(Article updated Feb 2006)
When your business revolves round a highly competitive keyword what does it take to reach number one on Google? The answer - intuition, not search engine optimization.
That’s the view of Mortage101.com.
Their site is easy to find - just enter ‘mortgage’ in the Google search box and they’ll be there, number one in the natural search results among over 100 million search results.
Mortgage101.com is part of the Lion Group with offices in Seattle and Denver and Gig Harbor. Lion designs software and builds websites that connect mortgage brokers with lenders and consumers.
So what marketing genius came up with the strategy that got Mortgage101.com to top spot?
According to Michael Borgelt, Business Development Manager of Mortgage101.com, it was a matter of pure intuition, “back in 1997 COO Chuck Aikens thought that free online calculators, articles and tools for mortgage brokers and real estate agents would be a great way to generate leads for his network of mortage brokers. He didn’t think about linking or search engines - all he wanted to do was to provide something useful to customers and gain business from the goodwill that generated.”
Mortgage101 now has an impressive collection of inbound links. A quick search on Google’s link popularity check (link: mortgage101.com) shows that the site has close to 118,000 inbound links. Borgelt also mentioned, “we now have over 60,000 realtors® who have signed up for our free mortgage tools and over 6,000 mortgage brokers who link to our tools. That network brings us over 8,000,000 page views or 1,000,000 unique visitors per
month.”
Mortgage101 has created extensive content and made it easy for realtors® to sign-up and integrate. Realtors® can incorporate every page of Mortgage101.com for free of a co-branding exercise or they can choose to add a javascript snippets to their website which allow realtors to have live mortgage rates on their websites.
With the free co-branding realtors® are able to provide their customers with over 170 pages of mortgage information and 16 interactive calculators. They can power their site with current interest rates, live market updates, calculators and documents. The content collection - both articles and tools - is impressive and would cost a small fortune for any realtor® to start creating themselves.
And as if the content itself was not incentive enough, Mortgage101.com pays website developers on a per lead basis when they place links to the tools on realtors® sites.
“Some significant size checks go out every month,” says Borgelt.
Mortgage101 spotted an opportunity in the marketplace and had the vision to exploit it. Clearly their strategies have brought success.
As an online marketing consultant, I’d probably say that they’ve used ‘viral marketing’ and ‘linking strategy’ to great effect. Talk to Borgelt and he’d say they used good, old-fashioned business intuition - no mystery there.
You can find Mortgage101 at http://www.mortgage101.com and view the realtor® sign-up page at http://realtor.mortgage101.com/SignUp.asp?p=mtg101.
