Originally Published on 13/11/2018
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, a way of enhancing a website so that it is increasingly visible in organic (non-paid) search engine results. This means you have to enable search engines to find your website and actively try to improve its performance in search engine rankings.
There are many sides to SEO, ranging from small changes to massive overhauls. The thing that can be difficult about SEO is that you are trying to influence how search engines perceive your website. Perception, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, so some SEO changes may not have the desired effect.
Thankfully, optimising your website for search engines doesn’t mean compromising your user experience. Search engines operate on the principle of providing their users with the websites they think best fulfil the searcher’s needs. This means user experience and SEO go hand in hand.
Full SEO can sometimes be incredibly complicated and you might need to get in touch with your friendly, local coder! However, making a start needn’t be.
On this note, here is Accord’s SEO Checklist for Mortgage Brokers.
This is an essential part to enhancing your website. Try to establish what you want from any SEO changes, so you have an overall direction.
Getting to grips with some of the theory behind SEO is essential. This in-depth guide from Google is a great place to start. If this whets your appetite for more, there are plenty of free, in depth resources online. Fittingly, a quick search is all you need to do.
Have a think about what short keywords, known as ‘short tail’ in the world of SEO, your potential prospects would use if they wanted to find your business, for instance ‘BTL mortgage broker’.
You can do this by setting up a free Google Ads account and searching your keywords to get search volume data and trends. Alternatively, use advanced tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner, as they offer more in-depth insights into keyword performance and competitor analysis to help you refine your strategy.
‘Short tail’ keywords tend to have plenty of competition, so finding longer, ‘long tail’ keywords can help you be more productive in terms of your search ranking and overall performance. A long tail keyword could be ‘BTL mortgage broker in Bristol’. You can also use search intent to refine long-tail keywords and help you target users based on what they’re trying to achieve - whether that’s making a purchase (transactional), finding information (informational), or navigating a site (navigational).
Often people won’t search directly for what they want. For instance, rather than searching for ‘BTL mortgage broker’, searchers might have a look for ‘the best mortgages for landlords’. Thinking about problems your audience regularly needs to solve is a great place to start. You should also consider optimising for voice search, as more users are relying on voice assistants like Siri and Alexa to conduct searches, which makes queries slightly more natural and conversational.
Registering your business with Google is a surefire way to improve your search ranking, especially for people using Google Search in your local area. Make sure you follow the registration process fully and add ‘search photos’ to your listing. Better still, optimise your Google My Business profile by adding posts, FAQs, and responding to reviews to improve local SEO.
Make sure your website is friendly to mobile searchers. Google looks at your site twice; once to see how friendly it is to desktop users and a second time for mobile devices. What’s more, the usability of your mobile site affects where Google ranks the site for mobile searchers. This free Google tool is a great place to start.
Your website’s speed affects where it appears in the Google rankings because Google wants users to find what they are looking for quickly. Thankfully, Google has another great free tool to help. Complete any follow up actions based on the results of the mobile usability test and the page speed insights test. In fact, mobile-first indexing is now the default for Google, so ensure your site is fully optimised with fast loading speeds and easy navigation.
When your website was developed, your web developer should have installed a version of GA4 on your site. If you don’t already have access, they should be your first point of call.
Within GA4, check and benchmark your time-on-site and your bounce rate. Two immediate things you can check within your GA4 are your figures for bounce rate and the time browsers spend on your website. This data feeds into Google’s search algorithm.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after only viewing one page. You want your bounce rate to be as low as possible as this shows that users visiting your website want to be there and are engaging with your content. These two statistics are important for your SEO because they indicate to search engines that your website has interesting and helpful content.
Focus on user engagement signals, too, as these metrics are becoming more relevant in SEO rankings. Things like scroll depth and interaction with content can be great indicators of your site’s quality.
Try to make improvements to your time-on-site and bounce rates. The best way of doing this is to post engaging content on your website, content that will actually make the reader want to stay there and provide answers to your audiences’ problems. Incorporate interactive elements like quizzes and calculators to keep people on your page longer.
Ask your customers to leave Google reviews. Aim for as many as you can! Sending former clients polite emails is the perfect way to encourage them to leave a review on Yelp or TrustPilot to diversify your presence.
Ensure your social media profiles are completed and hold up-to-date information. Google also trawls social media accounts to assess your online presence. Make sure your details are consistent and accurate.
If you’re using Wordpress, add the Yoast plugin. Yoast allows you to assess your site’s SEO friendliness using a simple traffic light system. The plugin automatically extends Wordpress’s standard SEO features and makes changes that will improve your site’s ranking.
Check your site for duplicate content and remove any that you find. Google hates duplicate content (copies of the same webpage) and will penalise your website’s search rankings heavily if it finds any. Tools like Copyscape or Siteliner are designed to spot duplicate content, and you can use canonical tags to make sure search engines index the preferred version of your content.
Create a sitemap for your website. Having a sitemap makes it easier for Google to index your entire website. Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console is also a great option as it helps Google crawl and understand the structure of your site more efficiently, ensuring all pages are indexed correctly.
Set up Google Alerts, or a similar service, and track mentions of your business. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. They are a big part of SEO. The better the quality of the site linking to your website, the more it’ll improve your ranking. For instance, a backlink from www.bbc.co.uk would massively improve your ranking, whereas a backlink from www.stevesfishmongers.co.uk could even negatively affect your SEO.
If you see your business has been mentioned somewhere online, then you’ve got a good chance of getting a backlink. Contact them and ask for them to create a link on their page to yours. Focus on high-authority backlinks and ensure they’re relevant to your industry to boost your credibility and rankings.
Understand what outreach is and then fire off your first campaign. Outreach campaigns involve creating valuable content and sending it off to relevant, content rich websites who may then publish your content (and in the process give you a link).
You might’ve seen these in various online industry publications, where Managing Directors contribute informative articles around relevant topics. For instance, our very own Jeremy Duncombe is a regular contributor to many of the mortgage intermediary trade websites. Explore influencer outreach and guest blogging as effective ways to increase your backlinks and online presence.
Create great, helpful content. Blogs, filled with fresh relevant content, are a good place to start. If you identified any keywords that you would like to use on your website but can’t fit in the main page copy, you can write some blogs that could include them. Blogs are a great way to rank for long tail keywords! For instance, if you identified ‘buy property through a limited company’ as a keyword, you could write a blog titled, ‘A guide to buying buy-to-let properties through a limited company.’
Organise your content around key topics (pillar pages), each supported by related blog posts (topic clusters). For instance, a main page on buy-to-let mortgages might link to articles about deposit requirements, tax advice, or purchasing through a limited company. This structure makes it easier for both users and search engines to discover and navigate your content.
Develop an SEO friendly URL structure for your website’s pages. Google likes URLs it can read. Make words in your URL relevant to what a page is about. With blogs, they should reference the title. For example, a guide about BTL taxes with the URL:
http://www.bestmortgagebroker.co.uk/373737451 would rank lower than http://www.bestmortgagebroker.co.uk/buy-to-let-tax-guide.
Implement your chosen keywords on your website. Go through the text on your website and try to make sure that your target keywords appear in the title or first paragraph of relevant pages. However, don’t force keywords into your website’s copy. Doing so could make it awkward to read and could deter visitors. What’s more, Google’s algorithms are adept at picking up keywords that have been forcefully inserted into a webpage. Consider adding keywords in header tags (H1, H2) and within image alt texts for better SEO.
Write a compelling meta description. Meta descriptions are concise summaries of a page’s content that appear on search engine results pages. Meta descriptions should be descriptive, without going over Google’s limit of 320 characters. This is a great place to sell what’s on your page to searchers. Focus on including strong CTAs in meta descriptions to increase click-through rates.
A good meta description should emphasise why the user should click on the link for your business as well as accurately representing what is on the page. Try to put your chosen keywords into the meta description as long as they reflect the page’s content. For a user searching ‘buy to let mortgage broker in Bristol’ a good description might look like the following: ‘Do you want to purchase a buy to let property? We are a mortgage broker based in Bristol with over 20 years of experience. We specialise in providing specialist mortgage advice for landlords with a range of different property portfolios.’
AEO helps your content appear as direct answers in search results, especially for voice search or featured snippets. Keep answers short and clear—2–3 sentences is ideal. Use a question-and-answer format in your content and FAQs. Add structured data (like FAQ schema) to help search engines find and understand your answers more easily.
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