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special focus on IT'S ALL ABOUT MARKETING a special focus on IT'S ALL ABOUT MAR Leveraging Today's Digital Mortgage: Using SEO to Close More Loans By Kelcey Brown s people spend more and more time online, their Internet habits follow them as they search for homes and mortgages. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 95 percent of homebuyers and 99percent of Millennials went online to search for homes. Thus, it's vital for anyone-Loan Officers and Realtors especially-trying to grab people's attention to be present online. Spending time online starts in the same place for most people-search engines. Eager homebuyers grab their laptop, click on Safari, Chrome or Internet Explorer, get brought to their home page, which is usually Google, and search "Homes Near Me" or "Mortgage Calculator." Google maintains a lion's share of the search engine market, with an 87 percent stake in the United States' market, according to StatCounter. According to a Search Engine Land report, Google handled trillions of searches as of 2016. That means, at the bare minimum, it processed two trillion searches annually. That equates to 5.5 billion searches per day, 3.8 million per minute, and 63,000 every second. 63,000 Google searches just happened ... and happened again ... and again ... and again ... But it's not enough to just be present ... people need to stand out. "Amidst all that volume, how can someone possibly stand out," you might ask. With search engine optimization (SEO). Before embarking on an SEO campaign-or any campaign for that matter- people need to conduct research. For SEO campaigns, research encompasses keywords and search volumes. Keywords provide the basis for SEO campaigns because, A MAY 2018 n National Mortgage Professional Magazine n NationalMortgageProfessional.com 82 "According to a study by Chitika, Web sites that land on the first page of Google search results receive 95 percent of search traffic. Moreover, the first organic result on the first page takes nearly one-third of traffic." well, they provide the basis for search engines themselves and the algorithms that they're built on. When a user hops on a search engine, he/she types in a query consisting of a word, group of words, phrase, or question. Thus, keywords provide the basis for his/her search. The search engine takes that query, scans it against its index of Web sites, Web pages, and other online content, filters the relevant results, and delivers said results in order from most to least relevant. If a borrower were to search "Mortgage," they'd receive more than 477 million results in just 0.42 seconds. According to a study by Chitika, Web sites that land on the first page of Google search results receive 95 percent of search traffic. Moreover, the first organic result on the first page takes nearly one-third of traffic. So, how do we get onto the first page of results? First, conduct a brainstorm. Think of as many possible keywords and phrases that your target audience might type into Google or another search engine. If you can, segment them. For example, as a Mortgage Banker, you might segment search terms into categories like Mortgage Calculator, Refinance, VA, FHA, Jumbo, Interest Rates, and Pre-Qualification, to name a few. Then, devise keywords and phrases for each category. For the "Mortgage Calculator" category, it could include keywords like "Mortgage Price" and phrases like "How much will my mortgage cost?" After a thorough brainstorm, you can scan and filter the keywords and phrases to discover their search volumes. Terms' highness or lowness of search volume determine their level of importance to the campaign and if they should make it in at all. Programs like Google Trends, Keyword Planner, Moz, and SERPs are great tools to discover search term volume. After determining what keywords and phrases pose most beneficial to your business and most useful by your target audience, you can implement them through on-page and offpage tactics. Off-page tactics include meta data, alt tags, header tags, and more. Some content management systems allow you to edit these factors on the backend of the site. Meta data is information that describes a set of data. In other words, meta data provides a summary of your Web site and its content to search engines. The meta data provides a high-level view through meta tags, which consist of meta descriptions and keywords. Meta descriptions, along with title tags, compose what you see on Google search results pages. For a given listing, the title tag provides the blue headline that you click; the meta description provides the brief summary of the Web page below the headline. Here's a meta data example for a lender that specializes in VA loans in Texas. A solid headline would be "VA Loans in Texas | Mortgages for Texas Veterans." This headline works well because it features keywords relevant to what its target customers would search for on Google. It also puts "VA Loans" early in the headline, which adds value to search engine rankings. The meta description should not only include keywords, but entice a searcher to click on the headline. Using a call to action, an effective headline could be, "Find the best VA Loan options in all of Texas. We deliver the best mortgage options for veteran homebuyers." Although you will use header tags, links, and keywords