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If you’ve been a loan officer for any number of years, you’re familiar with the ebbs and flows of the mortgage market. When things are good, they are very good. And other times, they are “less good.” Then there are times like the one we’re currently experiencing where it’s particularly challenging.

The good news is that all signs indicate we’re over the worst of it. The market has somewhat stabilized, and consumer confidence is on the rise. However, while the market is steadying and self-correcting, it’s still a far cry from a booming demand; profitable lead gen and conversion continue to be tough.

Thriving in the current environment and preparing for booming success when we’re on the upswing again means loan officers must adapt and innovate now.

You must take charge of the future by embracing change and finding new solutions that set you apart from the competition.

In this blog post, we’ll explore key strategies to help you become a successful loan officer in any market—from understanding your most lucrative channels to knowing how to leverage mortgage tech to win more referral partners. With our insider tips, you’ll be on your way to becoming a top-performing loan officer –no matter the market!

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Successful Loan Officer Lead Gen Strategies

Consider the following four recession-proof strategies to have a pipeline of consistent leads coming through.

1. Identify 3-4 marketing channels that bring in the most qualified leads.

When you focus on too many lead channels at once, it’s difficult to keep up, and you may spend too much time on marketing strategies that bring little to no return for your business. 

Instead, examine your analytics to understand which marketing channels are truly most successful at converting leads to customers. Your channels could include social media, co-marketing with existing realtor partners, paid leads, paid mortgage digital marketing, organic leads from Google searches, review sites, referrals, and social media platforms.

Examine which channels supply the most leads and have the highest/fastest conversions.

Filter it down to the top three or four that work best for your mortgage business, and see how you can take it a step further. Be sure to set smart, attainable goals which motivate you to work better towards them.

Since digital marketing is a major part of successful mortgage lead generation marketing, be sure to also check out our eBook on how to increase your digital presence online to gain more traffic and leads. The eBook also covers using mortgage loan officer marketing tools to your advantage, including leveraging social media platforms and search engines to find high-quality mortgage leads.

2. Establish new realtor relationships and nurture existing partnerships.

With higher rates and most mortgage transactions lying on the purchase side, you’ll want to consistently work to establish new realtor partners and add value to existing ones. Keeping regular contact with your realtor partners and continuously providing value is key to gaining more purchase leads. Sending a sporadic text or call to “check-in” and see if they have a prospective borrower they’d like to send your way is a poor and ineffective way to build a mutually beneficial relationship.

Instead, you must think of ways to positively contribute value to your existing realtor’s business, especially in the form of digital currency, such as content, tech tools, and marketing. Plus, you need a way to engage new realtors with a compelling reason to work with you. 

For example, originators using Loanzify Mobile App are able to co-brand the mortgage mobile app with their realtor partners to keep prospective buyers engaged with home searches, location-based mortgage payment calculators, and instant mortgage readiness checks – instrumental and advantageous features that consumers won’t find on other real estate apps like Zillow.  

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Going above and beyond to provide extraordinary value to your real estate partners is the only way to stand out and strengthen your relationship and is one of the best strategies for mortgage lead generation.

3. Leverage mortgage technology as a unique differentiator.

One aspect that will forever help your business stand out from your competitors is the technology you use and provide to your customers.

But this is where most companies get it wrong. It’s not just about having tech or even the latest tech (although legacy software is ill-advised).

The #1 benefit you want from your technology is providing customers with the best mortgage experience possible. Home financing is intimidating enough –it should not feel like a chore, too. Luckily, intuitive consumer-facing mortgage software from LenderHomePage helps homebuyers obtain home financing easily and quickly while making the journey exciting. 

If you resolve the issue of borrower experience better than your competitors can, you’ll close loans up to 5x faster. Not only that, but building out a stellar customer portfolio attracts other marketing-qualified leads, and you’ll be well on your way to success. 

4. Gain Insight into Your Local Market and Niche Opportunities

As a loan officer, staying informed about national mortgage trends is essential to providing excellent service to your clients. However, it’s equally important to understand your local market thoroughly. National headlines may not always apply to your region, and being aware of the nuances of your local market can help you identify revenue opportunities that might otherwise be missed.

One way to stay on top of your local market is to cultivate relationships with real estate agents in your area. These professionals are often the first point of contact for home buyers and can provide valuable insights into the current state of the market. And as mentioned above, real estate agents are a vital aspect of lead generation –particularly in a challenging market.

Another strategy is to track the data and metrics specific to your region. This can include things like the number of new home starts, the number of homes on the market, job market demands, and significant city improvements that may draw the attention of curious home shoppers. 

By staying up-to-date on these metrics, you can identify trends and changes in the market and adjust your strategies accordingly.

You can also use this information to create short blog posts to send out to your prospects and referral partners.

Wrapping up: How to stand out as a loan officer

Loan officers must stay informed of the current market shifts and use strategies such as optimizing their marketing channels, leveraging mortgage technology, building relationships with realtors, and understanding local markets to succeed. Whether in a booming market or a downturn, there are ways to remain competitive and profitable. 

Plus, being prepared should never be underrated when it comes to achieving long-term success as a loan officer—regardless of what type of environment you are working in.

So if you’re ready to take action, contact us at LenderHomePage today and get access to powerful digital tools that will give you an edge against all competitors in any market. We look forward to partnering with you to win.

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Picture this: Your ideal customer, a perfect fit for your target market, eagerly searches for “loan officers near me.” As they hit that search button, a multitude of relevant results floods their screen. The prospect starts scrolling and finds a select few local loan officers. Unfortunately, your business is nowhere to be seen.

Or worse yet, the prospect finds your site but quickly clicks out because it took too long to load –triggering Google to drop your site further and further down search results.

To prevent such nightmares from haunting your business, it’s imperative to keep up with the latest updates for local SEO optimization –particularly page speed. In recent years, page speed has emerged as one of the most critical factors influencing search rankings.

Like LenderHomepage, Google understands that page speed and User Experience work together and play a pivotal role in determining the quality of a website and, ultimately, conversions.

Missing this marker means certain doom for any website.

So take charge of your online presence and search ranking by ensuring that prospective borrowers looking for a local loan officer finds you on their first search. After all, according to Google, 81% of consumers use the search engine to search for a local business (Brightlocal, 2021).

Act now, and secure your spot in the local market to maximize your visibility and success with SEO optimization.

FREE Ebook: Master Digital Presence to Grow Leads!

But before implementing a local SEO strategy on your mortgage website, we need to step back and review something called “intent.” Google uses intent to judge what sort of search result the searcher wants. Is the searcher looking for information? Looking to buy? Looking to compare? All of this determines what type of content Google will display. Tying in “intent” with location further determines search results.

So let’s start there.

Understanding “local intent”

46% of all Google searches have some sort of local intent, and a whopping 97% of users will use Google to find a local business. (Safari Digital, 2021). Because of this, Google offers a handful of features to support geo-targeted searches. 

For example, when you search for ‘loan officers in (city name),’ Google will first display results from Google Maps listings and then showcase the traditional ‘10 results per page’ search results.

Now, let’s say that a particular searcher looked up ‘loan officers.’ Even though the user has not mentioned a location in their search query, Google may still display all the loan officers in the user’s area. Some users may even search ‘loan officers near me.’

Again, if the location is detected, Google will do its job of informing the searcher of all the loan officers near where they are located.

Then comes the underlying purpose of the intent of the search query. A transactional intent is where the searcher intends to purchase something now. While informational, commercial, or navigational are other types of intent categories. When it comes to drivers of traffic, those with informational and navigational seem to be the intents with the most volume. When it comes to sales, transactional intent is the big winner –which isn’t surprising since someone that is looking to “apply now” will do just that (it’s just a matter of where).

Now that you have an understanding of the mindset of intent and how that works with the searcher’s location, let’s move on to the strategies to optimize your website to gain local traffic.

Best loan officer strategies for SEO: Your Plan for Implementing Local SEO

Improve Page Speed for Instant SEO Boost

Page speed, also known as load speed, plays a critical role in SEO by determining how fast a page’s content appears. Different factors, like web hosting and page size, affect how quickly a page loads, and this can vary between desktop and mobile versions. Faster loading times improve SEO because it enhances the user experience –essentially, the longer the load time, the more likely it is for a user to click out. 

So if Google detects that a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the search engine will drop your ranking. Conversely, a mortgage site with optimized load speed will get an instant SEO boost.

There are several strategies that you can implement to improve your page speed. The easiest one would be to use a mortgage website platform that addresses these factors for you, but if you prefer to hire a developer to work on your existing site, these are items you’ll want to overhaul:

• Optimize image files: Compress images to reduce their file size without compromising quality.
• Minify code: Remove unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files to make them smaller and load faster.
• Reduce HTTP requests: Combine or eliminate unnecessary scripts, stylesheets, and other resources to minimize the number of requests the browser needs to make.
• Enable browser caching: Configure caching headers to allow the browser to store certain elements of your website, reducing the need to download them on subsequent visits.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN): Distribute your website’s content across multiple servers geographically to deliver it to users from the server closest to their location, reducing latency.
• Optimize server response time: Improve the server’s processing speed and reduce the time it takes to respond to requests from the browser.
• Minimize redirects: Reduce the number of redirects on your website to minimize the additional time required for the browser to reach the final destination.

Add location-based keywords to your website copy.

We all know that the right keywords are what bring the traffic in. So do your research! There are a handful of free keyword research tools that you can use to find out what the hot local keywords related to your industry are. Here are some of our favorites.

Google Search Console: Search Console is free to set up for any business, and the tool has many benefits. You can see the number of impressions, clicks, and average position for each of your web pages, and you can filter the timeline for when you want Google to gather the results. 

If you go to the ‘Queries’ section, you can see what search terms people are searching for, where your website shows up, and what position you are in for that search query. This is helpful because if you are showing up as the 80th result for a local search term, you know you need to optimize for that search query better.

Free Keyword Planners: There are several free keyword research tools out there to try. Most limit the results displayed on the free versions. However, they present a fair enough amount of data to be a valuable resource. 

Google Keyword Planner: Although built for Google Ads, you can still get a pretty good idea of what keywords are good for regular organic search copy.

Google Suggest and Related Searches: Did you know you do not need to use an external third-party tool to research your keyword? Google itself presents suggestions and related searches when you type in a topic into the search engine. 

The suggestions are presented as you are typing in the query. For example, if you are typing in ‘loan officer…’, Google may suggest that you search for ‘loan officers near me’ or ‘loan officers in California.’ That should give you some ideas for local keywords. As for related searches, you can find these when you go to the bottom of the search results page. The page will give you very similar ideas to the Google Suggest feature.

You can even ask your friends and loved ones for local keyword ideas! Ask them what they would search for if they were looking for local loan officers.

Keep in mind that optimizing your mortgage website for local SEO is one of the best lead-generation strategies for mortgage lenders too!

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Optimize your web pages for on-page SEO.

This is where you go all in and ensure your local keywords from step one are integrated into your website. There are many ways you can do this. The best place to start is your contact page. Do you have your physical address on your contact page? This would also be a great place to add headings such as ‘Best Loan Officer in (your city, state).’ 

Along with your contact page, make sure that the headings throughout your website have a healthy amount of local keywords added in. Do your title tags and meta descriptions mention your location? 

This is one of the best ways for your audience to find you. Of course, you’ll also want to optimize your blog articles, loan program pages, and images with alt tags!

Tip: Don’t forget to optimize for voice searches! A good way to do this is by adding questions that people often search for in your headings. You can use www.answerthepublic.com to find out what types of questions people search for regarding your topic.

Make your mortgage website responsive and mobile-friendly.

Although this is easy to miss, you want to ensure that your mortgage website is mobile-friendly. This is because many search engines, such as Google, have mobile-first indexing.

Use a free tool from Google Search Console called the Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your site is up to speed and has no issues rendering on mobile. Hint: If you use a LenderHomePage mortgage site, you can rest assured that it’s responsive and mobile-friendly!

Create a Google Business profile

Creating a Google Business profile opens up another opportunity to bring in local traffic. This will allow you to appear in the Google Maps results that list all the registered businesses in the area. It is completely free to create a business profile on Google. 

When creating your profile, make sure that you add high-resolution pictures of your business with good lighting, have a proper description that compliments your business, describe your offerings, request your best clients to leave reviews, and make sure that your address, hours of operation, and name of your business are correct. 

The more relevant your description is to what your audience is searching for, the more likely it is to appear higher in the Google Maps results. 

Then, you need to monitor your listing every now and then and make any changes as needed.

Tip: Along with asking your best clients to leave reviews on your Google Business listing, you can also request them to leave a review on other directories such as Yelp, Trustpilot, etc. However, you don’t want to pay for reviews. Make sure the reviews are authentic and not spam-like.

Don’t forget directory sites

Once you have tackled the Google Business listing, you can move on to getting your business listed on other directory sites such as Yelp and Yellowpages.com. 

The most important thing to remember when listing your business on these sites is that the information must be consistent on every website. This helps Google recognize your business more easily to help it rank higher for relevant search terms. 

Stand Out, Reach Mortgage Audiences: Free Ebook!

Build high-quality local links to your website

Link-building is a process in which one website links to another site, giving the linked site more SEO value. When doing link-building outreach to secure links on other sites, you first want to ensure that the website you’re trying to build links on is relevant to your niche. 

So a high-traffic informational website on the latest films and TV shows will not be relevant for your mortgage business. However, given the right content and context, linking to a local home contractor or pet adoption website might be perfect.

Reach out to the top local publications and businesses in your area, and see if they are willing to partner with you in some way so that you can give them an opportunity to link to your website. 

You also want to remember to build links on sites with a higher domain authority score. Tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush are great for finding out the Domain score of a website. 

Link-building is not an easy process and will require a great deal of patience and effort. However, if your efforts are consistent, you will certainly start seeing your rankings improve in search engines.

Post on your social media channels to boost engagement

Many homeowners lurk around on social media, so you must make your business visible on all the social channels you can think of. Plus, Bing search engine – which still holds about 10% of all internet traffic –uses social media as a factor in their search ranking. Posting frequent and relevant content can get challenging for a single LO, so consider using an intern or a scheduling tool to plan ahead. This, at the very least, can help take some of the load off of your plate.

For a more comprehensive solution, use a mortgage marketing specialist who can do the heavy lifting. Check out our social media marketing service for more information. 

It helps eliminate competition from businesses farther away from you, and you can further optimize for local SEO with Google Maps. Did you know that 86% of consumers rely on Google Maps to find the location of a business (Backlinko, 2020)? 

There is no reason you should wait to optimize your website to garner local traffic and the traffic you already get. Want to learn more about optimizing your digital presence? Read this previously published article about social media marketing for loan officers. 

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