Mortgage broker website content strategy

Most brokerage websites contain two kinds of page: the handful that convert, and the archive nobody has looked at since it was published. A content strategy is mainly a set of decisions about which pages you are willing to maintain, and the discipline to stop making the others.

Start by auditing what you already have

Before planning anything new, list every page on the site in a spreadsheet with four columns: the URL, the last time it was substantively updated, its clicks over the last twelve months from Search Console, and whether any information on it is now wrong.

That fourth column is the one that matters most for a regulated firm. Pages describing stamp duty thresholds, Help to Buy, lending rules or your own fee structure become misleading the moment they go stale, and a misleading financial promotion is a misleading financial promotion whether or not you meant to leave it up.

Sort the list by clicks. You will usually find a small number of pages doing nearly all the work, a middle band that could be improved, and a long tail with no traffic, no links and no purpose. Delete or merge the tail. Removing forty dead pages will not hurt you and it makes the remaining site easier to keep accurate.

The three jobs a broker site has to do

Every page should be doing one of three things, and you should be able to say which.

Winning the search. These are the pages that answer a question a borrower is actively typing. They live or die on being more useful than the lender and comparison-site pages above them.

Converting the visitor. Your service pages, fee page, adviser profiles, contact and booking flow. These get read by people who arrived from a referral or a review and are checking you are real. They deserve more attention than they usually get, and they are cheaper to improve than any new article.

Supporting the conversation. Explainers you send to a client mid-case because you are tired of typing the same email. These do not need traffic. They need to be clear enough that a nervous first-time buyer stops worrying at eleven at night.

Pages that do none of these three things should not be commissioned.

Where the topics come from

The best source of subjects is not a keyword tool. It is the questions clients already ask you.

Keep a shared note where every adviser drops a question a client asked that took more than two minutes to answer. Review it monthly. Anything appearing three times is a page. This produces subjects like what happens to an application when a lender changes rates mid-offer, how a lender treats a probationary period, what a downvaluation means in practice, or whether an agreement in principle affects a credit file.

Those are unglamorous topics with modest search volume, and they convert far better than another piece titled how to get a mortgage, because the person searching them has a live, specific problem and no obvious place to take it.

Structure: hubs, not sprawl

Group content into a small number of themes that map to how you actually work. A firm doing first-time buyers, self-employed applicants and buy-to-let has three hubs. Each hub gets one substantial anchor page and a limited set of supporting pieces that link back to it and to each other.

Resist the urge to spin out variants. A page for self-employed mortgages, another for sole trader mortgages, another for freelancer mortgages and another for contractor mortgages will mostly compete with each other and split whatever authority you have. One strong page covering how different self-employment structures are assessed, with clear sections for each, is easier to write, easier to keep current and more likely to rank.

Cadence and ownership

Decide how much you can genuinely sustain. For a small firm, one properly researched piece a month, plus quarterly updates to the pages that already earn traffic, is a realistic and effective commitment. Two a week is a commitment nobody keeps past March.

Name an owner for each hub. Content without an owner drifts out of date, and out-of-date content on a regulated site is a liability rather than a neutral asset. Put a review date in the diary for every page at the moment you publish it.

Seasonality is worth planning around. UK purchase enquiries typically build through the New Year into spring, remortgage volumes track the maturity dates of the fixed rates written two, three and five years earlier, and the last weeks of December are quiet for everyone. Commission and publish ahead of those movements rather than during them.

Approvals and compliance are part of the workflow

Build the sign-off into the process rather than bolting it on. Whoever approves financial promotions in your firm, or your network, should see the piece before it goes live, and there should be a record of that approval. If your network requires pre-approval, factor the turnaround into the schedule instead of publishing and hoping.

Two habits reduce friction considerably. Avoid absolute claims about outcomes, rates or approval odds. And date anything that references a threshold, product or rule that can change, so that a reader can see how current it is.

Judging whether it is working

Give a new piece two quarters before drawing conclusions, and judge it on three things: whether it collects impressions in Search Console for the questions it was written to answer, whether the average time on page suggests anyone read past the first screen, and whether any enquiry has mentioned it.

That third measure is the honest one, and it needs a field in your CRM rather than an analytics report. If a page has been live for six months, earns steady impressions, and no enquiry has ever come from it, the problem is usually that the page answers the question so completely that there is nothing left to phone about. Add the missing element: what the reader should do next, and why doing it with a broker is different from doing it alone.