Link building for mortgage brokers

Links from other websites remain one of the stronger signals in organic search, and mortgage advice sits in the category of subjects search engines treat with extra caution, since a bad recommendation costs someone real money. That combination makes links harder to earn and more valuable when you do.

It also makes brokers a favourite target for agencies selling packages of links that will eventually cause a problem. This piece separates what is worth doing from what is worth refusing.

Refuse these first

Paying for links, in any of its disguises, breaches Google's guidelines and risks the site being devalued. The disguises are well practised: guest post placements sold by the link, sponsored articles on unrelated blogs, private blog networks, and reciprocal schemes where two hundred small businesses agree to link to each other.

The tell is usually the pitch. If someone offers a fixed number of links a month at a fixed price on unnamed sites, you are buying the thing that gets sites penalised. If someone offers to place an article on a finance blog you have never heard of that carries fifty other finance articles, the same applies.

A second reason to refuse is regulatory rather than technical. Anything written about your firm that invites business is a financial promotion. An outsourced writer producing bulk articles in your name, with claims about rates or approval, creates copy you are responsible for and have never read.

What genuinely earns links in this market

Four routes work for UK brokerages, and all of them require having something to say.

Journalist requests. Personal finance journalists at national and regional titles need quotes on mortgage stories constantly, and the services that distribute those requests are cheap or free. Responding well means answering within the hour, in plain language, with a specific point rather than a platitude. The link is not guaranteed, the mention often is, and both are worth having.

Genuinely local presence. Sponsoring a junior football team, a school event, a charity run or a local business award usually produces a link from the organiser's site, and it comes with the local relevance that matters for a firm competing on local search. This is unglamorous and it works.

Membership and trade listings. Your network, your professional bodies, trade associations, local chambers of commerce and the FCA-adjacent directories all carry firm listings. These are legitimate, expected, and worth auditing because half of them will have your old address or a broken URL.

Original material other people need. If you publish something genuinely useful that does not exist elsewhere, people writing on the subject will cite it. For a broker that usually means practical detail about how a difficult borrower type is assessed, or a clear explanation of a process nobody else has bothered to write down.

Digital PR that suits a small firm

The large-scale approach, commissioning surveys and building interactive tools, is out of reach for most brokerages and often produces the invented statistics this industry has too many of already. There is a smaller version that works.

Comment on things you are actually positioned to see. A broker sees lender behaviour before it is reported: which lenders are moving on criteria, where valuations are coming in short, what is happening to timescales. A regional journalist writing about the local housing market wants exactly that, from someone nearby who will pick up the phone.

Two constraints. Never invent a number to make a story more attractive. If you quote a figure, it should be from a named, checkable source such as the Bank of England, ONS, UK Finance, the Land Registry or your own recorded data described honestly as your own. And keep quotes descriptive rather than promotional, because a quote that reads like an advert is both less likely to be used and more likely to breach the fair, clear and not misleading standard.

Fixing what you already have

Most firms have links they have lost or broken without noticing. This is cheaper to fix than earning new ones.

Search for your firm's name and check every result that mentions you: old sponsorships, press mentions, supplier case studies, association pages, your network's adviser finder. Where the mention exists without a link, or with a link to a page that no longer exists, ask for the correction. Most people will make it.

While you are there, check the details match your current name, address and phone number, since inconsistency undermines local search independently of the link.

Directories: which ones are worth it

The useful ones share three characteristics. A human decides who is listed. The listing carries real detail about the firm rather than a scraped name and postcode. And the site attracts actual users rather than existing only to sell listings.

Sector-specific directories, professional bodies, network adviser finders and well-run local business listings meet that bar. Mass submission services do not, and buying a hundred low-quality listings creates a footprint that looks exactly like manipulation.

Judging progress honestly

Link counts are a poor measure. A single mention in a regional newspaper is worth more than forty forum profiles.

Track instead the sites that link to you and whether you would be pleased to be associated with each one. Search Console lists linking domains without any subscription. Review the list quarterly and ask three questions: has anything new appeared, has anything valuable disappeared, and is there anything here I would not want a compliance officer to see.

Then connect it to the only outcome that matters. Links are a means to visibility, and visibility is a means to enquiries. If linking domains are rising while enquiries are flat, the constraint is somewhere else entirely, and more links will not fix it.