pollinate marketing

Turn online searches into consistent mortgage leads with SEO for mortgage brokers.

    What we do / See how you rank / Your SEO ROI / Who we are / FAQs

    What we do

    Planning

    Mortgage brokers are up against some of the most aggressive SEO competition on the internet. Comparison sites, national lenders, and lead generation platforms spend millions to dominate the search results you want to be in. We find the gaps they leave behind: the specific searches, locations, and client types where a well-positioned independent firm can win. Then we build your strategy around those opportunities.

    Local & regional visibility

    Most people looking for a mortgage broker start with a local search. We make sure you show up for the right ones, whether that's first-time buyers in your town, landlords searching for buy-to-let advice, or self-employed applicants looking for a broker who actually understands their situation. We cover your core area and build outward from there.

    Niches & product pages

    If you specialise in anything (bad credit mortgages, self-employed applications, HMO finance, later life lending, commercial mortgages), those specialisms deserve their own dedicated pages. These are the searches where intent is high and competition is lower. A well-built niche page targets the exact client type you want more of, and converts better because it speaks directly to their situation.

    Technical SEO

    A slow, poorly structured website costs you leads every single day without you knowing it. We audit your site for the underlying issues that hold your rankings back: page speed, mobile performance, crawl errors, thin content, duplicate pages. We fix them properly and make sure Google can find and rank everything you have.

    Content creation

    Buying a home, remortgaging, investing in property. These are some of the biggest financial decisions people make, and they research obsessively before picking up the phone. We create content that puts you in front of them during that research phase, building trust and familiarity before the first conversation. That audience grows month on month and doesn't disappear the moment you stop paying for it.

    Reputation management

    In financial services, trust is everything. We help you build a review strategy that generates a consistent flow of five-star Google and Trustpilot ratings, and we make sure those reviews are working as hard as possible for your SEO. Star ratings in search results, structured review markup, and a profile that makes the decision easy for someone who's never heard of you before.

    Google Business Profile

    For mortgage brokers with a local focus, your Google Business Profile is one of the highest-value assets you have. We optimise it fully, keep it active, and make sure it's generating visibility in the local map pack for the searches that matter. Most brokers either ignore it entirely or set it up once and forget about it. Both are missed opportunities.

    Press coverage & link building

    Links from credible financial, property, and local news sites tell Google your firm is worth ranking. We build them through relevant press coverage, property industry publications, and community content that earns attention naturally. In a sector where trust signals matter enormously, these are the authority markers that separate firms that rank from firms that don't.

    Reporting

    Every month you get a plain-English report that tells you exactly what your SEO is producing: traffic sources, keyword movements, and what it all translates to in terms of enquiries and leads. No spreadsheets full of numbers that need decoding. Just a clear picture of what's working, what's next, and what your investment is actually worth.

    See how you're ranking

    The mortgage brokers ranking at the top of Google are winning enquiries before anyone else gets a look in. Search for your brokerage below and see how you compare to competitors on traffic, rankings, backlinks and site speed with real data.
    We gather data on architecture firms from a combination of sources: Ahrefs for keyword rankings, domain authority and backlink profiles, a direct crawl of each firm’s website, and PageSpeed Insights for load time and technical performance. Traffic figures are modelled from keyword rankings and estimated click-through rates, so they represent a snapshot of organic search visibility rather than verified Analytics data. That said, they’re a very reliable indicator of how a firm is performing in search relative to its competitors.
    It may be that we haven’t indexed your firm yet, particularly if you’re a smaller or newer practice. Get in touch and we’ll add you to the database, or run you a free SEO audit that covers your site and your closest competitors in detail. Similarly, if there’s a competitor missing, let us know who you’d like to compare against and we’ll add them. Alternatively, a free audit will give you an even more detailed picture of where you stand relative to any firm you specify.
    The tool works best when you’re comparing like for like. An eight-person commercial practice and a two-person residential studio serve very different markets, so benchmarking them against each other won’t tell you much. Try to choose firms that compete with you for similar project types, in similar locations, or at a similar scale. If you’re not sure where to start, the “compare to average” toggle gives you a useful sense of where you sit relative to the broader market rather than specific rivals.
    Domain rating is a score out of 100, calculated by Ahrefs, that reflects the strength of a website’s backlink profile: essentially, how many other sites link to it and how credible those sites are. In practical terms, a firm with a higher domain rating is better positioned to rank for competitive search terms like “architect in Leeds” or “heritage architect Manchester.” It’s one of several factors that influence rankings, but it’s one of the most meaningful ones, and it’s very hard to build quickly. If a competitor has a significantly higher domain rating than you, that’s worth understanding.
    Architecture websites are often image-heavy by necessity; you’re showcasing your work, and that work needs to look good. But large image files, unoptimised galleries and bloated page builders can quietly wreck your load times, and slow sites are penalised by Google regardless of how good the content is. A beautiful website that takes four seconds to load will consistently underperform a plainer one that loads in under a second. Site speed sits alongside traffic and authority in this tool because sometimes the gap between you and a competitor has nothing to do with content or links. It’s a technical issue that’s entirely fixable.

    SEO ROI calculator

    Comparison sites like Habito and Trussle charge you every time someone clicks. SEO builds visibility you own permanently. Put your numbers in below and see what a consistent increase in organic traffic could mean for your brokerage.
    Search for your practice in the box at the top to pull in your estimated monthly organic traffic. Then add your average monthly enquiries from the website, your typical project value, and the traffic increase you want to target. The calculator works out how long it would take for the additional revenue to cover the cost of an SEO campaign.
    The calculator uses your own inputs alongside projected growth figures based on how SEO typically performs for architecture practices. It models that growth across twelve months, reflecting the reality that early months involve a lot of groundwork before rankings start to shift. The projections are structured estimates rather than guarantees, but the assumptions are consistent and the model reflects what we actually see with clients.
    Estimated traffic figures come from Ahrefs and Semrush, which model organic search visibility using keyword rankings and click-through rates. If you have access to Google Analytics or Search Console for your practice website, entering your verified monthly traffic figure will give you a more precise calculation than the estimate.
    Architecture SEO tends to have a longer runway than some other industries, partly because project values are high and search volumes are lower, and partly because the work involved in ranking for terms like “residential architect in York” or “heritage conversion specialist” requires building genuine authority over time. The calculator shows the month where cumulative revenue from additional traffic overtakes the cumulative cost of the campaign. For most practices that point falls somewhere between months six and ten.
    A modest traffic uplift might involve technical fixes and optimising your existing project pages. A more ambitious target means sustained content production around your specialisms, link building through architecture press and industry directories, and ongoing authority work. The bigger the goal, the more the work involved. Our pricing for architecture SEO is straightforward and you can get a clear sense of it when you run your numbers above.

    Who we are

    Rooted in Manchester

    Maybe you’ve tried doing SEO yourself instead of focusing on what you do best. Maybe you’ve invested in SEO and been given the runaround by an agency that knows how to send invoices and not much else. Or maybe you’re just not seeing the kind of return you want to see from your website. We speak to business owners just like you every day.

    We’re based in North Manchester, between Prestwich, Blackley and Cheetham Hill, right next to Heaton Park. From here, our team works with businesses just like yours across the city and beyond, putting clear plans in place, doing the work properly, and reporting on progress in a way that makes sense. 

    Your local SEO partner

    From Salford to Stockport, Oldham to Wigan, businesses across Greater Manchester trust us to make them more visible online. So whether you run a dental practice in Denton, an estate agent in Eccles, or some other business that starts with the same letter as where it is, our local SEO strategies can help you get found.

    We optimise Google Business Profiles, create location-focused content, build the right local backlinks, and structure websites to perform wherever you operate across Greater Manchester. 

    Click the interactive map to find out more about SEO where you’re based.

    Jamie Fallon

    My name's Jamie, I've been in SEO since 2016. Since then I've worked freelance, at agencies, and in-house as well as on my own websites - and now at Pollinate!

    Emily Shepherd

    Hi, I'm Emily! 👋🏻 I'm a passionate SEO content manager and writer with 6 years' agency and in-house experience. I'm in charge of content here at Pollinate.

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    Mortgage broker SEO FAQs

    Yes, and it tends to work particularly well for architecture. Most people spend a long time researching before they contact a firm, looking at portfolios, reading about different approaches, trying to understand costs and timelines. SEO puts you in front of those people during that research phase, on the searches that indicate genuine intent. A homeowner searching “architects for house extension in Leeds” is not browsing casually. Ranking for searches like that, consistently, generates real enquiries from people who are already partway through their decision.
    The honest answer is that trying to rank everywhere with a single page rarely works. Google wants to see that your content is genuinely relevant to a specific location, not just that you’ve mentioned a few place names. The most effective approach is building dedicated pages for each area you work in, each one written with real local relevance rather than a find-and-replace job. Done properly, those pages become some of your highest-performing assets and compound in value over time.
    More often than you might expect, yes. Large national firms tend to optimise for broad, high-competition terms and often neglect local search almost entirely. That’s where smaller regional firms can genuinely win. Someone searching for “architects in Sheffield” or “listed building specialist in York” wants a local firm with local knowledge, and Google knows that. A focused local SEO strategy targets the searches where you already have a natural advantage, rather than trying to out-muscle firms with ten times your budget.
    The main reason architecture firms don’t have many reviews is simply that nobody ever asks. Most satisfied clients are happy to leave one, they just need a prompt and a direct link that makes it as easy as possible. Timing matters too. Asking at the right moment, when a project has just completed and the client is pleased with the result, makes a significant difference to how many people actually follow through. A steady stream of recent, genuine reviews also carries more weight with Google than a batch of old ones, so building it into your process consistently is worth the small effort it takes.
    The most valuable content answers the questions your potential clients are already searching for, things like planning permission, build costs, what the design process actually looks like, and how to choose the right architect for a particular type of project. Case studies of completed work are also powerful, especially when they’re written to rank for the type of project rather than just to look good in a portfolio. The goal is to be genuinely useful to someone who is still making up their mind, so that by the time they contact you, they already feel like they know and trust your firm.
    Those star ratings come from something called review schema, a small piece of structured code added to your website that tells Google your review data is there and how to display it. Without it, Google either can’t show your ratings or won’t bother. It’s a technical implementation rather than something you can switch on from your Google account, but once it’s in place it makes a noticeable difference to how your listing looks compared to competitors, and a better-looking listing gets more clicks even when the ranking position is the same.
    Rankings are a useful indicator but they’re not the whole story. What you really want to see is whether the right kind of traffic is arriving at your site and whether that traffic is turning into enquiries. A good SEO report will show you which searches are bringing people to your site, how that has changed month on month, and most importantly, whether those visits are resulting in contact form submissions, calls, or other meaningful actions. If your reporting doesn’t connect SEO activity to real business outcomes, it’s not telling you enough.