A mortgage broker’s website has a structural problem that most service businesses do not. The broker offers roughly a dozen loan types, operates across several states, and serves buyers at completely different stages. Multiply those together and you have a site that could justify a hundred pages, or collapse into five that rank for nothing.
Smart Lending is a Melbourne mortgage broker operating across multiple Australian states. This is how we structured the location and service pages so they support each other instead of competing, and why the calculators matter more than they look.
Key Takeaways
- Loan types and locations are two different axes. Give each its own set of pages rather than multiplying them into every combination.
- A location page has to say something specific and true about that place, or it is thin content wearing a suburb’s name.
- Calculators are the strongest content a broker can publish, because they answer a question the visitor is not yet willing to phone about.
- The team page is not filler in regulated finance. People choose a broker, not a brand.
What Does Smart Lending Do?
Smart Lending is a mortgage and finance broker based in Melbourne. Their site covers home loans, investment loans, refinancing, debt consolidation, guarantor loans, business and commercial loans, and self managed super fund lending, alongside conveyancing and financial planning referrals.
Geographically the site reaches beyond Melbourne, with pages for Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania.
How Should a Broker Structure Loan Types and Locations?
The instinct is to build every combination: home loans in Melbourne, home loans in Sydney, investment loans in Melbourne, and onward. With seven loan types and seven locations that produces 49 pages, most of which would be the same page with two words changed.
That approach used to work and has not for years. Search engines are good at detecting templated pages, and the pages compete with each other for the same queries, which is the cannibalisation problem in its purest form.
Treat them as two axes, not a grid
The structure we favour keeps them separate:
- Loan type pages answer “what is this product and am I eligible”. Refinancing, SMSF lending and guarantor loans are genuinely different products with different rules, different documents and different anxieties. Each deserves a real page.
- Location pages answer “do you work where I live, and do you know this market”. They are about presence and local knowledge, not about re-explaining what a home loan is.
Each axis links to the other where it genuinely helps, so a visitor on the Melbourne page can reach refinancing, and a visitor on refinancing can confirm the broker covers their state. Neither page tries to be both.
A location page needs local substance
This is where most multi-location sites fail, and it is worth being blunt about it.
If the Adelaide page is the Melbourne page with the city name swapped, it is thin content. It will not rank, and if enough of them exist they can weigh on the rest of the site. A location page earns its place by carrying something that is only true there: state-specific stamp duty treatment, first home buyer schemes that differ by state, local market conditions, or genuinely local team presence.
Where that substance does not exist yet, the honest options are to write it properly or to not publish the page. Publishing a placeholder and intending to fill it later is how sites accumulate dead weight.
Why Are the Calculators the Most Valuable Pages?
Smart Lending’s site carries four: a borrowing amount calculator, a home loan health check, a fixed rate expiry calculator, and a refinancing calculator.
Calculators work for a specific reason. Someone wondering whether they can afford a house is not ready to speak to a broker. They are not sure the answer is yes, and they do not want to be sold to while they find out. A calculator lets them get a number privately, which is exactly the stage they are at.
Two of these are unusually well chosen:
- The fixed rate expiry calculator targets a moment rather than a topic. A borrower whose fixed term is ending has a deadline and a decision, which is the highest-intent moment in the whole customer lifecycle.
- The home loan health check gives people with no active problem a reason to engage, which is how a broker stays relevant between transactions.
The design caution is that a calculator which demands an email address before showing a result converts far worse than one that shows the result and then offers to explain it. The number is the value. Holding it hostage sends people to a competitor’s calculator.
What Else Does a Finance Site Need?
Named people
The site carries a team page. In regulated finance this is not vanity content. A borrower is handing over payslips, bank statements and identity documents, and they want to see who receives them. A broker site without faces reads as a lead-generation front rather than a practice.
Adjacent services, clearly separated
Conveyancing and financial planning appear as their own pages rather than being folded into the loan content. That separation is correct: they are different services with different audiences, and a buyer searching for a conveyancer is not in the same conversation as one comparing rates.
Restraint in the claims
Finance is a sector where the copy tends to drift into promises, and the promises are the part that regulators and consumers both remember. Language about approvals and savings needs to describe what is possible rather than what is guaranteed, because the broker does not control the lender’s decision.
What We Would Watch
Location pages need review on a schedule. State-based incentives and first home buyer schemes change, and a page citing a superseded scheme is worse than a page that never mentioned it. Any page that carries regulatory or scheme detail needs an owner and a review date.
The second is calculator accuracy. A calculator that produces an outdated result damages trust more than having no calculator, because the visitor acted on the number. The assumptions behind each one need to be visible and maintained.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should a mortgage broker have a page for every suburb?
Almost never. Suburb pages are the clearest example of thin content in this sector. A page per state or major metro, with real local substance, outperforms fifty templated suburb pages.
Do loan calculators actually generate enquiries?
They generate engagement from people who would not yet have called, which is their real value. They work best when the result is shown freely and the enquiry is offered afterwards as help interpreting it.
How do I avoid my service pages competing with each other?
Give each page a distinct question to answer. If two pages would give essentially the same answer to the same search, they should be one page. We cover this on our SEO retainer work, where consolidating competing pages is often the first gain.
What content matters most on a finance website?
Eligibility clarity, named people, and tools that let someone make progress privately. Rate tables age badly and are rarely the differentiator people assume.
Structuring a Multi-Location Service Site?
If your site has grown a page for every service in every city and none of them rank, the problem is usually structural rather than a matter of writing more.
See more of our builds in our portfolio, read how we plan site structure on our process page, or get in touch.
