In part 1 of this article, we touched on the the basic principals involved in mortgage website design and the benefits of generating your own mortgage leads. This week we will go into a little more detail in discussing the elements involved with mortgage website design.
Important Elements in Mortgage Website Design
Authority - A mortgage lead generation website should be authoritative. When high quality content on mortgage related topics is presented to website visitors, it helps educates visitors and builds trust. The key is quality, not quantity. Additionally mortgage 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. You are the authority and your website must reflect this.
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 company. This in turn increases conversion and mortgage lead generation. Additionally, having calls to action on every page is critical to conversion of visitors to mortgage leads.
Applications - Having the correct style of Mortgage Applications on your website can make or break your online conversion. The most common mistake made my mortgage web site 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 application 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 mortgage application. They spend millions of dollars A/B testing their applications to insure they use the application with the highest conversion rate possible. If you only take one thing away from this article, let it be that removing the Full 1003 Application is necessary for lead generation.
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.
Summary: There are many elements in mortgage website design that work together to create a successful online presence. These elements work together to achieve two goals: providing an intuitive and truly useful source of information for website visitors and 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. This means that 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 the medium. 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.
Author: Trace Richardson is the CEO of Ipagio.com, a Mortgage Broker Web Site Design company based out of Los Angeles, CA.
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