Search Engine Optimization and mortgage brokers

[Chris Leonard]

Im a web designer with a client in east Tennessee. We're redoing his site, and Im not sure how much to emphasize google searches. He said that when he did an online ad a while back, it mainly led to bad leads. I'm curious if that's been the experience with other brokers out there, or if you've had good luck getting leads through google? Any feedback is appreciated.

[Carlos Rovira]

As @Roger Poulin mentioned, SEO is more of an art than it is a science, and it could take months if not years to achieve results. 

When initially designing the site, you should probably pay attention to the type of words you are using in the web site copy. This will be indexed by the search engines organically. Make sure to use key words that are relevant to the topic of the site (i.e. real estate in Tennessee, etc). The content needs to be good quality and well written and you cannot stuff the copy with a lot of the same keywords as this will harm your ranking. 

When it comes to paid search ads, this is a different animal altogether and takes a lot of optimization and marketing knowledge. For your purposes, I'm assuming you're just redoing his web site. I would only emphasize the basic SEO practices on building the initial site. If your client is interested running a paid search ad campaign, I'd offer him that as a separate service and refer him to a marketing company that specializes in this, if you are not comfortable doing it yourself.