Picking your specialism, and what happens over the next six weeks
The short version
I've researched both ideas properly. Both work. My recommendation is to lead with adverse credit and add landlords a few weeks later — because nobody near you has claimed adverse credit, and because the landlord work needs different words than we assumed.
What I found
Adverse credit
- 9.26m UK adults have had credit problems in the last three years — the highest in nine years of that study.
- Fewer than half of them would think to use a broker at all.
- Nobody in Uxbridge or Hillingdon specialises in it. The top results are national template sites and directories.
- Small, unbranded brokers rank today for the specific searches: 11 of them appeared in one search I ran.
- These clients can't do it themselves — the lenders only deal through brokers.
- They come back in about two years to move to a better rate.
Portfolio landlords
- Better paid: some lenders pay noticeably more for limited company buy to let, and a fee is easier to justify.
- Bigger, repeatable cases — the average new buy-to-let loan is around £185,000, and landlords have several.
- Nobody local covers it either, and only one broker in Surrey does it properly.
- But "portfolio landlord" isn't what people type. It's the regulator's phrase. They search "limited company buy to let" and "HMO mortgage".
- The national competition is deep — one rival runs a 4,500-word page on it.
- The market's wobbling at the edges: 41% of landlords say they expect to sell.
My recommendation
- Adverse credit leads. It's what you already know, the ground near you is empty, and the first work can come from other brokers who've just turned a case down — that's weeks, not months.
- Landlords follow, once the first pages are live, written in the words people actually search.
- Reviews matter as much as either. The big adverse credit sites don't win on their writing — they win on thousands of reviews. You have 12. That's the cheapest gap on this list to close.
- Your homepage won't shout about either one. It'll be you, your twenty years and your reviews, with the specialist pages behind it — so your existing clients never feel it isn't for them.
Two things I want to be straight about. I can't see exactly how many people search for these each month without a paid tool — about £99 for a month if you want certainty before we go further. And on the wording: some sites in this market promise things like guaranteed approval. We won't, because the rules on credit advertising don't allow it and Rosemount would refuse it.
Where your website is now
I went through all 15 pages properly. The short version is that nothing is broken beyond repair, but nothing is working for you either.
- Your mortgage page address is spelled wrong —
/mortagages/— and every link in your menu points at the misspelling. That's your main page. - There's no way of knowing how many people visit. No analytics of any kind are installed, so nobody has ever measured it.
- You have two homepages, both live, which splits whatever credit Google gives you.
- There are Google adverts running on your site. Ad code loads on every page. Worth knowing whether that was deliberate.
- Google is told your business is called "My WordPress" — the default setting nobody changed. There's no address or phone number in the code, which is a big part of why you don't show up locally.
- Three sample blog posts from the website template are still live, along with an empty shop page.
- No phone number anywhere on the homepage, and no number you can tap on a mobile. Your two mobiles appear only on the contact page.
- Your 12 Trustpilot reviews are excellent and invisible — none since October 2025, and the widget doesn't display on the site.
- The words "bad credit", "CCJ", "arrears", "HMO" and "self-employed" appear nowhere at all. "Landlord" appears once.
- Your email address is a Rosemount one, not your own.
- Two for Rosemount to confirm rather than me: the repossession warning appears on only 2 of your 15 pages and not on the homepage, and the homepage says "the whole of the mortgage market".
- The good part: your own domain, twenty years of clients, five warm testimonials and a clean company record.
How you compare to the firms winning this work
| Your site | The specialists | |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | About 12 | 222 to 1,131 |
| Homepage words | 272 | ~2,275 on average |
| Speed on a phone | About 6 seconds to appear | Under 2 seconds for the fastest |
| Registered with Google's free tools | No | Yes |
| Published this year | Nothing since 2020 | One of them added 377 pages |
The encouraging part: two of those firms started within a year or so of you. They didn't win because they're older. They won because they kept publishing, and that's the bit we can copy.
The next six weeks
| When | What I do | What I need from you |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Measure where you stand today so we can prove what changes. Set up your own email address, start your Google listing, and move the domain onto my hosting ready for the new site. | A voice note about yourself and the cases you enjoy. A few photos. |
| Week 2 | Write your homepage, about page and the first six specialist pages, and send them to Rosemount for approval. | Read it and tell me what doesn't sound like you. |
| Week 3 | Build the site where you can click through it. Second batch of pages to Rosemount. Build the checker and tidy your email signature. | Approve the design. Start asking clients for reviews. |
| Week 4 | Go live. Old site saved, new site up, Google told about every page. | Tell your clients and contacts it's live. |
| Week 5 | Referral one-pager for accountants and estate agents, plus directory listings and a third batch of pages. | Send it to ten contacts. |
| Week 6 | First proper report: what Google is picking up, what people click, what to do next. | Decide whether to carry on at £250 a month. |
What honest success looks like at week six
Not a full diary. Google takes months to trust a new site. What we should have: the site live and approved, a dozen or more specialist pages published, Google indexing them, a verified Google listing with new reviews coming in, and a number to measure against. First enquiries from search usually show around month two or three. Referrals and the Google listing normally land sooner.
The money, as agreed
Hosting included. Nothing else to pay. No minimum contract.