $500,000 mortgage and you received a 3% commission from simply setting up the deal.

That’d be the quickest $15,000 ever!

But, here’s the problem…

A lot of mortgage brokers struggle with marketing and advertising.

They don’t stand out among competitors in their area and often struggle to scale their revenue.

That’s why today I’m going to share effective mortgage broker marketing ideas you can start using today.

Do such a good job customers can’t help but gossip about you

I’ve networked with some extremely successful and wealthy entrepreneurs.

Do you know what a big trend I notice is? Their businesses are built off of word of mouth and referrals.

When you do a good job, it shouldn’t be a surprise that customers will talk about you to others and send new clients your way.

This is why 65% of new business comes from referrals.

Heck, I’ve had clients refer me several new leads after I offered my content writing services for them.

The key to getting referrals is to go above and beyond expectations. Wow your clients. Treat them like family.

You will be rewarded with new business and a client for life if you take a genuine approach to solving their problem and making their life easier.

As a mortgage broker, find them the best possible deal, give them plenty of options, and set them up with a realtor or other professionals if possible.

You want to make the process so easy for them that’ll practically involve no thinking!

While word of mouth marketing happens on its own, it doesn’t mean you can’t stimulate it a bit, either 😉

I suggest that you send out an email to previous clients asking if they would be kind enough to tell anyone they know looking for a mortgage broker to visit you.

Here’s a template you can customize yourself:

Hey {First name},

I hope you’ve been enjoying your new home on {Street name} and it was an absolutely pleasure working with you.

I’m reaching out to ask if you’d be kind enough to tell anyone you know that’s trying to get their first mortgage to contact me as I’m always looking to help out.

Thanks again, and reach out at any time if you have questions about your mortgage or house!

Warm regards,

{Your name}

Presuming you had a positive experience with them, don’t be surprised if you have tons of phone calls coming in 🙂

Rank #1 on Google with mortgage broker SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of creating web pages and content that ranks highly on Google.

There are literally thousands of elements that go into ranking a website according to Google, so we will never know everything that goes into their algorithm.

As a matter of fact, they have a team consisting of dozens of scientists working on the algorithm every day.

It’s constantly becoming smarter which means that marketers of all kinds need to produce better and better content.

Practicing SEO will help your mortgage brokerage generate organic traffic, leads, and authority in the market.

You could have clients reaching out to you without lifting a finger with enough elbow grease.

However, very few mortgage companies take advantage of SEO and they’re missing out big time.

Any competitor that does do SEO will be miles ahead in no time flat.

That’s why you need to understand the two fundamental components of search engine optimization: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Let’s begin with the first…

On-page SEO for mortgage brokers

The pages on your website can be optimized via different techniques to make them rank higher, index faster, and offer more value to website users.

Try out the following optimization strategies to see both a performance boost on your website and in the search engine results pages.

Improve your page speed

It’s been found that the longer it takes your website to load, the more users will bounce.

This means a slow website can result in lost clients.

Furthermore, Google looks at page speed as a ranking factor along with metrics like bounce rate, average time spent on page, and more.

If your website is slow and a lot of people leave it quickly, what does that signal to search engines? That your website isn’t valuable.

That’s why mortgage brokers need to head over to KeyCDN’s website speed testing tool and enter their website URL. Choose a location close to you via the dropdown menu and click the test button afterward.

The first metrics you will see are total requests, total page size, and total load time.

Requests are the number of times a browser had to ping the website to receive information. You typically want this to be as low as possible

Similarly, the page size is the actual file size of your website. You can minimize HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to lower this number.

Perhaps most importantly, the actual load time of your website needs to be below two seconds because it’s what Google recommends.

So, how can you speed up a website if it’s slow and bulky? Simple. Try out the following strategies:

• Compress image sizes as they are a huge culprit for slow websites. As you can see from the above image, images were in the top two results for both request and content size. There are tools online you can use that will compress image file sizes for you. Additionally, I’d recommend getting a plugin like Smush WP if you’re on WordPress, but research one depending on the platform you use.
• Minimize HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to make web pages load faster. I personally use a WordPress plugin called Pagespeed Ninja which does this automatically on my behalf and you should, too.
• Design your mortgage broker website to be as simple as possible to make it load quicker and have smaller file sizes.
• Take advantage of a caching tool that prevents users from continually having to reload website content.

Clean up title tags and meta descriptions

The devil is in the details with SEO. I look at search engine optimization as dozens of little elements that add up to a big picture.

If you understand what all of these little details are, you will unlock the secret to more web traffic and leads.

Two such elements are title tags and meta descriptions.

Let me give you an example…

This is the search engine listing for a Toronto mortgage broker. Can you guess what text is the title tag and meta description?

Easy! The headline to the listing itself is the title tag. It communicates to Google and users what the web page is about.

The meta description gives a more detailed summary of what content can be found on the page.

Also, notice how keywords become bolded in the meta description. This is crucial because you want to include search terms you’re targeting to increase the click-through rate.

Get a free seven trial of SEMrush Pro to research profitable keywords fast.

Writing good title tags comes down to a few techniques:

1. Include a keyword you’re trying to rank for such as “New York commercial mortgage broker.”
2. Keep title tags under 60 characters because Google cuts them off after that point.
3. Create a benefit-oriented title if possible. This gives users a more direct reason to click your search engine listing versus others.
4. Include a call to action which is a statement telling readers to do something specific like contact you.
5. Use urgency and scarcity to make readers feel like they need to take action sooner.

While these HTML elements of a web page can be edited manually, I highly recommend that you use a tool like Yoast if you’re on the WordPress platform to optimize them effortlessly.

Once you have this installed, navigate to any page or post and scroll down the page until you see the new Yoast snippet section.

Click “Edit snippet” and you will be able to change the SEO title, URL, and description in the snap of a finger.

Writing good meta descriptions isn’t much different from titles. The key is to elaborate on the benefits of the page’s content, include a keyword, and keep it between 120-158 characters.

Research traffic-driving keywords

Good keywords are the foundation of good SEO.

Without them, you won’t see any results.

That’s why you need to use a tool like KWFinder.

Enter a search term related to your mortgage brokerage on the homepage and click the search button to begin.

This will take you the following page where you see keyword suggestions and data:

The trend column displays an overview of how a search term has performed over time. Use this to benchmark whether a keyword is seasonal and losing or gaining momentum.

The next column, “search,” measures how often the keyword is queried every month.

I suggest that you target a mix of low, medium, and high competition keywords throughout your brokerage’s website and content.

This allows you to rank for low hanging fruit while remaining competitive for competitive terms.

Perform keyword research for every blog post you write and center your website as a whole around industry-related terms like “New York commercial mortgage broker” or “New York residential mortgage broker” for example.

These keywords need to be placed in areas like:

1. Title tags
2. Meta descriptions
3. The body of pages
4. Header tags
5. Alt text of images
6. File names of media
7. URLs

Doing so will help search engines understand what your website is about, thus pushing you up the ranking ladder.

Use my Toronto SEO services if you need help with search marketing.

Off-page SEO for mortgage brokers

Cleaning up the on-page elements of a website act as the foundation of great SEO.

Many of the improvements you make to title tags, page speed, and alike only have to be done once.

They’re set-and-forget. You optimize them and then reap the rewards later.

However, effective off-page SEO takes consistent effort and continual campaigns.

The main premise of off-page SEO is backlink building which has three camps:

1. White hat: Strategies that are completely aligned with Google’s terms of services, morals, and ethics.
2. Grey hat: Strategies which aren’t directly against terms of service but may have the potential to get you in trouble.
3. Black hat: Unethical and illegal techniques that are against terms of service and eventually will get you penalized.

Now, how do you build backlinks exactly? There are many ways. I personally recommend that you only guest post and let me tell you why…

Guest posting involves posting a piece of content on another website and it often gives you a link within the content or author area.

This means that you spread the word about your business, gain a backlink, and generate referral traffic.

No other form of link building offers all of these benefits at once.

Check out this list of 200+ websites that accept guest authors for example.

You can visit all of the ones pertaining to finance and related optics, pitch them ideas, and write an article for them.

Next you know you’ll have better brand awareness, more backlinks, and organic traffic revving up like a Lamborghini.

Partner with local companies to generate leads

Let me give you some personal insight as someone who comes from a smaller town.

There are only a few banks, realtor companies, and appraising businesses where I’m from.

And, guess what? They’re not cutthroat and trying to steal each other’s customers.

Instead, all of these businesses work together to generate leads and share clients via referrals.

As a matter of fact, partnership marketing has some of the biggest growth potential compared to other strategies.

That’s exactly why you need to consider partnerships in your mortgage broker marketing plan.

And how exactly do you form partnerships? One of the best ways is to attend local real estate networking events.

This is perfect because you will meet like-minded people exclusive to your industry.

Head over to Eventbrite, change the location to your city, and enter in a real estate related keyword to begin finding conferences.

Try to attend regular events to maximize the opportunities you come across.

Make sure to dress the part, bring plenty of business cards, and follow up with those that you meet.

I attend a lot of events and I firmly believe that you need to take things slowly with other entrepreneurs.

Don’t instantly talk about partnering, but rather pitch grabbing a coffee and bring it up when the time seems right.

And remember: partnerships need to be mutually beneficial. That means you need to send them to referrals or offer a percentage of every lead’s transaction they send your way, for example.

Wrapping up mortgage broker marketing strategies

Despite the ups and downs of the real estate market, it isn’t going away any time soon.

This is why being a mortgage broker will always be a profitable business.

However, you need to use the right strategies to beat competitors, gain market share, and grow at the speed of light.

Applying today’s main takeaways below will help you achieve just that 🙂

Need a marketing consultant to help you with everything you learned today? Book a free consultation with me.