The SiteRoot team6 min read
An accountant in Coburg gives a couple your name across the table on a Thursday. That night, while the other one is watching television, one of them types your name into a phone. They are not shopping. They already half trust you, because somebody they pay for advice said your name out loud.
What happens in the next two minutes decides whether you get the call. That is the honest job of a broking website: not finding clients, because referral does that, but surviving the check. Somebody is working out whether you are a real, licensed business who handles their particular situation, and they are doing it on a phone, quickly, with no patience. Every page decision follows from that.
The order people check in
It is remarkably consistent, and it is not the order most broker websites are built in.
- Is this a real business. Your name matching the name they were given. A photo of an actual person. A suburb or an office. A phone number that is a number, not only a form.
- Who are you, formally. Clients look for your credit representative number and the name of the licensee you work under. If they cannot find it, some of them go and look it up elsewhere, and a few of them just stop.
- Do you do my kind of loan. First home buyer, refinance, investment, construction, self employed, a bit of all of it.
- Does this cost me anything. Very close to the top, and often unanswered.
- What actually happens next. How long, how much of it lands on them, what they need to dig up.
If your home page and one other page answer all five, you have done the job. Most sites answer one and three.
Your credentials belong where people are already looking
Not buried on a compliance page nobody opens. Your credit representative number, the licensee you are authorised under, and any industry body you belong to, in the footer of every page and again on your about page.
The same goes for the part of your background that does the most work and gets mentioned least: how long you have been broking, and what you did before. Ten years inside a bank is the single most reassuring fact a lot of brokers have, and it is usually sitting in a LinkedIn profile instead of on the website where the check is happening.
What you are required to disclose is your licensee's and your regulator's business, not ours. This is about the things a client goes looking for anyway.
The page that does the most work: how this actually goes
Most people have taken out a home loan either never or once, a decade ago. They do not know what a broker does day to day, and they are quietly worried about looking stupid on the phone.
So write the process out, in five or six steps, in plain words. The first conversation and what you will ask. The documents. What you do with them. Lodging with a lender. What conditional approval means in practice. What happens between then and settlement. Say who does which part, because clients genuinely do not know whether you order the valuation or they do, or who talks to the real estate agent.
This is the page clients read twice and the page they forward to their partner. It is worth more than three pages of copy about your commitment to service.
Say whether you charge the client
It is the fourth thing they check and it is missing from a lot of broking sites.
If you do not charge the client, say so in one line, in their words, and say who does pay you. If you do charge in some situations, for a commercial file or a complex self employed application, say that plainly and say roughly when it applies. People are far less bothered by a fee than by the feeling that a fee is being kept from them until the meeting.
The documents checklist, which is the sleeper page
You already have this list. You email it to every new client. Put it on a page.
Payslips, identification, bank statements, the extra things a self employed client needs, what a first home buyer needs that a refinancer does not. Nothing clever, just the list. People search for what they have to get together before they start, and a page that answers it is the page somebody sends to their partner with the message "start finding these".
Do not put live interest rates on your website
Two reasons, both practical rather than principled.
A rate on a page is out of date within weeks, and nothing on your site will tell you when it goes stale. The one thing worse than no number is a wrong number that a client quotes back at you.
The second reason is that a page of rates invites somebody to compare you on a number, which is the least useful version of the conversation you want to have, and the one where your actual value is invisible.
Your enquiry form is asking for something uncomfortable
An enquiry to a broker is not the same as an enquiry to a painter. You are asking somebody to raise their money situation with a stranger, in writing, at half past nine at night.
So keep it short and keep it safe. Name, phone, suburb, and one box asking what they are trying to do and when. Do not ask for income, debts, dates of birth or anything that looks like an application in a form on a website. Ask for a good time to call, because half the people filling it in cannot take a call at work.
And say where it goes. A single line saying the form emails you directly does more for confidence than a privacy page nobody reads.
Check your own site tonight, on your phone
Two minutes, in the order a client does it.
- Tap your phone number. Does it start a call?
- Without scrolling, can you see your name, what you do, and where you are?
- Is your credit representative number findable in under ten seconds?
- Is the fee question answered anywhere?
- Send yourself an enquiry through the form. Which inbox did it land in, and how long did it take?
Where SiteRoot comes into it
You describe how you work and the site gets built around it, in about 15 minutes, free to build, A$16.50 a month including GST if you keep it. getset-lending.siteroot.com.au is a broking site we built and published.
The things above that are mechanical, we handle: your number is a tap to call link on every page, the enquiry form emails you at your own address rather than sitting in a portal, and your service, your area and your hours go onto the site in the form search engines read. There is also a plain file of facts about your business that AI assistants can read directly, which very few broker websites have.
The things above that are judgement, the fee line, the process page, the checklist, are yours, and they are the ones that turn a check into a phone call. We will not pretend a website does your marketing or gets you a position in a search result. It makes you checkable by somebody who has already been given your name, which is where nearly all of this work comes from.
