Cedric Liem

Online Marketing Services for Mortgage Brokers

March 17, 2018 By Cedric Liem

Online marketing, also called digital marketing, is using online channels to market your product or service. Online channels include email, website advertising, social media, and search engines. We specialize with working with mortgage brokers. We’re here to connect mortgage seekers with you.

Why Use Cedric Liem?

SEO Specialist

Cedric Liem is an SEO Specialist with a career background in the banking industry for over 10 years and his own furniture company turned online for over 7 years. He attained eBay Powerseller status in the early 2000s, attained 1st page ranking on Google and Yahoo!, and sold to 28 states in the US, and overseas in Germany and Italy, without 1 cent of advertising!

Understand being a Salesperson

I know as a mortgage broker, you need leads and clients to maintain or grow your business. I used to be an Investment Advisor myself. I didn’t like it. But, I know what it’s like having to build a client base from scratch.

Connecting Mortgage Seekers with Mortgage Brokers

I run a mortgage website (Mortgage Crunch) that is dedicated to educating consumers about mortgages. Although only 8 months old (as of December 2017), it’s already ranked highly for mortgage related search terms in Google Canada, which brings in mortgage seekers to my site. During the first 8 months when I started this blog, I was a full time stay at home dad caring for a 1 year old daughter. So, I wasn’t really able to do anything. I really just got the site up and running with 1 or 2 articles only. My daughter just started part time daycare in December 2017. So, I have a bit more time and I’m actually doing some work now.

Focus on Marketing

You may have learned the hard way that paying a designer to do your website didn’t actually help you get any leads, as beautiful as it may have looked. That’s because a beautiful website is just that! Looks is important for maintaining a visitor, but, if you have no visitors, then don’t focus on looks too much. Just make sure it’s clean and user-friendly.

There’s more to getting leads than a great looking website. Look at it this way, in the Yellow Pages (I know, who uses that, but, just bear with me), there are xx million listings of people and businesses. When someone gets added, does anyone know? Nope. Does it matter if you have the best looking website? Nope.

This is the same thing with a website. When you create a website on the internet where there are about 140,000 new web pages per day and over 1 billion listings (2014), do you think anyone will know after you create yours?

So, how do you get known? It’s no different that old school advertising and marketing, you have to tell people. The “new school” however has some new channels such as ads on websites, emails, social media, and search engines, particularly Google.

The Difficulty with Mortgage Broker SEO

The difficulty with SEO for mortgage brokers is that most of you offer the same services to people. New mortgages, refinancing, self-employed, etc. I know very well that the service offering is the same. So, your website content is also the same as the next mortgage broker. It’s just re-written slightly differently.

So, it doesn’t help when I did a bit of research and found one particular popular Website and SEO Agency that specializes in Real Estate, Mortgage Brokers, and other real estate related professions; they just copied the same text from broker to broker for several pages on their websites. I checked four broker websites created by this Agency and they had the same text.

If you’re a web design agency only, then I don’t feel that’s a problem depending on the contract you negotiated with the agency. But, if you offer web design and SEO, then you shouldn’t be doing something like that.

That makes it hard to rank highly when all your competitors have written the same topics on their website. And it’s even worse if the text is copied exactly the same like I have seen. Your money is better spent on actual marketing rather than paying for the website.

How Can I Help You (Services)

I offer a unique website promotion service via email. If you’ve every hired an SEO consultant or bought an SEO report, you may have found that you just didn’t know what to do and how to utilize all the numbers and charts you were given.

I can help you get past that by eliminating the reports and charts and just giving you plain, simple, actionable advice via email. For example, “shorten your title tag to less than 60 characters and include this [keyword] into it.”

That’s advice you can do, not something you’ll get confused by.

You should also note that some things may be more difficult to carry out than others, such as changing the title tag vs adding a picture to your article.

So let’s see the details:

DIY Website Promotion via Email

If you’re a DIYer and probably a bit of techie, then this may be the plan for you.

In this plan, I offer 30 days of advice to help you get your site ranking higher as well as getting traffic. You actually don’t need to rank high in Google to get targeted traffic, you can get traffic in other ways.

I use my premium SEO tools to perform a site audit and interpret the results to give you simple, actionable advice to get your site more traffic.

For example, I may say you need to correct some broken links on your site. To do that manually, you need to click on each link and see if your link goes to the correct site. Instead, I can tell you exactly where your broken links are.

Another example may be to find your current website position. If your site is really low on Google, it means you may need to go through 10, 15, or more pages trying to find your site. I can find your position quickly.

A third example may be to find the related keywords to your main topic. You can use free tools for that which give you limited results or poor results and only for Google. Or I can use my premium tools to find related keywords with search volume on Google, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, and other “search engines”.

Price: $99.95 / 30 days

Contact me if you’re interested in this service. If you’re ready to purchase, please click here.

I’ll provide excellent customer service throughout the contract.

Contact Me

Error: Contact form not found.

Content Writing is all About Quality

November 3, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

Good, useful content writing is the core to successful SEO.

It’s not sufficient to help you rank a web page to the top, but, ideally, it will be required if search engines such as Google have their way. And that’s good. The days are supposedly numbered where spammers will be able to write junk in their articles and rank highly in the search engines. Although, it’s still not the case yet.

Factors Affecting Good Content Writing

It used to be that content writers for SEO had to look at keywords used, the density, and the length as the primary factors when writing articles.

I would say now, you just have to write good content, and secondly, make it look good. The look is important in order to keep visitors because the time a visitor stays on a page is considered a strong ranking factor.

Since the time a visitor stays on your page is important, the length of the article has to be somewhat monitored as well. A long page, assuming the reader reads everything, will keep the reader on your page longer. An article that is about 800 words or more will take about 3 minutes, which currently is considered a good, lengthy time on a web page, according to articles I’ve read about Google.

However, a long article isn’t the only way to keep a visitor. A video may also be used to keep a visitor on a page. So, having a video, diagrams, or other types of content other than the written word can also help maintain visitors on your site. This has always applied to presentations in general. And web content is just another channel of presentation.

What is Good Content?

Good content is subjective to the particular reader. And search engines want to be able to serve their customers who are searching, with content that matches their search.

An important factor of good content is that it matches the title of your article. Take this current article I’m writing about “content writing”. What would a person searching for content writing be looking for?

My method for writing this content of this article was to read other articles about this, take the best, most useful points, and also include my own view on it. I’ve eliminated many points from articles I’ve read because I believe a lot of the information provided wasn’t about content as it was about SEO.

You can tell from the headings what I consider is important to someone searching for this topic and I tried to provide useful, factual information related to the headings in a better way that other articles. “Better” can be to summarize an article into something easier to read, or it can mean it’s more detailed, or it can be corrected or updated information.

I mentioned that making an article look better is also important. Look better can mean the typography such as the font size, the font, spacing, and other elements of the font and how it’s displayed to make it easier for readers to read. It can also mean adding some graphic elements such as images, content boxes, and other graphics (e.g. changing bullet points to use graphic images) to make the content easier or more interesting to read.

Good content is something that the search engine and the author of the article have to have in sync. The reason I say that is, you may write an article that is useful and factual with regards to the topic you have chosen, but, then, you have to rely on the search engine to serve your article to the right people.

So, it’s important to make sure that you have written an article that searchers want. One way to do that is to just do a search yourself and see what the top articles are. The top articles are presumably the ones that people want. Does your article end up in that search? This is a bit of keyword research and your keyword rank analysis.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to change it up a bit and put your own spin. There are too many articles of the same topic that are just re-written. Having a unique spin to your content may get you to the top faster than re-writing other articles. Search engines don’t want the same topic that is just re-written 10 times to take up the first page in the results. That would be terrible for searchers. Unfortunately, it’s going to happen. Many people in the same profession are going to write about the same topic because it’s important for their readers. For example, I’m sure many accountants will write about budget changes, or cash flow vs accrual accounting. It’s just part of their profession.

What’s important is to write it with your own words, your own thoughts, and make it your own. Don’t copy other articles. I’ve read other articles in order to make sure I’m writing about the correct topic and covering what is needed. But, I’m using my own words and my own voice to make it my own. I’m writing this in my style and not someone else.

With regards to typography, I’m a bit lazy on that and I leave it up to the theme. I’ve chosen a highly regarded theme (Genesis Framework) to ensure that I am using good typography. Even still, I did increase the default font size used by this theme and also made it heavier because I find the font on mobile is too small and too light.

I use free websites for graphic images such as Pixabay. I also use Google Images and use their Advanced Search to search for images that are free to use commercially.

In summary, produce good content and make sure the content of your article matches the title. Secondly, check that your content shows up in the search engine based on the search that you believe other people are searching for.

How to make sure your article shows up based on what people are searching for is another topic that I plan to write about later.

Let me know if you have suggestions or comments in the comments section below.

Keyword Research the Right Way

November 2, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

Keyword research is arguably the most important task to do for your website with regards to search engine optimization or search marketing. Why? Because you might create a great website but discover that no one finds it on the internet. The internet is like a telephone book with name and contact information. But, how do you get someone to find your name unless someone already knows it?

In an ideal world, great websites with useful, valuable information regarding the topic you search for will show up in the order of usefulness or relevance. Business owners, individuals, or organizations who build their websites will just focus on their particular topic and create content around it.

In actuality, there is a tremendous amount of websites created to spam users and are full of duplicate content people took from one website and changed a few words to “make it their own.” Often these sites are full of Google Ads or other ads. And they know how to get their website to show up before yours!

These bad sites often have to do with spammy link building, although, with search engines like Google, they may get removed or pushed to the bottom.

This is where keyword research can help. If you are selling some type of marketing services, you want to show up in the search engines when individuals search for “marketing services”. To do so, you should know the words people search so your website shows, at or close to the beginning of the search results, and not bad ones and spammer sites. But, you want to use this information in a responsible and ethical manner to make your content as available as possible to the people searching for it.

Keyword Difficulty

From a business perspective, you want your website to be found with an easy and intuitive search term. “Marketing services” does seem like an intuitive term to search for. But, surprisingly, the trend for this search term is going down. Does it mean that the business of marketing is going down? Absolutely not! People are starting to use different search terms or “lingo”.

Social media marketing, however, is on the uptrend. What else is on the uptrend? Are there other search terms people are using? How competitive are these search terms.

“Social media marketing” has 292 million results in Google Canada. Do you want to compete with all these other results? This is something you need to find out if you want visitors to find you in the search engine. This is where keyword research can help.

On the other hand, people may look for quartz and you might do some basic research and find that it’s on the uptrend. You think your “quartz counter top” business will do well because of this, but, maybe (I haven’t checked this) people are really looking for quartz watches. So, your website doesn’t end up getting the right visitors.

Getting more specific in your search terms allows you to focus in on your target audience. This requires something called long-tail keyword research. An example of this would be to optimize your site for “cornerstone red quartz countertop” instead of “quartz countertop”. Notice that the first keyword is more specific while the second is more general.

Getting specific helps you attract more targeted visitors. You may think that optimizing for the general term is good because you want more visitors, but, having the right visitors is actually better.

Keyword Value

Another aspect of keyword research is keyword value. How valuable, from a business perspective, is the keyword. For example, some terms may have few results, but, people click on the results because it’s relevant. The purchases from these clicks might be a lot even though there are few results. The value of this search term would be high because of all the purchases and possibly the scarcity of online sellers.

Other terms may generate millions of results, but, few people click on it because the results aren’t relevant. The keyword value would be low.

Keyword Research Benefits

Depending on the depth of research, keyword research can help you in the following ways:

Learn which terms for your niche are popular and their trend
Narrow down sub-niches related to your main search term
Determine which search terms are difficult to compete with
How valuable is a keyword term

Doing keyword research before building your website can help guide the overall design and strategy of your website(s). However, if you already have a website, you can modify and reorganize your site after completing some research to improve it’s user experience and results in the search engine.

What is an SEO Audit?

October 29, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

The SEO audit is for the most part the on-site factors of your website SEO. By having an audit and addressing any issues, it helps the search engine read and interpret your content correctly. Having the search engine correctly understand what you are trying to convey to people helps you get read by your target audience.

Keyword use used to be important for on-site SEO, but, not so much anymore. It’s relevance that’s important. How relevant is your article in the search results by the person making the query? By making your article relevant, you are trying to create a page that satisfies the query of the user as opposed to creating “spam” pages that just tries to get to the top of the search engine for the sake of it.

In summary, the SEO audit will help you create an article that gets read by the search engine properly. Subsequently, your content will be read and hopefully satisfy the people who are searching for articles that matches your content.

An SEO audit can include checking and / or analyzing:

HTML validation

This checks that the code behind your web page is correctly written. It’s basically a “grammar and spelling” check of the coding.

Bad links

Does your site have links with the incorrect url? Fixing bad links improves user experience by not having them land on a 404 Not Found error page.

Redirects

Are old links redirected to new ones? If not, they can be redirected so that users do not end up with a 404 Not Found page. This improves the user experience.

robots.txt file

Do you have a robots.txt file. And if so, is it correctly written. This file helps search engines crawl your site by excluding directories and files that should not be looked at.

404 Not Found page

Do you have a Not Found page that helps users when a link is broken or not found? Having a good 404 page can mitigate bad user experience when broken links are found on your site.

Indexing issues

Are all the pages you want to be found in the search engine actually in the search engine?

Crawling issues

Are there any issues when the search engine reads your website?

Page load time

How fast does your web page load in the browser? The faster the better.

Site maps

Are you using a site map which is a table of contents for your website? Site maps helps search engines crawl your site.

Linking

Are you linking correctly within your website? Good links help user experience and keeping them current helps prevent not found errors.

Page titles

Are you using relevant page titles? Good page titles can attract users and improve SEO. They are a very important factor in SEO.

Meta tags

Do you have descriptive meta tags? Good descriptions can attract readers.

Duplicate content

Do you have duplicate content issues in your website? Duplicate content issues can reduce your ranking.

Images

Are you images labelled? At least 1 labelled image can help the SEO of your page. The label includes the alt tage and the file name of the image.

Content

Is your content relevant?

Navigation

Is it easy for user to find your content? Does it make sense?

If you notice, user experience appears very important in SEO. And that’s because search engines want to send good, easy to read information to users. There are more factors, but, these are the ones I consider the most important, although, not in that order.

Learn Financial Planner Designations and Titles in Canada

May 13, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

Have you wondered how to pick a financial planner with the myriad of titles and designations that exist in Canada?

Before I go through them, know that only Investment Advisors can recommend stocks. Everyone else sticks to financial planning without recommending any stocks.

This article is a comprehensive list of professions and the possible designations these professions may have. Individuals can have multiple designations or no designations. This doesn’t talk about the courses or certificates individuals have. But, if you can put some letters behind your name that relates to retail financial planning (i.e. financial planning for consumers and the general public), then this article will have it. But, if you have a certificate that doesn’t grant you any letters behind your name, I may not have covered that.

Let’s go through some of the titles now. I’ve broken them down by the granting organization.

Organization Website:
http://www.fpsc.ca/

Certified Financial Planner

Designation: CFP
Formal Training: Yes

The CFP designation is granted by the Financial Planning Standards Council (FPSC). They’ve been around since 1995. Advisors with the CFP designation have gone through a lot of education and learning. It’s definitely a designation I trust. They probably have the most rigorous training among the financial planners.

If you want someone to go through your income, expenses, and assets and figure out: How much money can I leave for my children? When can I retire? When can I stop working? How do I get out of this hellhole? Well, maybe not the last question, then this is the profession to go for in my opinion.

Organization Website:
http://www.iiroc.ca

This isn’t an official website for Investment Advisors, however, they must work for an Investment Dealer which is regulated by IIROC

Investment Advisor or Stockbroker

Designation: Investment Advisor
Formal Training: Yes

An Investment Advisor is the only type of financial advisor that can recommend stocks. At at early point in time, they were called stockbrokers because that’s all they focused on: Selling stocks. Nowadays, their training includes an increased amount on financial planning. And many advisors take extra courses and obtain certificates or designations related to financial planning.

Obviously, if you want recommendations on stocks, you need to go to an investment advisor. Their minimum education includes the Canadian Securities Course, ethics and a 90-day training program.

Official Website:
http://www.step.ca

Trust and Estate Practitioner

Designation: TEP
Formal Training: Yes

This designation is granted by Society of Estate and Trust Practitioners (STEP). This designation is a specific area in financial planning. A planner with the CFP designation has already covered this during training, but, if the person also has this designation, then you know they’ve studied this area in much depth. I don’t see this designation much. It doesn’t seem as well known as the CFP. Even still, if I had an issue dealing with trusts or estate planning, I would try and find someone with this designation along with a legal or accounting background. Knowledge in this area is much less available publicly than general financial planning or investment decision making.

Official Website:
http://www.iafp.ca/

Registered Financial Planner

Designation: RFP
Formal Training: Yes

This is another financial planning designation accorded by the Institute of Advanced Financial Planners. This organization was originally from the Canadian Association of Financial Planners. In 2002, CAFP merged with the Canadian Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors to form Advocis. RFPs created the IAFP instead of joining with Advocis.

Their website says they’ve been around since 1987, longer than the CFP designation. Even still, their designation is not as popular as the CFP, which is much more recognized.

Organization Website:
http://www.iafe.ca/clu.aspx

Chartered Life Underwriter

Designation: CLU
Formal Training: Yes

Planners with this designation specialize in wealth transfer and estate planning.

Chartered Financial Consultant

Designation: CH.F.C
Formal Training: Yes

Planners with this designation specialize in wealth accumulation and retirement planning. Note that the governing organization does not provide the educational requirements courses for this designation anymore. But, they still need to meet continuing education requirements.

Organization Website:
https://www.csi.ca

Personal Financial Planner

Designation: PFP
Formal Training: Yes

The Canadian Securities Institute grants this designation to individuals who have completed formal training attained via 4 different paths. This designation doesn’t have the respect as a CFP, but, from what I’ve seen over the years, the course curriculum is becoming more rigorous, as are all financial designations I’ve looked at.

Designation Webpage:
https://www.csi.ca/student/en_ca/designations/pfp_info.xhtml

Chartered Investment Manager

Designation: CIM
Formal Training: Yes

Generally, this title is acquired by Investment Advisors. Individuals with this title can offer you discretionary portfolio management which is when they can trade for you without asking you for permission for each individual trade. This doesn’t mean they won’t ask you for permission with each trade. It means that they are licensed to do so with clients who want this. But, if you want to know each trade before they execute on it, that’s not a problem.

Designation Webpage:
https://www.csi.ca/student/en_ca/designations/cim.xhtml

Certified International Wealth Manager

Designation: CIWM
Formal Training: Yes

According to the CSI website, global wealth is growing rapidly and Private Banking is the fastest growing market in the financial services industry. This designation is for managing the affluent client who may have assets globally. Advisors with this designation cover trust and estate planning in depth generally because when you have a lot of wealth, you want to be able to pass it on to your children or benefactors in the most tax efficient way.

Designation Webpage:
https://www.csi.ca/student/en_ca/designations/ciwm_info.xhtml

Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute

Designation: FCSI
Formal Training: Yes

This is the highest designation accorded by the Canadian Securities Institute. There are different paths to get this designation. And designation holders need to maintain Continuing Education credits as do all the title holders above that require formal training.

Designation Webpage:
https://www.csi.ca/student/en_ca/fcsi/index.xhtml

Other “Designations”

Life License Qualification Program (LLQP)

Designation: N/A
Formal Training: Yes

This is technically not a designation although I have seen it behind people’s names before. It’s actually an exam required to sell life insurance products. It’s offered by several approved providers. You need to find someone with this certification to buy life insurance in Canada, except Quebec, where they have a different licensing requirement. The certification is managed by the Canadian Insurance Services Regulatory Organizations.

Official Website:

http://www.cisro-ocra.com

Financial Planner

Designation: None
Formal Training: Not required

This title is not regulated. Anyone can call themselves a financial planner, but, only those who have gone through the training and attained the experience as accorded by the FPSC can put the letters CFP behind their name.

Official Website: N/A

Financial Advisor

Designation: None
Formal Training: Not required

This is another title that is not regulated. It’s the individual or company’s preference that determines this title. There are organizations with the term Advisor in it, but, you don’t have to be part of any organization.

Official Website: N/A

There is a website by Advocis which says they are the Financial Advisors Association of Canada, but, the term is not regulated and many people not part of the association can call themselves a financial advisor.

Financial Coach or Money Coach

Designation: None
Formal Training: Not required.

These people are possibly TV personalities, writers, or bloggers. There is no formal training and the term is not regulated. If you need someone to drill things into you and watch over you because you can’t, then a coach is the person to go to. Some advisors with designations may also advertise themselves as coaches for marketing purposes.

Official Website: N/A

There is a website called Money Coaches Canada, but, they’re not an official website for money coaches. Because the term is not regulated, they used the term in their company name.

Master of Business Administration

Designation: MBA
Formal Training: Yes

Some people may think that if you have an MBA, you’ll know about stocks and finance. They may, and they can learn about it in business school, but, it may not be the right information and they still cannot sell or advise you on any investments unless they have the proper licenses. One exception is the Financial Services MBA from Dalhousie. People with this MBA definitely learn about retail investing but, they are still not allowed to recommend investments unless they are an Investment Advisor. There are also many financial planning topics that they do not cover that CFP graduates do. Insurance and estate planning being two big topics.

Chartered Financial Analyst

Designation: CFA
Formal Training: Yes

People with the CFA designation generally move on into investment analysis, can become portfolio or wealth managers, and other positions related to investments. This is probably the most training of all the investment analysis positions in this list.

Recommendations:

The easiest recommendation is that if you’re looking for stocks, then find an Investment Advisor. This is assuming you don’t want to do this yourself, otherwise, you should try a discount brokerage.

If you’re looking for financial planning which for many cases means figuring out how much you need to save for retirement, then you have a few options. These calculations are not too difficult. I plan to add a sample retirement Excel or LibreOffice workbook online for readers to download. For me, the first person to find is an advisor with the CFP designation. I would say they have the best reputation and recognition. After that, it could be an Investment Advisor, or someone with an PFP, and then an RFP. All these individuals may be good for general financial planning.

If you have financial planning that involves estate planning and trusts, then someone with a TEP designation would be more appropriate. Often times, advisors will work with other individuals who specialize in estates and trusts.

If you have financial planning that involves insurance, then someone with the LLQP certification is required for insurance sales. Although someone with a CFP can still do the planning for you, but, may not be able to sell you the products.

If you have financial planning issues that involves taxes, then an accountant would be the best bet.

Finally, if you need someone to handhold you, then a coach may be the right person.

Remember than many individuals may have multiple designations.

If you know of more designations you’d like listed here, feel free to send me a note or comment below.