This article is part of a five-part tutorial on writing mortgage website content. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to attract home buyers and mortgage shoppers online, by blogging about popular topics.
At a glance: Blogging is a great way to attract home buyers and borrowers to your website, because everyone gets something of value. Your visitors get great content (hopefully) that helps them learn about their mortgage options. And you get their full and undivided attention, along with a steady stream of leads. If you blog about topics that are popular with home buyers and mortgage borrowers, you’ll attract even more of them to your website. Below, you’ll find a list of these hot topics.
How to Attract Home Buyers and Borrowers Online, Using “Hot Topic” Blog Content
If you want to attract borrowers and home buyers to your website with content-based strategies such as blogging, you’ll want to cover popular topics. This will result in more traffic, more exposure for your mortgage company, and more leads from potential borrowers.
A side benefit to this strategy is that your visitors are being educated and informed about a very serious subject — mortgage financing. So everyone wins.
When you write about popular topics, you have the potential to attract more visitors through the search engines. You also increase the amount of time people spend on your site, since you’re providing the kind of information they want most. By extension, you are increasing the chance that your website visitors will contact you in some way (i.e., lead generation).
In a separate article, I offered a list of blog topics for a local audience (in a particular city or state). Here are some that will appeal to a broader national audience. If you’re trying to attract home buyers and borrowers from all over the country, this is the kind of mortgage blog content you should be publishing.
Hot Topics That Attract Mortgage Shoppers
Our company has been been involved with mortgage blogging and publishing for well over a decade. And we analyze everything we publish to see what works best, in terms of traffic volume and other important metrics.
We typically reserve this kind of insight for our clients. But I’ll throw you a bone here and share a few of the most popular blogging topics for attracting home buyers and borrowers online:
- FHA vs. conventional
- The different types of mortgage loans and programs
- Mortgage rate trends and forecasts
- Steps in the home buying process
- Steps in the mortgage process (each step could be an article)
- Credit scores and how they relate to loan qualification
- New mortgage rules and changes
- Pros and cons of different products and programs
- Local loan limits (FHA and conforming)
If your company serves a certain geographical area, like a city or state, then you’ll want to attract home buyers and borrowers from within those areas. That’s only logical. You can do this by giving the blog content topics listed above a local angle.
For instance, we help our clients attract more borrowers online by publishing content relating to local mortgage rate trends, local home prices, loan limits, real estate market activity — you get the idea.
Local Housing Market Reports Are Always Popular
Local housing market reports are another great topic for mortgage blogging. This is an area that doesn’t get a lot of coverage, which means there’s less competition for search engine visibility and rankings. But there’s a lot of search activity for local housing info.
Here’s how it relates to mortgage blogging: You can attract home buyers and borrowers from select areas by blogging about local real estate markets (where you are licensed).
You can also use keyword research tools, such as Google’s “Keyword Planner,” to find out which topics have the most traffic potential. These are the same tools search engine marketing firms use to generate PPC and content plans for their clients, and you can use them to.
The point is that you need to think about what your audience wants. What kind of information do they need? What kinds of questions do they have? What topics are they most interested in? If you answer these questions before writing your mortgage blog content, you’ll attract more borrowers and home buyers over time.
Original Content Is Key
Also, make sure you’re writing your own original content. If you’re mostly using “stock” content (that already exists online, on other mortgage websites), you won’t get much love from the search engines.
You’ll attract more home buyers and loan shoppers through Google, Bing and Yahoo if you write your own original blog posts. It takes more effort to write your own material, obviously. But the results are well worth it. And this is an area where we can help you. Original content is one of the services we provide to our clients.
So there you have it, a crash course in attract home buyers and borrowers online, with mortgage blogging. If you want to learn more about content-based marketing strategies, I recommend reading the other lessons in this series (see the link at the top of this page). They’re full of useful information.
