New Business Start Up

MortgageMamma

Hi All,

I am new to the forums but have been viewing the site for some time now. I was wondering if there are any mortgage advisors out there could give me some friendly advice? (No I am not looking for a mortgage!)

I am just about to launch an Independent Online Mortgage Advisory Service, and I am very aware of the levels of competition out there. As you can imagine its an exciting and anxious time and any feedback/help could go a long way.

Does anyone else here work online with mortgages? Do you think online is the way things are going or do you think most clients still prefer face to face? Do you think it's harder to sell over the phone than face to face?

If you have mortgage sites, do you have "online tools" such as a mortgage calculator, apply online ratebeater etc? If you have these, do you feel many site visitors get the lender name with the cheapest rate and go direct?

If you are a potential mortgage customer, would you go to a bank or an independent mortgage intermediary? would you trust your own selection of mortgage from the information available on the internet?

Any friendly advice much appreciated!

AndrewSmith

The biggest problem you wil find is getting your site to rank anywhere on the google or yahoo rankings, against companies such as moneysupermarket and the Guild of Professional Mortgage Advisors, both of which advertise on a national basis and provide leads from their website enquiries to Intermediaries and Brokers. The way they can afford the advertising is by not employing brokers of their own but selling the mortgage leads to brokers for an average of £30-60 each, with some adverse credit leads costing upwards of £350 each.

I spend approx £300-500 per month on web and local advertising which generates local enquiries. Local web placement is easier to attain that national. Also in the 12 years I have been doing this job I find that people still prefer the face to face approch from a professional, experienced mortgage consultant rather than a 'cold' approach via phone etc. Think like this, would you divulge your credit situation and be honest about county court judgments, or bad debt to someone over the phone without having ever met them?

You will also find that your site would become an excellent information portal, then people would go to their own local broker to implement the mortgage.

I know some on here will not agree with this however I speak only from my own personal experience (which includes both face to face sales, and financial services call centre management) and the regular client satisfaction and expectation surveys I carry out, in which most (around 70-80%) clients still want the face to face evening visit in their homes.

Hope this helps

Andy

MortgageMamma

Thanks Andy

You've just said what I was feeling myself. I think I'd prefer to stay as local as possible. We are currently considering buying leads from the GPMA ourselves, to help us get off the ground so to speak.

I've just departed another company who are always on the first page on google and try as I might I can't figure out how they get there on optimisation alone (although I did have a good go at trying to find out while there). The thing I don't understand is, this company I worked for their site is really poor (and dodgy), and quite small in comparison to others, and they even advertised services they don't provide. Can't understand how such a tiny drastically understaffed company got so many leads without buying them in.

emmaHarris_2

We have some web tips that may be useful:
Google send a 'robot' to your site every day. It will look for certain aspects to your site:
Make sure that all your different pages have individual 'header; information specific for that page

Titles and Meta fields should reflect the same information that is on the page
for example: If your page is Contact us...it should say these words on the page (relevancy)

Robots like HTML more than dynamic or flash sites (php sometimes do not get picked up)

Have html links on all your pages to your other pages. Robots will look at your first page then look at all internal links and go to the scan the next pages and so on

If your titles in your header are all the same for all pages then the robots will/may just scan your first page and hence only show one page of your site

Make sure you have great external links to other sites and get as many of your links on other relevant sites also. Exchange links whenever possible

Link to bigger sites that get trawled. i .e those who have hundreds of pages
Make sure your robots.txt file on your server allows search engine robots to see your pages/site

If you do not have a robots.txt file then get one and make sure it doesn’t tell robots NOT to visit your pages as a lot do

We have never paid Google for a listing and yet we continue to grow.

PM me and I will provide an example of what we mean and how this has helped other sites in the search engine rankings. (FREE)

I hope this helps and many people do not fully understand how the search engines work and have not fully realised how important to learn about Internet search engines when they submit a site.

Hope this helps.

p.s. If you make changes to your site...resubmit manually to the search engines

emmaHarris_2

There are now many ‘free on-line visitors chat/contact scripts’ that you can place on your web site. This will enable visitors to your site to click and talk to you 'one to one' and thus capturing the visitors while they are on your site and before they move on to your competitor’s site.

There are also many free scripts to monitor your visitors, where they come from, how long they stay on your site, which pages they go to and where they came from etc (i.e Google or another site). This will provide a lot of information to you as well as daily, weekly and monthly stats so you can then modify your site to meet the visitors expectations more.

Again, I hope this helps.

emmaHarris_2

here are some examples of how we are starting to achieve better rankings on Google in new sections of the site:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=mr%20mortgage%20kidsgrove&meta=

We are the top 2 in this respect. We do this free for certain customers and NO we are not touting for business. This is not the business of the company. What we did here is change all the title headers on each page and within a couple of weeks this is the result.

Here we are just under moneysavingexperts
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-28%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=uk+mortgage+forum&btnG=Search&meta=

Here we are NO 1 again

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=south%20african%20shop%20%2BOxfordshire&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t-1&fl=0&vc=countryUK&x=wrt&meta=vc%3DcountryUK

We tell friends and partners not to spend money on internet marketing without first having a chat. If we can help with some simple advice then we will:) FREE!!

On a variety of search words and phrases:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2006-02,GGLR:en&q=nursery%20goods%20keynsham