Local SEO for mortgage brokers

Local search is the one channel where a two-adviser firm in Shrewsbury can outrank a national brand. Google treats "mortgage broker near me" and "mortgage advisor Shrewsbury" as local queries, and the map pack that sits above the blue links is populated mostly from Google Business Profile data, not from your website. That single fact should change how you spend the next quarter.

This is a walkthrough of what actually moves local visibility for a UK brokerage, in the order worth doing it.

Fix the listing before you touch the website

Open your Google Business Profile and check five things against reality.

• The business name field matches your trading name exactly, with no keywords stuffed after it. "Baxter Mortgages" is fine. "Baxter Mortgages - Best Mortgage Broker Shrewsbury" invites a suspension.
• The address is a real place where you meet clients, or the address is hidden and you are set up as a service area business. Do not use a virtual office you never attend.
• The primary category is Mortgage Broker. Secondary categories can add Mortgage Lender or Financial Consultant if genuinely accurate.
• Opening hours reflect when someone answering the phone will pick up, including whether you take Saturday calls.
• The website link points to a page that mentions the same town, not to a generic homepage that could belong to anyone.

Then add photographs of the actual office, the actual team and the actual street. Stock imagery of a couple holding house keys does nothing here and quietly tells a visitor you have nothing real to show.

Service areas, radius and the proximity problem

Proximity to the searcher is one of the strongest signals in the map pack, and you cannot change where your office is. What you can control is how honestly you define coverage. If you advise across a county, list the towns you genuinely serve rather than every settlement within fifty miles. A service area list of forty towns does not make you rank in forty towns; it dilutes the signal and creates an expectation you cannot service.

If you have two offices, each needs its own profile, its own phone number and its own page on the site. If you have one office and want visibility in a neighbouring town, the honest routes are an adviser who lives and networks there, sponsorship and press in that town, and a page that says something specific about that market. There is no shortcut that survives a Google update.

Name, address and phone consistency

Aggregators, trade directories, your network's find-an-adviser page, the FCA Register entry, your Companies House record and old sponsorship pages all carry a version of your contact details. When those disagree, particularly on the phone number, the local signal weakens.

Make a spreadsheet of every place your details appear, correct them, and keep it. This is dull, one-off work with a long tail of benefit. If you rebrand or move, that spreadsheet is the difference between a two-week dip and a six-month one.

Reviews sit inside the financial promotion rules

Review volume and recency influence local ranking, so asking for reviews is legitimate marketing. Two constraints matter for a regulated firm.

First, your marketing is a financial promotion, and it must be fair, clear and not misleading. The moment you lift a review onto your own website or an advert, you are responsible for the impression it creates. A testimonial saying "they got us a rate nobody else could" implies an outcome you cannot promise. Choose quotes about service, communication and clarity, not about beating the market.

Second, never incentivise reviews, never filter who you ask, and never write them. Ask every completed client the same way at the same point in the journey. Under Consumer Duty you are expected to understand real client outcomes, and a review process designed to surface only happy clients undermines the feedback you actually need.

Reply to every review, including the poor ones, without disclosing anything about the client's circumstances. A defensive public reply that reveals a borrower's income is a data breach and a bad look.

Town pages: fewer and deeper

Most broker sites carry a folder of near-identical town pages where only the place name changes. Google can see this as easily as a reader can, and it rarely ranks. Publishing forty of them is the single most common waste of a broker marketing budget.

A town page earns its place when it contains something only someone working that market could write. That might be the dominant housing stock and the lender attitudes it triggers, the local employers whose contract structures complicate income assessment, the ex-local-authority flats where lending is patchy, the new-build developments and their reservation deadlines, or the conveyancers you have actually worked with. If you cannot fill a page with that for a given town, do not publish one. Three genuine town pages beat thirty templated ones, and they are far cheaper to maintain.

What to measure, and where

Do not accept a ranking screenshot from an agency as evidence. Rankings vary by the searcher's exact location, so a "number one" screenshot is nearly meaningless.

Use two free sources instead. In Google Business Profile performance, look at calls, direction requests, website clicks and the searches that surfaced you, month over month. In Search Console, filter queries to those containing your town names and compare impressions and clicks across a rolling three months.

Then compare that against the only number that pays anyone: enquiries where the client says they found you on Google, recorded in your CRM at the point of first contact. If your Business Profile calls are rising and your booked appointments are not, the problem is the phone, not the search engine.

A weekly routine that takes twenty minutes

Post one update to the profile about something real, such as a criteria change you have noticed or a local development. Check for new questions in the Q and A section and answer them. Check for new reviews and reply. Once a month, look at the performance tab and note anything that has moved.

That is genuinely most of it. Local search rewards a business that is visibly present and consistently described, and punishes one that publishes volume without substance. UK mortgage demand also swings with the seasons, with enquiry patterns typically lifting after the New Year and around the spring market, so judge any change against the same period last year rather than against last month.