How to grow a mortgage business?

The James Dooley podcast brings James Dooley and Kasra Dash together to explain why mortgage brokers scale more rapidly when marketing is built around positioning, trust and predictable lead flow. James Dooley breaks down how selecting the right niche, domain name and website structure establishes authority, because clear market positioning attracts and converts higher-value clients more efficiently. Kasra Dash adds that early visibility comes from proactive LinkedIn activity and Facebook Marketplace listings, as both channels can generate immediate enquiries while SEO foundations are still being built. The discussion also warns against reliance on shared lead platforms such as Bark, where slow response times and repeated resale dilute trust and crush conversion rates. James Dooley positions FatRank’s exclusive, pay-on-conversion lead generation as the strongest entry point for growth, since brokers only pay once revenue is created, removing financial risk and enabling confident scaling. Kasra Dash reframes SEO as a long-term business asset, explaining that focused service pages, strong local relevance and quality backlinks push brokers into top positions where high-intent searches convert more consistently. The episode goes deeper into retention and lifetime value, highlighting how CRM-driven follow-ups before mortgage renewals turn one-off clients into repeat customers. James Dooley outlines how upselling life insurance, income protection and conveyancing increases average transaction value, allowing brokers to invest more aggressively in acquisition. Kasra Dash closes by emphasising the impact of fractional CMO support, where targeted audits uncover wasted spend, broken funnels and fast opportunities to unlock

Creators and Guests

Host

James Dooley

James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

Kasra Dash: So as a fractional CMO, if I came to you as a mortgage business owner and I want more mortgage inquiries being generated, what are some strategies that you would recommend for me? Let's say I'm just a startup.

James Dooley: So as a mortgage broker, if you're looking to grow your business, first and foremost you need to make certain you've chosen the right branding, the right niche of what you want to go for, and then choosing the right domain name of what you want to go with. And then getting a website built would be the first place I would start. And then obviously once you've chosen your branding name, I'd look to try and get the social media accounts to compensate that as well. So Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, everywhere where you think potentially your clients could be hanging out.

Kasra Dash: One thing to add to that as well is obviously with websites and SEO you know yourself that it can take a considerable amount of time to rank, especially for something in the finance industry. So a few quick wins that I would recommend in that, especially if you're just setting up as a mortgage broker, is you can obviously start daily posting on LinkedIn. You might actually end up getting some commercial mortgages and obviously you know yourself commercial mortgages are a lot more in for the actual mortgage broker. You can also set up ads on Facebook Marketplace. I call them ads but they're actually free to set up and it takes literally a couple minutes to set up.

Kasra Dash: Really, then whenever somebody's searching on the Facebook Marketplace they can see that oh Kasra is doing mortgages, let's inquire with him. So just a few things prior to even setting up a website you can actually launch those right now as you're watching this video. But let's say you've done the Facebook Marketplace, you've done the websites, what's next?

James Dooley: I think if you were asking me, if I was a mortgage broker and how I'm going to grow my business, the first steps I would do is go and find a quality lead generation company. That's the first thing I would do. I'm slightly biased obviously, I own FatRank and FatRank does a no risk supply of inquiries so you only pay on conversions. So I would start there because there's zero risk involved. And then I'd go down the route of going okay, but then I won't put all eggs in one basket. So I would go to FatRank and I'd go, okay, any inquiries that you get that we do, we're specialists in let's say remortgages or we're specialists in terrace houses or it could be first-time buyer mortgages and stuff like that. You'd want to go down and sub-niche within somewhere where you go, this is what I'm an expert in.

James Dooley: And then do the lead gen, start getting the leads from FatRank on that. But I would also go to one or two others. There are places like Bark and other places that do lead generation. So that would get me leads today right through my door that I can then be trying to convert and try and turn into making profit. Then after that you then can start looking at a little bit more long term on your website and doing some sort of SEO.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. I think you're better probably expanding on that with regards to what SEO is for anyone that doesn't know or the importance of content and backlinks.

James Dooley: Yeah.

Kasra Dash: So just one thing to add to what you've said is if you guys are going to go down the Bark strategy, and obviously we've spoke to hundreds of business owners by now, one thing that is a commonality on websites like Bark and Checkatrade and stuff is the KPIs. So if you're getting a lead at let's say 2 p.m. but you're not following up with that lead until the next day, or let's say it's a lead that Bark has generated and you're only purchasing it after a couple days, that person has probably already dealt with another mortgage broker. Would you agree with me in saying that?

James Dooley: Definitely, yeah.

Kasra Dash: So then going to the actual SEO strategy for your website, I think it's super important to rank on position one. And I was watching a podcast and it's actually really true. If you're ranking on like let's say position four or five on Google, so let's say somebody's searching for mortgage broker near me and you're position five, typically if you're getting the clicks at position five, it's actually people that have went to competitors and they're just shopping around for the cheapest price. So you're actually getting the worst type of leads. The worst type of leads really. So try to rank position number one.

Kasra Dash: Obviously with SEO I'm going to make it sound a lot less complicated than what it is but basically for every single service that you provide as a mortgage broker, you want an actual dedicated SEO-optimised page for. So for example commercial mortgages, residential mortgages, first-time mortgages, all of these you should have dedicated pages for, optimising it for your actual local area. And then basically, I'm going to assume that you're going to have a technically built site. And then basically you need to start doing some link building and that's almost getting mentions from other websites pointing through to your website.

Kasra Dash: There's other strategies that people can be doing with regards to traditional marketing or advertising strategies. They've got stuff like TV ads, radio ads, getting listed in magazines. But the truth of the matter is a lot of these platforms you can't check your KPIs. You can't be checking what return on investment you're getting, how many leads you're generating specifically from that billboard or TV ad or radio ad. Where if you do run, you mentioned on like Facebook ads, and you could even run PPC in AdWords within Google which is paying for clicks to be at the top of Google Search. That's another strategy. Generally speaking it's expensive to do, generally speaking it would be very difficult for you to try to get that winning campaign for you to get a return on investment.

Kasra Dash: So there's lots of different strategies you can do.

James Dooley: Just back onto the Bark scenario as well which is a little bit important. And I don't mean to slander any other companies but generally speaking Bark would sell that same lead you were talking about ranking position number five. Bark would sell that same lead to four or five different mortgage brokers. So you're not getting exclusive leads. Now if I was you I would be looking to try and find a lead generation company that provides you with real-time exclusive leads. They're the best leads that you can get that you can convert on. So always try to look down that route before going trying to find ten different lead generation companies.

James Dooley: SEO is a long-term strategy. You're not going to be generating leads tomorrow by doing SEO. It is a long-term strategy but it's also very good as well for branding. So if someone is coming to you and you're called Kasra Mortgages, people might, when they're getting closer to signing up with yourself and getting the mortgage from one of your lenders, they might want to know who is Kasra Mortgages. So not just from an SEO standpoint but from a reputation management standpoint. How good do you look online?

James Dooley: The amount of people that we speak to that have got a really nice shop on the high street that do mortgages and go “but we're five times bigger than this company over here”, but online they look a lot smaller. And if people haven't been to their shop, they're going to think they're not as good as this other one that looks better online. So always be making certain you're trying to build out your reviews and your testimonials from existing clients of what you have as well as trying to do SEO as well.

James Dooley: Having a non-optimised website for SEO is kind of like having a shop in a back alley that nobody walks past. So try to rank for your local area. Let's say for example some of you guys might actually do mortgages nationwide. To be honest most mortgage brokers probably would do. If you can start ranking for nationwide keywords that works out very brilliantly.

James Dooley: But going back to actually growing the actual business, let's say you've started to generate some inquiries, what are some ways that you can obviously expand on that?

Kasra Dash: One of the methodologies that a lot of people rely on is word of mouth. And obviously word of mouth is good but you can't build a consistent flow of inquiries doing that. So what's some other strategies that you like?

James Dooley: So word of mouth is probably the best converting lead that you can get. But obviously you're restricted by the volume of word-of-mouth leads that you can get. There’s lots of other obviously lots of different types. You can get mortgages from PPC, from SEO, from Facebook ads, from just being active on social media, lead generation companies. There’s lots of different ways of how you can grow the leads out. Is there any others that you know of?

Kasra Dash: So another strategy that I would consider is, and this is a little bit more technical, but if you have a CRM system, let's say I sign you up to a four-year mortgage. If I have a notification in let's say three and a half years' time to message James and say “hey your mortgage is coming up for renewal, do you want to remortgage?”, that's a brilliant way of getting people to rebuy off you and it's essentially working off your previous client base as well.

Kasra Dash: So some of you guys watching this might already have done mortgages for the past ten years. Let's say you're not reactivating that list of clients that you've worked with for the past ten years. It's not always about acquiring new as well, it's about basically working the previous leads that you've done.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure. And I think also two massive points and could be sucking eggs here with some mortgage brokers, a lot of them already know about this, but average transactional value. How can you increase that? If you're looking to grow your business it's not always about new leads coming in. That's very important. But could you with this customer help to get income protection, life insurance? Could you also be helping them in passing them on to a conveyancer that could help you by giving you leads in return or paying you some sort of finders fee and commission? So not only then does it become that you're earning some money off the fees from the mortgage, but your average transactional value that you get, the ATV, you're increasing that per customer which is huge.

James Dooley: What you're talking about there with a CRM system in following up in two, three or four years' time, a couple of months prior to them going on a variable rate as opposed to a fixed rate, you could be nurturing them and explaining to them the latest interest rates and then from there then saying look we've got a great deal that could potentially get you into another two-year, three-year fixed rate deal which is one percent, two percent or whatever it is below the base rate of what's going out there. We think you should go into this one next.

James Dooley: When your lifetime value of that customer now has increased because now you've not just got them a mortgage, you've now put on a remortgage a few years down the line. And again that's all different ways of looking to grow your mortgage business. So not just new leads but trying to get the most out of existing leads as well.

Kasra Dash: Yeah definitely. And not only that, once you actually have all of these different kickbacks, let's say you are selling them insurance for their house as well. So that might be an extra £200 that you're earning per client. You can actually start spending more on acquiring new customers. Like for example if you're going up against a well-established mortgage broker, they might be able to spend £600 on acquiring one converted lead. Whereas for somebody that's not got a slick back-end system, they're not upselling all of these different services, you might only be able to spend £200 to make it actually worthwhile and profitable for your company.

Kasra Dash: So there's all of these small bits that you need to understand when it comes to growing a business. I think it's important before doing anything is to hire a fractional CMO or hire a consultant literally just for an hour. Hire a consultant for an hour that can basically turn around and look at where you're at in your cycle. We could be talking about oh you need to go and choose a brand and build a website. It could be a mortgage broker watching this that's 15 years established but then when you start looking at the brand and you start looking at the reputation management, it's not good enough.

Kasra Dash: So that consultant could say as well as looking for new clients, we also feel you should be trying to improve your reviews on your Google Business Profile or your Trustpilot or something like that, but also then making certain that they do have a consistent flow of inquiries coming in. So are they using a good lead generation company? A good consultant can sit down within 30 minutes and come up with some sort of plan, check to see where they're spending money at present, see where they're wasting money. That's a big part. Where they're wasting time and where they're wasting money. And that 30-minute call can turn around and transform them to say stop spending money here where you're not being guaranteed any sort of return on investment, start putting some into this which could guarantee you a return on investment or this for long-term growth with regards to SEO and stuff like that.

Kasra Dash: Yeah definitely. Is there anything else that you want to add?

James Dooley: No, I'd say just leave a comment in the comment section. Let me know how you are growing your mortgage broker business. And if you are looking for some more advice you can contact myself on mejames.com. Or how can they get in touch with you?

Kasra Dash: kasradash.com. Or I'm certain both of our links will be in the description so just click any one of our links. And then yeah I strongly recommend trying to book in for a 30-minute consultation call to see holistically what would work best for your mortgage broker company.