Mortgage Marketing using Link Building Campaigns
Link exchange is probably the most influential way to bump up your search engine rankings and is an essential element to any web-based mortgage marketing campaign. The idea is that every link to your website from another one, is an endorsement by the other site. The more you are endorsed, the better your site must be and that is the idea used by search engines. There are a few important factors to consider when building a link exchange campaign:
"One-way links" would be a site that links to yours, but you are not linking back to them. Search engines are smart and know that people exchange links with each other to gain search engine rankings - these are commonly referred to as "reciprocal links." While these are still effective, "one-way links" are valued much higher, as these are interpreted by search engines as another site endorsing yours without any influences.
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PageRank (PR) is a system used by Google to determine how important a site is. It is based on a scale of 0-10 with 10 being the most important. Most sites on the web will have ranks with 0-2 with only a handful of the most prominent websites having a 10. A link from a site that has a higher PR is always going to be a higher valued endorsement. So getting just 1 link from a site that has a PR of 5 is worth a lot more than a dozen from sites with PR's of 1 or 2.
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Sites that are similar in content and industry to yours will always be valued higher than links that are coming from sites that have nothing to do with your industry. For a mortgage website, it makes sense that an endorsement from a real estate agent would be valued higher than once coming from a sports website.
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Link exchange is an essential part of getting good search engine rankings. 85% of people using the web go to search engines to find information on the web. It's a huge competitive advantage to have good search engine listings. If you're spending thousands a month in advertising, while the guy next door is generating the same amount of business just from having a website that comes up high on searches, then that puts you at a huge disadvantage. Search engine listings are FREE, it costs no money to be listed and therefore, in the long run, traffic coming from search engines has no incremental cost on your mortgage marketing budget.
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To do a quick recap, to get higher rankings on search engines, all you have to do is get a bunch of sites in the same industry with high PR, giving you one way links. Not quite that easy, but that's the main idea. Getting links is very time consuming as you need to search the web to identify sites, find out who the owners are, and then solicit them to exchange links. Even at that, 99% of the time they want something in return so at best you get a reciprocal link. This is a start, but it's not ideal, and as a mortgage professional, isn't your time better spent selling mortgages as opposed to soliciting website owners?
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There's plenty of other factors that we use to help give our clients the advantage on marketing their websites on the search engines, but theoretically the idea was explained above. Over time we've developed a strong network of mortgage-related sites that have accumulated PageRank's in the range of 5-7 that we use to strengthen our client sites. We provide one-way links from all of these sites and don't require you to link back to us. We save you months of effort you would otherwise need to spend on soliciting links and you get the same benefits.
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FREE mortgage marketing tip:
Exchange links with realtors, appraisers, and title companies you do business with. You can mutually benefit from this relationship and generate even more traffic for your website. Remember, which reciprocal links aren't ideal, they are still beneficial to your online success!