As retailers prepare for the holiday shopping season, Google is launching new sections in its search results to showcase deals, rolling out tools to highlight promotions and expanding reporting capabilities in Google Merchant Center, the company announced Wednesday.

The new deals sections. The new “Deals related to your search” section shows discounted or competitively priced products from retailers across the web. This section is live now and can be found in the Shopping tab.

Additionally, when users search for deals during major retail sales events, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Google will show a new carousel that highlights relevant deals, alongside other related sales information. This new SERP feature will be available in October — right in time for the aforementioned shopping holidays.

Promotions and deals uploaded via Google Merchant Center are automatically shown to users on the Shopping tab, even if the retailer or manufacturer isn’t running ads on Google. “Offers are shown based on factors such as the discount itself, how popular a product is, how popular the site it’s listed on is and more,” Google said in the announcement.

New promotions tools. Google is rolling out two new ways for merchants to attract new customers and highlight their promotions:

• Merchants can now indicate that a promotion is only available to first-time customers (for example, a “10% off for new customers” promotion). These promotions will still be shown to everyone, but only eligible shoppers will be able to access the promotional price.
• Promotions can now be highlighted on free listings in the Shopping tab. To do so, navigate to the promotions tab in Google Merchant Center and select which promotions you want to have appear in free listings (or, alternatively, supported by ad spend).

Expanded best sellers report. Historical best seller data and relative demand data are coming to the best seller report in Google Merchant Center.

This report can be accessed once a merchant opts into market insights in Merchant Center or Google BigQuery.

Why we care. The new deals sections may present retailers with opportunities to showcase their competitively priced products. This may also help retailers attract new customers during their most important times of the year, major shopping holidays. Additionally, the deals carousel will appear on the main results page, so users are more likely to see those deals since they don’t have to move over to the Shopping tab first.

The new promotional tools can help merchants draw attention to their sales and attract first-time customers.

Historical best seller data can be used to inform decisions ahead of upcoming shopping holidays. And, relative demand data can help merchants compare demand between products in the same category and country, which may help them stock the right products.

The post Google announces new deals sections, promotional tools and expanded reporting ahead of the holiday shopping season appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, do you love or hate change?

If one thing is constant in the search marketing industry, it is change — and a lot of it, very often. Just in this newsletter, we are reporting about new changes Google made to its mobile results and Google Ads’ new policy violation rule that will go into effect in the coming months.

The search results, both paid and organic, are constantly changing. Sometimes it is the algorithms that cause them to change. Sometimes it is the competition causing the change. Sometimes it is something you do that causes them to change.  But if there is one guarantee in our space – it is change.

We’ve seen the strategies, especially the quick win strategies, change drastically over the years. We’ve seen the link-building industry turned upside down numerous times. We’ve seen the content marketing space adapt countless times. We’ve seen AI, automation, and machine learning touch all aspects of what we deal with.

Embrace change and it’ll make your job easier.

Barry Schwartz,
Change management consultant

Google Ads to try three-strikes and you’re out policy

Starting in September 2021, Google Ads will begin testing a new three-strikes pilot program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. Well, it might be four-strikes; it starts with a warning but then an additional three-strikes after that warning – your Google Ads account can be suspended. 

Strikes expire after 90 days, according to Google. If you’ve had two strikes, fix the issues, send an acknowledgment of the issues and fixes, and then do not violate another policy for 90 days after the fix, your account resets, in a way, and the next violation will be the initial warning again. As always, search marketers will be able to appeal any violation and enforcement decisions.

Google may expand this three-strikes rule beyond just the Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies areas in the future. 

Why we care. The new ad policy pilot program provides clear actions and consequences for advertisers. While Google is testing this program for the Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies, it will likely eventually roll out to other policy areas in the coming year. The initial warning gives you the benefit of the doubt, but penalties are increasingly stringent after that. Many advertisers are worried that the new policy will penalize those whose ads get mislabeled or mistakenly violate policies.

Read more here.

AMP labels gone for Google mobile search results

After five years of Google showing the AMP icon in the mobile search results, it is now retired. Google is no longer showing the AMP label even for AMP pages in the mobile search results.

Google was thinking of showing a page experience label instead, but we have yet to see Google show the page experience label that they tested for a short period of time last December. Instead, Google shows no label for either AMP-enabled pages or for pages that meet the page experience update factors – at least not yet.

Why we care. It is unclear what impact this change may or may not have on your click-through rate to your AMP content from Google Search. Keep an eye out for those changes in your analytics and reporting tools.

Read more here.

Google illustrated what different types of traffic declines look like

Daniel Waisberg of Google came up with illustrations of what six different categories of organic search traffic drops look like when you are looking at your performance report in Google Search Console.  It is broken down into these categories:

• Site-level technical issue
• Page-level technical issue
• Manual action
• Algorithmic changes
• Seasonality
• Reporting glitches

So if you see these types of traffic drops, you may want to dig in and figure out what is the cause.

Why we care. I believe this was the first time Google described visually how various issues in Google Search can impact your traffic. It gives you a way to clearly see what to expect from various SEO issues and how your traffic may be impacted. It is important to note that these illustrations are generalizations and that you do need an experienced SEO consultant to diagnose any real issues with your website.

Read more here.

Math solver rich results filter in Search Console performance report

A new search appearance filter has been added to the Google Search Console performance report. This new filter works for math solver rich results and structured data. That is, if your site shows math solver rich results in Google Search, Google can now report on your clicks, impressions and other data within the search performance report in Search Console.

The Google Search Console performance report shows important metrics about how your site performs in Google Search results: how often it comes up; average position in search results; click-through rate; and any special features (such as rich results) associated with your results.

Why we care. This gives us more data to see if using Math Solvers markup is actually helping our sites get more visibility in search. More importantly, is the markup and rich results leading to more clicks to our websites.

Read more here.

Faster AdSense code, shared hosting, Google Posts for hotels and deleting disavows

Deleting disavow files. John Mueller of Google warns against blindly deleting disavow files. He said “blindly deleting the file sounds as bad as blindly adding to the file :). Be thoughtful when making bigger changes.”

Google Posts for hotel listings. It seems Google might be testing bringing Google Posts to hotel listings in Google Search. It is unclear if this is a bug or an early beta feature, but those SEOs in the hospitality industry are excited to give it a try.

Shared hosting and SEO. Google’s John Mueller said in a video that shared hosting works fine for SEO and ranking in Google Search. He shared more details in this video, like if the shared host gets overloaded and GoogleBot may have issues crawling the site.

Google AdSense better code. Google announced it has new faster and better performing AdSense code. If you want better-performing pages and for your AdSense code to not slow down your pages as much, you can replace your old AdSense code with the new one.  Google is not doing away with the old code, so you do not need to replace the code if you don’t want to.

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC UGC – Moz
• Google Says Core Updates Can Impact People Also Ask Results – Search Engine Roundtable
• How to Succeed With Google Posts: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google Posts – Sterling Sky
• Ready for it? Olympics 2021 best practices for news SEO – WTF is SEO?
• Rewriting Keywords at Google for Paid Search – Go Fish Digital

The post Change is what search marketers expect; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

The challenge of growing an SEO agency as the business becomes more sophisticated translates into staying on top of two major components — the client acquisition process and the client retention process.

The acquisition process is usually tricky to scale because you need to have your best consultants doing the SEO proposals followed by the pitch, and they have limited time in a day. So you can decide to focus on your client retention and improve that to unlock your agency growth.

If we consider the type of growth that happens for a subscription-based business model, improving client retention can also mean lower costs of re-acquisition and maintenance. Plus, your agency can overcome the plateau effect, which is bound to happen as the business develops. 

Improving the retention rate means efficiency over time. Both in terms of resources invested and revenue per month, along with a higher cash flow predictability, as higher retention (compound revenue) can outgrow a higher acquisition rate. Think about your customer acquisition cost versus the lifetime value of that client — research shows that increasing customer retention rates by 5% is bound to increase profits by a scale of 25% to 95%.

But, you probably know the already old business adage: you can’t control what you don’t measure. It’s like driving a car with a broken speedometer. You have no idea how fast you’re going as you enter a speed limit section.

So, the first order of business to tackle: measuring churn rates and retention. What’s behind the churn rate is a whole ecosystem that you need to keep track of, ideally in one place: client profile, SEO performance trend, client engagement, communications, goals or transactions, etc. 

Here’s where an operational dashboard makes the difference between growth and crisis. Having accurate real-time metrics for immediate action will keep you in control:

How to develop your SEO agency operational dashboard 

To scale your SEO agency with speed and efficiency, you should consider the daily tasks that need fast reactions and real-time data and what historical trends you need to be aware of to make data-driven decisions. 

Another thing to keep in mind: not every metric is actionable or critical. And not every metric is essential if it distracts you from your business strategy in the first place.

The challenge is to calibrate the delicate balance between objectives, metrics, and results, translating into managing resources, processes, and profit margins within set growth limits. 

You can start with the fundamentals:

Your SEO agency business model

Think about the types of contracts you sign, the lifetime value of those accounts, and how you keep track of them now. It’s a good start for understanding the forces that impact your churn rate and your current portfolio trends.

You may define the following parameters to include for each client subscription and get an even deeper understanding of your agency landscape: contract type, start date, end date, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), client profile, and even account manager.

You can also include the average revenue per account (ARPA) metric to have a clear picture of where you’re standing regarding business revenue, as it highlights your growth trends.

Make sure you don’t include one-time clients and special projects when calculating MRR, or you’ll lose revenue accuracy. Keep track of them in a separate line.

In the end, you can also correlate these parameters with new business metrics like new qualified leads or new monthly clients, for instance, to further optimize your overall strategy. 

The current visibility of your clients

Another key indicator to closely watch that underlines the state of your SEO campaigns and your performance as an SEO agency is the Visibility metric. Calculated as an impression share that takes into account the ranks of your keywords and their monthly search volumes, it offers you a real-time check on the state of a campaign or overall portfolio.

To have a complete picture, you should measure visibility trends (daily, weekly and monthly). You’ll be able to show how your SEO performance directly impacts business results and know when something is wrong before you get that client email.

You’ll also get to compare visibility scores with the health of an account, the allocated resources and the type of client to gain a deeper understanding of your current portfolio. And how you can further grow it.

The health of your accounts

After looking at the visibility score, you can consider every account’s status in your current portfolio. You can define that as the health of accounts and assign it as a percentage or score. 

It may be the goal set at the beginning of your SEO campaign versus its current status, or it may be a client engagement or client feedback score. 

Whatever makes sense for your SEO agency to define as client health, it is an efficient way to spot what accounts are on track, what accounts are in danger of getting behind, and quickly address those already behind that need fast action. 

A color-coded system might be helpful in that regard. You can also set alerts when a certain percentage or score needs immediate attention. 

No more satisfied clients on paper only!

Budgets and allocated resources per client

Where is your focus in a given timeframe? Being able to pinpoint where you allocate more resources in a month or if you went past a client’s negotiated budget can support you in optimizing internal processes.

That’s why an overview of budgets and human resources allocated per campaign, together with the campaign’s daily or weekly health status, can help you better prioritize and manage your clients.  

You will be able to compare resources with client type, current status, and even historical status (weekly, monthly, or quarterly). This comparison will give you an accurate overview of where and how you spend your resources and what needs to be changed or further defined to lower the churn rate. 

After all the groundwork is done, you’ll have a good foundation for your KPIs dashboard that you can test and iterate, so it’s genuinely actionable and answers your business questions. 

The state of your monthly reports

In a nutshell, reporting influences retention heavily. 

To know the reports’ status for each client in your portfolio is a hidden growth opportunity. It’s your time to take the client’s “pulse,” talk to them in their language and further develop your collaboration.

So having a real-time overview of your client portfolio and when reports are due in your operational dashboard is another critical aspect. Don’t forget to match clients, reports, and account managers for better accuracy and set notifications in advance. 

The communication value of your monthly reporting is not only in how you present your SEO results but in delivering the report on time. 

Making dashboards actionable and adopting them across the agency

Now that you’ve developed the operational dashboard with all the relevant KPIs, which your whole team has access to, you need to make sure they use it. 

1. The operational dashboard should cater to every SEO agency role 

Your operational dashboard can help your account management with their daily status check and prioritization. 

For instance, if a batch of clients appears to be reaching the end of their contract period, your Customer Success team will know it’s time to set new meetings and start creating SEO proposals for extending the collaboration and keeping the retentions steady. 

Or, maybe, you have a big account with health issues, and your technical SEO team can immediately investigate.

Each role in your SEO agency should use this internal dashboard to do their job with more efficiency.

2. The operational dashboard should improve your SEO agency’s processes.

To make the internal dashboard usable, you should also think about timing and metrics. 

When does each role need it?

Is it daily for technical issues? Is it monthly for client reporting or, maybe, to check the MRR and ARPA status? Do you need to see the weekly clients’ health and the status of your CS team?

Think about how you get this kind of data now. Maybe you have known unknowns in your current tools, and you keep postponing a dashboard optimization. Or perhaps you have various excel files with tens of tabs each.

Your operational dashboard should help you understand where’s room to grow, your current bottlenecks, and the trends in aspects like new clients, churned clients, MRR on track or behind, visibility trends, client engagement, and so on.

It may seem like another thing to add to your workload, but if it’s a simple and easy to comprehend dashboard, you will gain valuable time for quick actions and decisions. 

Plus, all your team will have the same version of the truth to check and return to regularly. You’ll be in control of your business processes while the “car drives itself” under your careful watch.

We know deciding on what to include and what to leave out of an operational dashboard is a struggle. That’s why we consulted with SEO agencies and designed a dashboard solution that fits your needs as part of our robust SEO platform.

Join us, and hundreds of SEO agencies clients, in the journey of bringing more transparency to the SEO industry. 

The post The SEO agency KPIs dashboard: a way to unlock growth appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Daniel Waisberg, a Search Advocate at Google, described and illustrated what various types of organic search traffic drops look like in the performance reports in Google Search Console and how you can address those traffic drops.

Types of traffic drops. Google posted sketches of “examples of drops and what they could potentially mean.” This shows you visually what a site-wide technical issue or a manual action looks like compared to normal seasonality in search traffic, compared to a technical issue on a page level or an algorithm change (like a core update) or simply a reporting glitch in Search Console.

Here are those sketches:

With technical issues that are site-wide and manual actions where a Google employee gives you a manual penalty, you can generally see a massive drop off in your organic search traffic from Google. This is illustrated in the image at the top left above.

With technical issues that are on a page by page basis or an algorithm change like a core update, you would see a slower decline in your traffic, and it would then level off over time.

Then there are seasonality changes that you see recover with the change in seasons for your business cycles. Also, Google has been known to have reporting glitches in Search Console, where you see things bounce back to where they are.

How Google defines these categories. Here is how Google defined these categories of traffic drops:

• Technical issues: Errors that can prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users – for example server availability, robots.txt fetching, page not found, and others. Note that the issues can be site-wide (for example, your website is down) or page-wide (for example, a misplaced noindex tag, which would depend on Google crawling the page, meaning there would be a slower drop in traffic).
• Security issues: If your site is affected by a security threat, Google may alert users before they reach your site with warnings or interstitial pages, which may decrease Search traffic.
• Manual Actions: If your site does not comply with Google’s guidelines, some of your pages or the entire site may be omitted from Google Search results through a Manual Action.
• Algorithmic changes: Google is always improving how it assesses content and updating its algorithm accordingly; core updates and other smaller updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search results. To keep track of future updates, subscribe to our Google Search News YouTube series or follow us on Twitter.
• Search interest disruption: Sometimes changes in user behavior will change the demand for certain queries, either as a result of a new trend, or seasonality throughout the year. This means your traffic may drop simply as a result of external influences.

What to do. The remainder of the blog post from Google dives into how to dig into the reports to analyze your search traffic drop. This way you can understand which category your traffic drop falls into. Was it a reporting bug or an algorithmic update or maybe it was a Google manual action.

Why we care. I believe this was the first time Google described visually how various issues in Google Search can impact your traffic. It gives you a way to clearly see what to expect from various SEO issues and how your traffic may be impacted.

It is important to note that these illustrations are generalizations and that you do need an experienced SEO consultant to diagnose any real issues with your website.

The post Google categorizes what organic search traffic drops look like appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Starting in September 2021, Google Ads will begin testing a new three-strikes pilot program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies.

“Warnings and strikes will be issued for violations of our Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies—this includes ads promoting deceptive behavior or products such as the creation of false documents, hacking services, and spyware, as well as tobacco, drugs and weapons, among other types of content,” the company said in a new Help Center News Announcement. These ads types have been prohibited for a while, but the system to punish those who don’t abide by the policies is new.

Penalties in the strikes system. The system starts with a warning and no penalties for an initial violation. From there, each violation has an increasingly stringent penalty until the account is finally suspended.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, would you have pursued a degree in PPC or SEO?

One can obtain a four-year degree in marketing, but would a similar degree, specifically focusing on organic or paid search, be worthwhile? This question was inspired by a tweet from Eli Schwartz (thanks, Eli!), and in the comments, professionals have shared that they lecture or even teach courses at well-known universities.

All the resources an aspiring SEO or PPC pro may need are already available for free, but the same can be said for virtually any field. There are also many other considerations to ponder when it comes to PPC/SEO degree programs: Why don’t these programs already exist? And, if they did exist, would they add more “prestige” to our industry, and us as practitioners? Would professionals that hold such degrees be taken more seriously within their companies and with clients? Might an SEO or PPC degree become prerequisites for entry-level positions? How might this affect conferences?

One of the things I love about getting to meet people in the search industry is that we all have different backgrounds, so the question “How’d you get into SEO/PPC?” is a nice way to learn about someone’s journey. But, there are a lot of “professionals” that engage in shady tactics, and perhaps formal curriculums can help remove that element. As always, my inbox is open, send your thoughts to gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com (subject line: Kickin’ it old school)

George Nguyen,
Editor

Google officially launches SeekToAction for key moments for videos in search

SeekToAction markup is now out of beta and can be used for any site with videos. This markup allows Google to identify “key moments” (shown in the image above) from your videos.

To use SeekToAction markup, your URLs must have the ability to deep-link to a point in your video other than the start, and Google must be able to fetch your video content files. With more and more videos showing in Google Search, it’s a good idea to put in the effort to make your videos stand out from the rest. Using SeekToAction markup can help enrich your video results in Google Search, which could potentially improve click-through rates.

Read more here.

Answer our new survey on attending or exhibiting at in-person events

Pre-pandemic life is starting to return. Travel is up. Masks are coming off. And, indoor dining is an option once more.

The relaxation in pandemic restrictions is also rippling through the business world as conferences and trade shows schedule in-person events for this summer and fall. We’re not surprised, since the last edition of our Events Participation Index showed that many marketers were ready to hit the conference hall floor as early as the third quarter of 2021.

But a sizable number of marketers still seemed luke-warm to the idea of business travel, which is why we are once again asking marketers to share their sentiments on returning to in-person events.

Please click here to take our 3-minute survey.

Video: Richard Nazarewicz, Technical SEO Manager at the Wall Street Journal

Search Engine Land News Editor Barry Schwartz and Richard Nazarewicz, technical SEO manager for the Wall Street Journal, sat down to discuss how to approach technical SEO for a publication such as the WSJ, the importance of evergreen content, the impact of algorithm updates on the WSJ and more.

“I’m not the only SEO in the company — we are all SEOs.” That was my favorite tidbit from the chat. One might assume that, since it is a major publication, that wisdom only applies to publishers, but that’s just not so: everyone in your company who touches your site can impact its SEO. Listen to Richard’s talk with Barry for more perspective that you can take back to your own teams.

Watch the discussion here.

The Marketoonist provides some perspective on what consumers really care about

For the third time, the answer is “no.” When asked if forum links work as a link-building method, Google’s John Mueller answered succinctly: “no.” This question was addressed in 2014 and in 2018, but here it is in the new decade. In all likelihood, links in forums are nofollowed, and they’re almost certainly not going to be as valuable as natural links.

Do customers really care what you do to gain their attention? “All of this corporate research — shopper decision trees, category management decks, and the like — can be valuable. But followed too closely, they can lead to marketing myopia,” said Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne, “Consumers don’t think about brands nearly as much as the marketers of those brands think about the brands.”

“If you think smart folks have this figured out…” “​​Google’s internal meme generator is old, and one of the more active places internally for voicing opinions,” John Mueller tweeted, “Closing in on the #1 all-time spot is a black image with just the words ‘I’m so tired’ on it. If you think smart folks have this figured out & are thriving, think again.” Remembering that everyone’s just doing their best helps me be more patient — that, and telling myself it costs nothing to be nice.

“I think people were pretty noisy about quitting the Bay Area . . . But they’ve been very quiet in admitting they want to move back.”

The quote above comes from Eric Bahn, co-founder of an early-stage investment firm based in Palo Alto, and it’s in line with what the data is telling us. Only a sliver of you live and/or work in the Bay, but it’s a proxy for the overall trend that’s occurring in major metropolitan areas nationwide.

“In an area near San Francisco’s Financial District, where tech workers tend to cluster, average apartment rental prices dropped more than 20 percent in 2020, according to census and Zillow data compiled by the city,” Kellen Browning wrote for the New York Times, “That area saw the biggest price jumps in the city in the first five months of 2021.” Traffic is also making a return. 

Similar things are happening in Boston (closer to where I currently live), as well. Browning’s research indicates that a majority of those who left the Bay Area in 2020 were young, affluent and highly educated (read: likely to be tech workers). The attractions of urban life are among the reasons this demographic is moving back: restaurants, shopping and nightlife were some of the hardest-hit industries, so it’s no surprise that some folks are looking to make up for lost time.

So, now, in the second half of 2021, where is the dream of remapping the American workforce? The cost of living in these metropolitans (along with traffic) was supposed to decrease, remote work was supposed to become the new norm and tech’s high-earning tech workers were supposed to spread out across America.

While some companies, like Oracle, Palantir and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, have moved their headquarters out of California, for now, it looks like “returning to normal” really does just mean “returning to 2019” when it comes to tech and major cities.

The post Would you have pursued a four-year degree in PPC or SEO?; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Scaling a mortgage business requires a 360-degree effort. From staffing to workflow management and technology, growing a mortgage business is just as much about increasing intake capacity as it is about developing professional attributes such as branding. Even if you’re a one-person shop still a year or so away from expanding your business, it’s best practice to build a foundation that can scale with you. 

That said, this article will cover how to build a brand that’s pliable enough to meet your current business needs as well as your future expansion plans.

Then, we’ll give you ideas on how to use strong branding to fuel your mortgage business growth. Let’s dive in!

How To Create A Scalable Mortgage Brand

Developing a scalable mortgage brand begins with writing a mission statement that stands the test of time. It should be well-defined, simple, and honest about who your company is at its core. No matter how large your company gets, this mission statement will remain true. A simple guideline for writing a mission statement answers these questions:

1. What does your mortgage company do?
2. How does your mortgage company do it?
3. Why does your mortgage company do it?

After writing a 1-2 sentence statement that hits all three points above, you’ll be set with a branding foundation that you can use for everything from your business plan to advertising to scaling expanding your business.

Remember to add visuals! Graphics and color schemes are a memorable part of your branding story. While it’s expected that your visual brand will evolve over the years, it should remain relatively consistent to maintain that familiarity and relationship with your public. 

How To Use Your Brand To Grow Your Mortgage Business

Discover Your Target Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictional ideal mortgage consumer. If you’re doing it right, you’d be able to answer questions like where your consumer lives, her income, his fears and drives, demographics, and shopping habits. 

Knowing your brand and mission statement will help you to discover who your target buyer is. Consequently, you’ll know what messages, content, and advertisements you should create to speak to this buyer effectively. Although it may seem like a minor exercise, knowing your target audience can decrease the cost of lead acquisition while also increasing the quality of the lead.

Understand Your Competitive Edge

The fact is that there will always be a competitor with a bigger marketing budget or more resources. But that doesn’t mean that you’re out of the race. Your mortgage business –its value, mission, service –are qualities and benefits that are unique to your business. 

So when attempting to leverage your brand to scale your business, think about what factors make your business attractive and unlike others. Use what you know about your target buyer persona to develop a list of benefits and features about your business and brand and use it as a framework for your marketing strategy to strengthen your reach. Here are a few examples:

• Transparent mortgage process
• Pressure-free self-serve application
• Investment property professional
• Tech-savvy government loan specialist
• Biligual loan services

Use Brand Awareness To Define Your Pathway For Growth

Brand awareness is the initial step of any marketing funnel and a critical component of organic mortgage lead acquisition. Not only does your brand communicate your value and purpose, but it also builds rapport and familiarity between your business and prospect. This awareness is crucial since consumers typically choose what they are familiar with when making purchasing decisions.

Now that you understand that there is “equity” in your brand, inject it into every touchpoint of the user experience. Just like building a long-lasting business, creating brand awareness requires constant effort for a sustained period. 

Be Social. Studies have shown that over 50% of a brand’s reputation comes from being sociable. Be active on social media by sharing content, replying to comments, commenting on other’s posts, and responding to reviews.

Humanize Your Content. Use personality and storytelling to give your brand depth and your prospects something to latch onto. You can do this by sharing client stories, lending scenarios, and even easy-to-read mortgage articles written in a friendly tone.

Technology + Mortgage Branding

A brand’s ability to scale your mortgage requires more than inserting a logo. To positively impact your marketing campaigns, consumer perception, and revenue, mortgage branding requires a 360-degree effort in awareness and consumer experience. At LenderHomePage, we understand this concept profoundly and have woven it into every mortgage software product we’ve developed. 

From our templated mortgage websites to the industry-leading Loanzify mortgage mobile app, our digital mortgage tools invite engagement, strengthens brand loyalty, and definitively set you apart and above your competition. We’re more than software developers. We’re your partners in digital mortgage business success. Click here to start a conversation. 

We’ve compiled a list of the topmost relevant, and useful online courses mortgage professionals need to thrive and grow their mortgage business to the next level. From digital marketing to customer service to branding strategies, these upper-level online courses are taught by professionals at the top of their game and will give you the launching platform you need to grow your business. 

Need more resources for scaling and completing your digital transformation? We got you covered! Explore our stackable and brandable digital mortgage platform that grows with your business. 

Leadership Assessment and Development 

This course by Udemy is a 2-hour deep dive into exploring and developing your leadership skills. More than the typical “business leader approach,” this course is a great foundation for growing a mortgage business and shows you how to create a resilient work culture and leadership mentality within your team to promote innovation, accountability, profitability, and loyalty. Learn more.

Performance Experts 

Taught by one of the nation’s top fifty producers of loan origination, Tim Braheem offers several coaching programs in an exclusive small group, online settings. His Leadership 360 course is open only once a year to 9 members are takes mortgage professionals through a year-long business and life coaching program to teach mortgage professionals how to build a sustainable business model that complements the desire for personal fulfillment. Learn more.

CORE Training 

Taught by trio Rick Ruby, Todd Scrima, and Reeta Casey, this program focuses primarily on leveraging healthy competitiveness within your workforce to elevate the entire team. There are three levels to this program, with the first requiring a 12-month commitment and comes with the promise of doubling your business after successful completion. Learn more.

Social Media and Digital Advertising 2021

Offered by the respected Mortgage Banker’s Association (MBA), this webinar provides upper-level insight into digital marketing and social media marketing for the mortgage industry in 2021 and beyond. With legal compliance, consumer trends, and evolving digital etiquette, knowing how to market your business is challenging. This course can be completed in a single session and will provide a solid foundation for establishing and maintaining a professional mortgage digital presence. Learn more.

Aligning Customer Experience with Company Culture

Offered by one of Linkin’s featured professionals, customers service expert Davide Brownlee provides insight into the customer journey. He shows you how the mortgage professional can add value to each phase to create an exceptional customer experience that results in happier clients, a supportive and satisfying work environment, and increased profit. Learn more.

Marketing Foundations: Automation

Named as one of Forbes 30 Under 30, Jon Chang teaches the foundations of automation in marketing, how to use it to drive efficiency, identify marketing opportunities, and develop retargeting ad campaigns with high conversion rates. The self-directed course has several case studies and can be completed in a day. Learn more.

Sales: Closing a Complex Sale

This 5-module course is a fast-track program for improving sales and closing skills. It helps originators understand the buyer’s dilemmas and offers solutions to simplify the buyer’s journey and value proposition. Taught by Jeff Bloomfield, trusted sales strategist and executive coach to senior executives of Fortune 500 companies. Learn more.

Advanced Mortgage Loan Processor: Essential Skills Training

Gain a more profound knowledge of mortgage processing with this essential skills training course. This program is perfect for the loan officer looking to branch out on his own or work independently alongside banks or lenders. Even seasoned brokers will find the lessons helpful in expanding their practice and training up a top-producing mortgage team. Learn more.

Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign

Go beyond the basics set up of Google ads and learn how to plan, execute, and optimize for mortgage lead generation. Taught by Google, this one-hour seminar will introduce you to the advanced features of Google’s ad platform and prepare you for creating powerful mortgage ads on both local and national levels. Offered on a rotating basis so check the calendar for the next available date. Learn more.

Brand Management by UCLA Extension

This higher-level 11-week course offered by working professionals is part of UCLA’s Extention program. Available in 100% online format, you’ll learn the development and application of a business brand and how to leverage this power to differentiate yourself from the competition. This course is ideal for mortgage brokers who are aggressively scaling their businesses. Learn more.