1. Lendingtree has a lead generating website because they dont need to provide as much as information to gain a borrower's trust. Most people know them by name, and people see their commercials and/or ads all the time. People normally go to LendingTree to see rates not to find info.
2. You won't find lead generating websites on top organic searches...you will find them on the google adwords and/or yahoo search marketing. Depending on the keyword they can be about 1dollar to 50dollars per click.
3. SEO can last you for a long time, and is generally much cheaper than running ads.
Finding the right SEO person is the key.
There are many SEO people who will tell you that they get visitors and/or rank for keywords.
1. You need to make sure they're not getting 'fake visitors' or 'useless visitors'.
A lot of SEO people go post a blog comment on 100 blogs, and this will generate a lot of traffic but there will be no ROI. Most people who were referred by a blog aren't generally looking for a mortgage. I can post a comment on a very popular blog on myspace, mortgage implode, sports blogs, and even gaming blogs, and will get thousands of visitors. The problem with this is that most people aren't looking for a mortgage on myspace, MI, sports blogs, or gaming blogs. This is what I mean by fake/useless traffic.
2. Ranking for useless keywords. A lot of SEO companies will show you that they rank for keywords, and anyone will be impressed when they see that the SEO company is #1 in the search term. You sign up with the company, and the SEO gives you 10 keywords that are #1, but you receive no search engine traffic. The problem is that nobody searches for these keywords, and it is a waste of time/money.
FHA Secure programs or FHA Secure Program - I was ranking #1..now Hud.gov is beating me. I receive a 1-2 dozen of visitors per month from Google. A lot of the visitors were useless until I found out what a 'loan mod' was. I didn't know it was a good keyword until I starting getting a lot of apps from this keyword.
You will need to find out what keywords are 'searched' so that can help you gain a lot of visitors.
Be careful with the 'false promises'.
Not ALL companies know about SEO. Otherwise everyone would be in the top 10 for every keyword, and we know there are only 10 spots for Google's front page.