Mortgage broker SEO landing pages: a practical framework

A landing page earns its place when someone arriving on it from a search is measurably closer to knowing what to do next. That is the whole standard. Everything else — headings, structure, internal links — is in service of it.

This is a framework for building pages that meet it, and for deciding which pages not to build at all.

Start from a situation, not a keyword

The pages that work for brokers describe a person in a position, not a product in a category. Someone buying with a default on file. Someone self-employed for eighteen months. Someone with a small deposit and a gifted contribution. Someone remortgaging a flat with a short lease.

Those readers have stopped browsing and started worrying, which is why they convert. A page called mortgage advice is read by people who are still deciding whether to think about it at all.

Before writing anything, describe the person in one sentence: what has happened to them, what they are afraid of, and what they want to know within the first thirty seconds.

One page, one intent

Do not merge a location page and a specialist page because both target searches you want. They serve different readers and end up serving neither.

A location page's job is to explain how to find and compare an adviser who covers that area. A situation page's job is to explain the situation, what lenders generally look at, what evidence is involved and what a sensible next step looks like.

If you cannot describe a page's single job in a sentence, do not build it yet.

What the page needs to contain

• A title and opening that name the situation in the reader's words rather than the industry's.
• An honest explanation of what usually matters in that case, written by someone who does the work.
• The documents and questions that tend to come up, so the reader can prepare.
• What is realistic and what is not, including where the answer is often no.
• How fees and the advice process work, or a clear route to that information.
• A specific next action, and a way to take it without submitting a long form.

Original guidance is the part that cannot be faked. A page assembled from other pages reads like one, and a reader who has already opened four tabs can tell.

Say what you cannot do

Pages that acknowledge limits outperform pages that do not, because they are believable. If a situation is genuinely difficult, say so and explain what would change it. If your firm does not handle a case type, say that too and point elsewhere.

Never claim whole-of-market access, guaranteed acceptance or a rate you cannot support. Every one of these pages is a financial promotion for a regulated service, and the standard is that it is fair, clear and not misleading. Include your regulatory status where required and keep it accurate.

Build the internal links deliberately

Link the national or hub page down to specialist pages, and specialist pages across to relevant consumer guidance. Link adviser or firm profiles to the situations they genuinely handle rather than to everything.

Use descriptive anchor text — what the reader gets, not "click here" — and keep the number of links modest. A page with forty links has no structure; a page with six has a shape.

Avoid building thin pages at volume

The temptation is to produce fifty pages from one template with a variable in the heading. It is fast, it is cheap and it produces a folder of pages that compete with each other and add nothing.

The honest test before creating a page: is there something specific and true to say here that is not said on any other page of the site? If not, either the page should not exist or it should be merged into a stronger one.

Fewer, better pages are also cheaper to maintain, which matters more than it sounds. Every page you publish is a page that will need checking when your fees, your permissions or the market change.

Measure the right things in the right order

Impressions and clicks tell you whether the page is being found. Enquiries tell you whether it works. Qualified conversations tell you whether it attracts the right people.

Look at all three per page, and be prepared for a page with modest traffic and strong enquiries to be worth more than a page with the opposite profile. Rankings move slowly, so give a page three to six months before judging it, but check within a fortnight that it is indexed and that the search terms it is appearing for are the ones you intended.

Keep them current

Put a review date on every page. Fees change, criteria change, your firm's coverage changes, and an out-of-date page is worse than no page because a reader who spots one error stops trusting the rest.

A page that makes someone more confident and better prepared before they contact anyone is doing its job, whether or not they contact you first.