The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK mortgage brokers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK mortgage brokers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK mortgage brokers has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national mortgage brokers, including Meridian Mortgages, Molo, Just Mortgages, Mojo Mortgages, Mortgage Advice Bureau, London & Country Mortgages, John Charcol - Independent Mortgage Expertise, Habito, and Better.co.uk.

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.

Q2 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 mortgage brokers on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing mortgage brokers, or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site 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.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.

For Q2 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK mortgage brokers was £3,563, with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £86 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively.

There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, both Habito and Mojo Mortgages reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £0, and Mortgage Advice Bureau has the highest at £868.

The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance. In this report, Habito has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £805, and London & Country Mortgages has the highest at £199,000.

By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.

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 our previous report, London & Country Mortgages reported 47 404 errors. This quarter, London & Country Mortgages has slightly increased these errors to 49. Any brand reporting 404 errors should undergo a linking strategy to ensure they’re implementing redirect links or removing links from their website to avoid directing visitors to a dead end.

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 our previous report, London & Country Mortgages flagged the slowest mobile site speed (35). This quarter, London & Country Mortgages has decreased their mobile site speed to 31. Though they’re no longer the brand with the lowest score, seeing a decrease in their speed indicates that they’re not following a process to increase their score. John Charcol - Independent Mortgage Expertise currently has the slowest mobile site speed (23).

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.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA this quarter ranged between 71 and 15, with Trinity Financial reporting the lowest DA score. This mortgage broker should ensure they’re using every opportunity to increase the quantity and quality of their backlinks, such as building relationships with trusted brands in the same niche.

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.

Six mortgage brokers reported a decline of organic traffic on desktop, and 6 reported a decline on mobile. Better.co.uk saw the biggest loss on desktop (-57%), and Coreco saw the biggest loss on mobile (-54%). All mortgage brokers should ensure their website theme and content style/length are suitable for different screen sizes.

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 site 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.

Mojo Mortgages has taken the top spot for the most Universal Search appearances overall (3,643), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ (2,700). On the other hand, Meridian Mortgages has received the fewest Universal Search appearances overall (21).

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 brand 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).

London & Country Mortgages secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (705) and positions 4–10 (1,961). All mortgage brokers can increase their keyword appearances by updating blog posts to include updated longtail keywords naturally.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, 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.

We’ve included screenshots of Mojo Mortgages’ sponsored Facebook posts. This UK mortgage broker continues to use over 3 lines of text, and they should reduce this amount to help make their posts more scannable to social media users.

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 brand 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.

London & Country Mortgages remains the mortgage broker with the most Facebook Likes (12,900) — the same as our previous audit. Habito also remains the mortgage broker with the most Instagram followers (8,500) — the same as our previous audit. Other mortgage brokers can increase their followers/likes by regularly posting social media content and using their platforms to post informative material that will benefit their audience.

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, brands 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

 In our previous audit, John Charcol - Independent Mortgage Expertise reported 194 accessibility alerts, and London & Country Mortgages reported 91 contrast errors. This quarter, John Charcol - Independent Mortgage Expertise has made progress by reducing their alerts to 187. Additionally, London & Country Mortgages has reduced their contrast errors to 43. Currently, Trinity Financial is the one to watch for contrast errors (186) and London & Country Mortgages for accessibility alerts.  

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q2 2025 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 Rory Tarplee.