An affiliated adventure in mortgages
A year ago I created the web site whatthemortage.com and didn’t tell anyone. For a year, the web site has been aggregating news about the UK mortgage market. Take note, this covers industry and market news as well as news about specific mortgage products and deals. There has been no advertising on the site. For a year the internet has quietly indexed it, with Google Analytics providing the stats. For a year I ignored it and let it tick over.
The results are interesting. I’ve not performed any third party SEO. I’ve only gone as far as to optimise the mark-up and content in the site itself. According the Analytics, the two most popular organic keyword searches sending traffic to the site are
- 5x mortgage
- coop mortgages
Searching for “5x mortgage” in Google brings up whatthemortgage.com 4th from top in the results. This is prime Google real-estate. This demonstrates the one of the keys to SEO success is time. My content wasn’t even original or very high quality.
In the following year I shall start some 3rd party SEO, trying to create more links to the site to improve Google’s PageRank. I shall attempt to re-style the site to make it more appealing (ala web 2.0). A part of the re-style shall be to make room for some affiliate adverts. Can I convert some of the “5x mortgage” searches into hard cash?
I shall report in a year’s time (or maybe sooner)!
Posted in whatthemortgage