If you are a mortgage loan officer or a real estate agent you can buy a pre-designed,  pre-written, cookie cutter web site and have it up and active in a less than an hour. Is this a good marketing  / branding strategy?

That sounds simple and easy. All of the design work is done, almost all of your content is already written, you get an attractive well written web site right out of  the box. This is a great way to get a web site online fast. But when it come to search engines like Google, and Yahoo, the pre-written part is not so good.

Pre-written is the content. There are several companies that provide websites for mortgage and real estate professionals with pre-written content. The sites are full of well written  articles and information. In many cases the content is very well written and informative. So why are pre-written content web sites a problem when it comes to SEO, branding, standing out from the crowd, etc.?

The short answer is that original content is king! The major search engines award sites for original content and penalizes sites for content that is not original.

Take the phrase “Our customers save money and close their loans quickly because we employ the most advanced mortgage technology available.” This can be and is said in some form on almost all mortgage web sites. But the exact phrase can be a problem.

Google – “Our Customers save money…….”

Do the above search (click on the link)..  this is a line taken from one of the top providers of pre-designed web sites – there are over 15,000 web site listed on Google that use that exact phrase… word for word – multiply this by an entire site full of the same content other than the name, address and phone number.. now do you see the problem?

Content that is a 90% + match to 15,000 other web sites is not going to be ranked well.. this is not considered original content. If your web site is full of non-original articles and phrases the odds of your site ranking high in searches are not good at all.

Content for your site should be original – it should be written with your target market in mind, your target customers in mind.

Websites that use a Blog format are a great way to accomplish this with out the big price tag that custom websites can bring.  No one knows your market like you do, no one knows your clients better than you do.

We are working on a solution to this problem that will help you have original content designed to rank high in the search world and be as affordable as the pre-written – out of the box – websites.

If you find this information helpful please let me know. I always welcome suggestions,  comments and new subscribers.
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