Guild Mortgage
Leading mortgage lender leverages dynamic locator to boost local pages’ conversions
Tools used
- Local Pages
Founded in 1960 when the modern U.S. mortgage industry was just forming, Guild Mortgage Company is a nationally recognized independent mortgage lender offering pilot and niche residential mortgage products and local in-house processing. The company now employs more than 4,000 individuals and has 222 retail branches in 31 states. With a widespread national presence, Guild Mortgage needs the ability to direct local searches to the location geographically closest to them.
As a relationship-oriented business, Guild views its loan officers as internal customers. Because of this, the company not only needs to reach the right searchers at the right time but also needs to empower loan officers to reach their goals and easily facilitate their business. To accomplish this, they sought out a local marketing partner who could offer a high level of personalization and customization for individual loan officer pages and dynamic locator tool.
The challenge
Enhancing local pages
To further enhance their digital presence, loan officers can differentiate themselves through the ability to customize their personal page. The same can be said for local branches. Guild prioritized adding editable sections and a variety of templates to these pages in an effort to help loan officers and branches stand out. A few of these editable sections on loan officer pages include their background banner images, contact information, personal social media accounts, charities they support, and much more.
Expanding search proximity
As customers continue to seek businesses that are close to them, businesses must focus on highlighting the most convenient locations available to searchers during their time of need. Due to Guild’s expansive nationwide presence, the company wanted customers to be able to easily find the branch location and loan officers closest to them. In order to specify both the branch locations and loan officers closest to the searcher, Guild was working to partner with a business that could help elevate both their proximity search and standard search capabilities.
Rio SEO has become more than just our local marketing partner, but rather an extension of our team. Their consistent communication matched with real expertise has positively impacted our local search performance. Reliability, flexibility, and support are pillars of a rewarding business relationship, and Rio SEO goes above and beyond in all three.
Ana Hussey,
Manager, Creative Design
Lead Stakeholder for Organic & Local Search
Our solution
Solution 1: Fully customizable pages
Rio added numerous, customizable sections to loan officer and branch pages. Now, loan officers and individual branch locations can fully diversify their pages from one another through intuitive, customized templates.
- Customized banner image
Color theme (4 options); Hero Image options (7 options) - Personal information section
Headshot; Title; Branch location; CTA’s; Email; Directions; Phone; Mobile; Fax; Branch; Social accounts; Static CTA - Quote for refinancing CTA
- About me section
Solution 5: High-level of enterprise support
- All requests handled within a quick time frame.
- Requests for customizations are fully accommodated.
- At the start of the partnership, Guild’s corporate marketing team had a wish list of out-of-the-box features they wanted to have incorporated.
- Frequent calls with a dedicated Account Director help Guild streamline tasks, hear recommendations for improvement, and work through challenges.
The results
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Guild Mortgage saw drastic improvements across both their GBP, loan officer pages, and branch pages performance. By revamping their local tool and customizing both their loan officer and branch pages, Guild Mortgage saw triple digit year-over-year improvements for the number of visitors as well as the actions those visitors were taking on those pages.
Page performance is directly tied to GBP performance, as many users find branch and specific loan officer pages by first searching for a mortgage brand then being directed to their locator tool to find the loan officer and branch closest to them. A robust locator tool coupled with an aesthetically pleasing design drove customers to the branch locations and loan officers closest to them, encouraging more views and engagement with Guild Mortgage.
For this case study, we focused on Guild’s pre-COVID performance for a more accurate representation of how this financial services brand was performing prior to the pandemic.
*Data represents January-March 2020 YoY increase
GPB performance
52%
Increase in total searches
56%
Increase in total views
26%
Increase in map views
19%
Increase in total action