Mortgage broker directory listings

A directory profile is a strange piece of writing. It has to do the work of a first meeting, a website and a recommendation from a friend, in the amount of text somebody will read while standing on a train platform. Most broker profiles fail because they were written as a summary of the firm rather than as an answer to the reader's situation.

This is a walkthrough of what goes into a profile that gets chosen, section by section, and what to do once the enquiry lands.

Picture the person reading it

Someone comparing brokers on a directory is usually two or three weeks into worrying about something. They have a specific complication in mind: a probation period, a limited company, a lease with sixty-eight years left, a partner with a missed phone contract payment. They are scanning several profiles quickly, looking for a signal that you have seen their situation before, and discarding anything that reads like a brochure.

They are also nervous about being sold to. Anything that sounds like a call centre script pushes them to the next profile.

The anatomy of a profile that gets picked

The first line

The opening sentence is the one that survives. Use it to name who you work with rather than what you are. "I mostly work with self-employed applicants and company directors across Greater Manchester" tells a reader more than "an award-winning whole-of-market advisory practice". If your firm genuinely does everything, pick the two or three areas you would most like more of and lead with those.

The description

Two or three short paragraphs is plenty. Cover what you handle often, how you work, and what a client should expect from the first conversation. Concrete detail earns trust: saying you will need three months of bank statements and a payslip before you can be useful is more persuasive than saying you are thorough.

Say what you do not do. Turning away work you are not suited to costs nothing on a profile and saves both sides a wasted appointment.

Specialisms and tags

Where a directory offers structured fields for case types, fill them in honestly and completely. These are usually what powers filtering, so an empty field means you are invisible to a searcher who has selected it. Ticking everything is equally damaging in a different way: you appear against searches you cannot serve, waste your own time on the calls, and train yourself to think the source is poor.

The photo

A plain, current photograph of a human face outperforms a logo for a service where the whole product is a person you will talk to about money. It does not need a photographer. It needs decent light and eye contact.

Coverage and how you meet

Be exact about geography and about whether you work by video, by phone or in person. A reader in a village outside your city needs to know whether distance matters. If you work nationally by video, say so plainly rather than leaving a town name to imply otherwise.

Fees and how you are paid

Stating your fee position openly filters out people who were never going to pay it and reassures people who assumed the worst. Whatever you say here has to match your terms of business exactly, because a profile is a financial promotion like any other and has to be fair, clear and not misleading.

Qualifications and permissions

Name your qualification, your firm, and where you sit on the register. If you are an appointed representative, say whose. People do check, and the ones who check are often the ones with the most complicated cases.

What happens in the ten minutes after they click

Everything above is wasted if the enquiry sits unanswered. Directory enquiries are usually sent while the person is still in comparison mode, and the profile that answers first has a natural advantage over the one that answers on Thursday.

Decide who owns these enquiries, where the notification lands, and what happens when that person is with a client. A shared inbox nobody has been made responsible for is the most common single point of failure.

Keeping the profile alive

Profiles decay. Advisers leave, phone numbers change, a firm stops doing bridging, a review platform link breaks. Put a recurring reminder in the diary to reread every profile you hold, out loud, twice a year. Read it as if you were the nervous reader described above.

Update it whenever the business changes shape. If you have just taken on someone who knows adverse credit inside out, that belongs in the profile the same week, not at the next annual review.

Choosing which directories to be on

Ask three questions before joining one. How does an enquiry reach the broker, and does the same enquiry go to several firms at once? What does the platform require of you in return: a subscription, a share of fee, a per-enquiry payment? And can you see enough about who is searching to judge whether the audience overlaps with the work you want?

MortgageMatch does not sell or auction enquiries, so an enquiry that reaches you has not been resold to a queue of other firms. Not every platform works this way, and the difference changes both your conversion and the tone of the first call, so it is worth asking directly rather than assuming.

Mistakes that quietly cost you enquiries

• Writing in the third person about your own firm, which reads as distance rather than authority.
• Listing every lender you can access, which no reader can evaluate.
• Claiming to be the best or the cheapest, which is both unpersuasive and a promotions problem.
• Leaving the profile identical to eleven others on the same page.
• Filling in the marketing fields and skipping the structured ones that drive search.
• No mention of what happens next, so the reader cannot picture the first step.

A profile is a small asset that keeps producing once it is right. Spend a serious hour on it rather than fifteen distracted minutes, then leave it alone until something real about the firm changes.