The Q2 2023 benchmarking report for UK mortgage brokers has just been published. Learn how the top 9 UK mortgage brokers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q2 2023 benchmarking report for UK mortgage brokers has just been published.  It covers the largest 9 national mortgage brokers, including Meridian Mortgages, Molo, Just Mortgages, Mojo Mortgages, Mortgage Advice Bureau, London & Country Mortgages, Better.co.uk, John Charcol - Independent Mortgage Expertise, and Habito.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other mortgage brokers to win brand exposure, drive site visits, and generate online enquiries. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q2 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.  

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from 30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing.  Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance. Mortgage brokers have the benefit of not needing to maintain large sites with a high volume of product pages, so should find staying on top of their technical compliance easier than our clients in e-commerce sectors.

In Q1, we noted that Mortgage Advice Bureau were seeing a significant volume of 4xx errors, with a total of 4,220. Though still lagging behind competitors in Q2, Mortgage Advice Bureau have reduced their figure down to 149 - a significant step in improving their technical compliance.

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. As with ensuring key pages are not blocked by error codes, mortgage brokers will want to ensure their site is quick, and that customers have a great experience from every touchpoint, to instil trust in their service.

In Q1, mobile page speed scores ranged from 24-86. This range has reduced in Q2, with mortgage brokers receiving scores between 33 and 59. That said, we are seeing falls in the highest performers of mobile page speed across all sectors we specialise in, so London and Country should not be too concerned with their score having halved.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Mortgage brokers can look to creating digital PR campaigns across the full spectrum of home ownership, to generate engaging press coverage that links back to their site and improves referral traffic, as well as domain authority.

DAs have improved slightly from Q1, with scores now ranging from 15 to 71. Meridian Mortgages are still the lowest-performing broker when it comes to DA, and could look to a link reclamation strategy as an initial way to improve their backlink profile and increase their authority.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. With high house prices and worrying mortgage rates, mortgage brokers will need to ensure their organic strategy is considerate of changing consumer habits, in order to maintain traffic.

In Q1, we saw that only three mortgage brokers had achieved a year-on-year increase in traffic. In Q2, only Mojo Mortgages and London and Country saw any increase in organic traffic. The biggest drop was seen by Mortgage Advice Bureau, who's overall organic traffic fell by 76%, while Meridian Mortgages (who had seen the biggest gain in Q1) have lost 54% of their traffic in Q2.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results is an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Reviews' are a great Universal Search result to optimise for, as it will help mortgage brokers build trust with potential customers directly from the SERP.

While 'reviews' remains the most used opportunity in terms of volume of results (with John Charol remaining ahead of the pack with 3,100), 'people also ask' results are the most widely used of all mortgage brokers, with Mortgage Advice Brokers making the most appearances, with 890. 'People also ask' results are a great way to build authority on a subject, and usually points to great performance for longtail keywords too. 

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. For mortgage brokers, they'll want to identify not only high-traffic longtail keywords, but phrases showing high intent to enquire (potentially including specific details such as ages, occupations, salaries, and locations).

Meridian Mortgages are still ranking for very few longtail keywords, and only appearing in the top three positions for one phrase. While we would usually point brands to their existing, poorer ranking keywords as a first port-of-call to improve, Meridian will need to complete a full review of longtail keywords and adapt their content strategy to be better optimised for organic activity.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) forecast to hit over 42 million users by 2022, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019.

No mortgage brokers were running any Facebook ads in Q2. This is a missed opportunity to improve brand awareness and reach targeted audiences.

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'Evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for longer. It's great for your retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Mortgage brokers can expand on their work with 'people also ask' and longtail keyword optimisation by identifying common questions users ask, and developing shareable content that will be widely engaged with.

Habito have the most consistent following across Meta's platforms, including 6,800 Facebook likes and 9,300 Instagram followers. This represents an audience more likely to engage with organic social posts, reducing the need to rely on paid social campaigns to boost posts.

Website Readability & Accessibility

20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. As housing is a universal need, mortgage brokers must ensure their websites are fully accessible for all potential customers

John Charcol have made no improvements on their accessibility, still returning 169 alerts in our audit. Many of these alerts are due to redundant links and title text, which can cause particular challenges for site visitors using screen readers.

Q2 2023 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 9 mortgage brokers on, check out our quick-look table below;

GET THE FULL 79-PAGE Q2 2023 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

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