A few years ago I created a couple of directories to test which industry, mortgage or car insurance, was more competitive online. From my very unscientific research I’ve found that mortgage brokers are a lot more aggressive online, both when it comes to marketing their services and creating numerous websites. I’ve also found that it’s much more difficult to gain SEO traction with mortgage keywords as compared to insurance ones. A lot of this online competition has to do with the high Adsense pay out for these keywords. However even with a higher PPC your earnings are still minimal since the competition for traffic is so great.
As I previously wrote, I believe Adsense has become worthless and with this a lot of the sites made purely for Adsense will likely expire because the pay out is so low and search engine optimization is so competitive. Also given the recent downtown in the housing marketing, and the difficulty in obtaining a mortgage, I would gather that a lot of these mortgage websites will also expire.
