Saving Money on Mortgage Keywords?

Anyone have advice on how to save money on expensive keywords like mortgage or home loan? Most of the associated keywords are upwards of $8.00 or $10.00 for 1st position. We don't need to be in position one but we do need to cut cost. Also is there any way to pre-qualify through the ad or the website that might help cut costs further?
Thanks in advance.

I tested mortgage keywords back in 2005 and it was seriously not fun. You can read all about it and hopefully get some ideas on Advertising Mortgages using PPC Ads.

The competition and search volume for mortgage keywords is enormous. I would see if I could find a particular niche made up of a sub-set of people who want a mortgage. That could be just about anything. What you're looking for is a way to offer what is commonly called a USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Since that probably isn't too clear I'll provide some examples:

1. If we weren't talking about such a saturated market I'd suggest something obvious like mortgages for people with bad credit but that would be no easier than just mortgages. You might try mortgages for single parents or financing for a particular type of property. Try doing some keyword research and look for a decent amount of traffic and more reasonable click costs.

If you don't come up with any workable ideas that way, you may have to get really creative. For example:

2. Maybe the owner of the mortgage company loves Harley motorcycles. Other people who have Harleys could also need mortgages so if they came up with a creative Web site that tied the two together somehow other Harley owners could be more inclined to do business with the fellow Harley loving owner of that particular mortgage company.

Personally I think I would take another route to getting traffic. Social networking sites can drive a lot of free traffic as can anything you can produce that would go viral.

There are definitely some actions that can be taken to help within the mortgage space for PPC marketing. These tactics that I have used won’t really decrease your CPC much, but instead are ways to filter out clicks, therefore decreasing your overall PPC cost. The fact is that the mortgage space online is/was a very profitable market. Big mortgage lenders along with loan aggregators can stand to spend a lot per click because once they have a consumers information or business, they can re-sell the lead up to 4 times, not counting the different loan types some of these companies offer (i.e. – home loan, refinance, car loan, student loans, etc.) Here are my tips:

1.Geo Target like no other – It seems that you have a limited budget for your mortgage space. You should already have a good idea of where you best closing rates come from. What states, and within those states what counties, cities, and DMA’s. Geo Target these and then cut out the dead space within the country. You can look like a bigger player, and put a bit more of an aggressive bid if you are geo targeting.

2.Negative keywords – Bad credit, poor credit, no credit at all, unable to verify income? All these types of searches produce leads that are risky. Build out an extensive negative KW list that will take out some of your riskier leads.

3.Copy Filter – Within your copy, add filter statements such as “Good credit? We’ve got a loan for you”, “offering great rates for verifiable incomes”, “steady income? Credit over 600? We’ve got the right mortgage for you”.

Those were just a few techniques I used while working in the mortgage space.