Rank On Maps
Rank On Maps
Game Plan · For Central Lending Solutions
Prepared for Dave & Harj
June 2026

Central Lending Solutions · The transparent read

Where you sit, and where we’re taking you next.

A no-spin breakdown of what we shipped this week, where Central Lending Solutions outranks the top Perth mortgage brokers right now, where you still trail, and the phased work that closes the gap. Numbers over opinions.

01 / What changed this week

The work that just shipped.

Everything below is live on centrallendingsolutions.com.au right now. You can click straight through to verify any line item.

✓

Replaced every placeholder testimonial with real Google reviews

49 verified 5-star reviews pulled and scored for SEO strength (named broker mentions, services described, outcomes). The strongest reviews now sit on the homepage, pillar service page, and the 12 suburb pages, each with structured Review schema for Google rich snippets.

✓

8 named broker profile pages built from scratch

Every accredited broker plus broker support now has their own page with full bio, credentials, awards, the reviews that mention them by name, and Person schema. This captures branded broker searches ("Keeley Rodgers mortgage broker", "Harj Dhillon Perth") that the site used to lose entirely.

✓

Review count corrected from 280 to 307 sitewide

Pulled the real current count from your Google Business Profile and propagated to 74 pages including JSON-LD AggregateRating schema, the figure Google reads to power 5-star snippets and AI Overview citations.

✓

Soft-404 hole closed

Any unknown URL on the site (typos, old WordPress paths, scraper bots hitting /wp-admin) was silently returning the homepage at HTTP 200. Google would have begun treating these as duplicate content. Closed with a real branded 404 page that returns the correct status code.

✓

Legacy WordPress URLs with backlinks redirected

Two high-value old blog post URLs were being soft-404’d and losing the backlink equity. Now 301’d to the closest live equivalent so the link juice flows to the right new pages.

✓

Search Console housekeeping

Three stale WordPress sitemaps that Google was still polling were deleted, and the new clean 47-URL sitemap submitted. Google now has a single, accurate map of the site.

✓

AI engine readiness layer

A dedicated `llms.txt` machine-readable summary now sits at the root of the domain, telling ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini exactly who Central Lending Solutions is, what services exist, the eight brokers by name and where to read more. Most competitors do not have this file. It is the new frontier for being cited when someone asks AI "who is the best mortgage broker in Perth".

Homepage Team hub Dave’s profile Harj’s profile Reviews wall llms.txt

02 / The journey

From the original site, to the rebuild, to where you are right now.

Three states the website has lived in. Worth understanding the gap between each one, because it explains why this current version is built to compete at a different level entirely.

Version oneThe original WordPress site you came to us with

  • The shape of it. A standard off-the-shelf WordPress theme with plugins layered on top. Generic real estate / finance template, slow to load, heavy on mobile, no real architecture behind it.
  • What Google could see. Almost no structured data. Brokers were photos with a caption. Reviews were anonymous testimonial text not tagged as reviews. Google did not know who Dave was, or that Central Lending Solutions held an Australian Credit Licence, or that you compared 30 lenders. It was guessing.
  • Where it hurt you. No suburb pages, no Keystart depth, no calculators that ranked, no llms.txt for AI engines. Searches that should have gone to Central Lending Solutions were being captured by Mortgage Choice and Loan Market because their sites told Google more about themselves than yours did.
  • The verdict. A working business card on the internet. Not a sales asset.

Version twoThe first rebuild we delivered

  • The shape of it. A purpose-built custom static site. Modern stack, faster everywhere, mobile-first, hand-written for Perth mortgage broker search. 47 pages, every one of them serving a job.
  • What Google could see. Full Organization and FinancialService schema. Every credential, award, lender comparison, and service tagged for machine reading. Real suburb landing pages. Six calculators each built to rank.
  • Where it still had room. Reviews were still placeholder text. Brokers were on the about page but did not have their own profiles. The site had the foundation right but had not yet activated the people layer, where most of the trust signals actually live.
  • The verdict. A genuine competitive site. Solid foundation, missing the personality and proof layer that closes the deal.

Version three · what you have nowThe site you are looking at this week

  • The shape of it. Same foundation, with the people, proof and AI layer fully activated on top. 8 named broker profile pages. Every placeholder testimonial replaced with a real 5-star Google review from a real client, tagged with Schema.org Review markup so Google can render them as gold-star snippets in search.
  • What Google and the AI engines now see. Eight individual Person entities with credentials, awards, MFAA membership, and the reviews that mention them by name. Every named broker is a separate searchable identity in Google’s knowledge graph. The llms.txt file at the root of the domain tells ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini exactly who you are, who works at Central Lending Solutions, and what to cite. No competitor in this market has shipped that layer.
  • Why it matters. Two new battlegrounds opened up this week. The first is branded broker search, anyone Googling "Keeley Rodgers", "Aoife Farrell" or "Harj Dhillon" now lands on a Central Lending Solutions page they did not have before. The second is AI assistant citations, when someone asks an AI to recommend a Perth mortgage broker, the site is now structured to be the answer.
  • The verdict. An asset built for the next ten years of search, not the last ten.

03 / The scorecard

How CLS stacks up against the top 5 Perth brokers right now.

Benchmark group: Mortgage Choice Perth, Aussie Home Loans Subiaco, Loan Market Perth, Smartline Perth, and the strongest independent (Resolve Finance / Empower Wealth tier). Honest read. Green means we are clearly ahead, neutral means we are roughly level, red means we still trail and have work to do.

Dimension
CLS
Top competitors
Google reviews (volume & rating)
307 reviews at a perfect 5.0 average is genuinely rare in this market. Compounds now that every review is Schema.org-tagged for rich snippets.
Ahead
30 to 150 typical
Named broker profiles with Person schema
Eight individual pages with credentials, awards, reviews, MFAA membership, ACL, and full Schema.org Person markup. Most competitors show a team photo and no schema at all.
Ahead
Mostly missing
AI engine readiness (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews)
llms.txt, full JSON-LD graph, speakable markup, AggregateRating tagging. This is the layer that determines whether you get cited when someone asks an AI assistant for a Perth mortgage broker recommendation.
Ahead
Not yet doing this
Keystart and WA-specific content depth
Dedicated Keystart pillar, eligibility calculator, FHOG hub. The national franchises do not customise for WA, so they are largely silent on the most common Perth first-home-buyer search terms.
Ahead
Thin to none
Calculator suite
Six purpose-built calculators (Keystart, borrowing power, repayments, WA stamp duty, offset, refinance savings) each with the right page structure to rank for the search.
Ahead
2 to 4 typical
Local suburb pages
12 dedicated Perth-suburb pages, each with locality copy and a real review featured. Most competitors use a postcode lookup form instead, which Google does not index as a local landing page.
Ahead
Lookup form, not pages
Trust signals in structured data (ACL, MFAA, awards)
Every credential machine-readable in JSON-LD so Google’s knowledge graph and AI engines treat them as facts, not marketing copy.
Ahead
Visible to humans only
Mobile experience
Mobile-first build, sticky call-to-action, 44px touch targets, fluid type. Franchises tend to be bloated and slow on mobile.
Ahead
Mostly fine, often slow
Page count and content volume
47 pages live. National franchises run 100 to 400 pages each, mostly long-tail blog content captured over years. Volume gives them coverage on niche queries we cannot yet rank for.
Behind
100 to 400 pages
Domain authority and backlinks
Estimated DR in the high teens. The national brands sit at 30 to 60+ because of years of referring domains. This is the single biggest gap and the one that gets us to page 1 for the "mortgage broker Perth" head term once closed.
Behind
DR 30 to 60+
Internal linking density
Currently navigation and footer only, no contextual "related pages" component. This is why a few of the new pages are still flagged "discovered, not indexed" by Google. Fixable in one targeted build.
Behind
Naturally dense
Blog cadence / long-tail capture
No active blog right now. Competitors publish 1 to 4 articles a month and slowly accumulate long-tail traffic. We can launch this as a programmatic engine when the higher-leverage work is done.
Behind
1 to 4 posts a month

04 / The competitive set, up close

Who you’re actually up against, and what we see when we look.

These five names are the ones doing the most damage in Perth mortgage broker search results right now. Below is the short version of who each one is, what they get right, what they leave on the table, and where Central Lending Solutions already has the edge.

01

Mortgage Choice Perth

National franchise · multi-branch network across WA

  • What works for them. Decades-old national brand. They own their own brand-search traffic ("mortgage choice perth", "mortgage choice subiaco") and every Australian banker has heard of them. Multiple physical branch pages spread across Perth give them local coverage by sheer volume.
  • What we see they’re not doing. Generic franchise template content with very little WA-specific depth. No Keystart pillar. No structured data on their individual brokers. The pages read like marketing brochures, not local advice.
  • The CLS edge. You will out-rank them on every Keystart, FHOG, and named-broker query because their template does not have those entities. They will keep brand-search until you build your own brand.
02

Aussie Home Loans (Subiaco / Perth)

National franchise · biggest paid media spend in the category

  • What works for them. The Aussie brand has had national TV exposure for 30 years. They run heavy paid search and paid social. They also benefit from being part of Commonwealth Bank’s broader marketing footprint, which gives them an unfair brand-recall budget.
  • What we see they’re not doing. Their local Perth pages are very thin. No named-broker schema. No suburb-level landing pages with real local copy. The brand carries the SEO, the content does not.
  • The CLS edge. When someone is comparing brokers and lands on an Aussie page versus a CLS page, the CLS page is more useful, more local, more credible. They win the click, you win the conversion.
03

Loan Market Perth

REA Group-owned franchise · strong content history

  • What works for them. Owned by REA Group (realestate.com.au), so they get internal link equity from one of the strongest real estate domains in Australia. Long-running blog with hundreds of evergreen articles capturing long-tail searches. Solid technical infrastructure.
  • What we see they’re not doing. Their broker pages are franchise-style, photo and bio, no schema, no individual reviews per broker. Their content depth is on home loans generally, not on WA-specific lending products. They lean on REA, not on local craft.
  • The CLS edge. You will not match their backlink profile for a while. You will match and exceed their content quality on every WA-specific topic, and you will out-rank them on any query that combines a broker name with a city.
04

Smartline Perth

REA Group-owned · the technical SEO operator of the group

  • What works for them. The most technically polished of the franchise brokers. Sitemap discipline, structured data, fast pages, clean URL architecture. They will rank for technical queries because their site engineering is genuinely good.
  • What we see they’re not doing. Their content is competent but not opinionated. Their brokers are interchangeable in the eyes of Google because they are not individually entity-tagged. No real Keystart depth. No personality, no founder story, no awards in JSON-LD.
  • The CLS edge. Your technical layer is now at parity. Your content and your named-broker entity graph are clearly ahead. As of this week you out-school them on the part of the algorithm that is actually getting harder to fake, the E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
05

Resolve Finance

The strongest WA independent · builder-focused niche

  • What works for them. Long-established Perth-only brokerage with deep relationships in the WA new-builds market. Builder partnerships drive a steady referral funnel that does not depend on search. Strong reputation in the construction loan corner.
  • What we see they’re not doing. Their site has not been touched in a while. Limited structured data, no llms.txt, no real broker profile pages. They are leaning entirely on the builder channel and the brand, not on web acquisition.
  • The CLS edge. You are now ahead of them on every web-acquisition lever (schema, AI readiness, named brokers, suburb pages, reviews). They will continue to win on builder-channel referrals where they have years of relationships, but the digital lane is yours.

One read across all five: the franchise brokers carry brand, the independents carry relationships, and almost none of them carry the structured data and AI-readability layer the modern algorithm rewards. That is the lane Central Lending Solutions is now built to win in.

05 / The honest read

What this scorecard actually means.

Two columns. Where the site is already winning, and where it is not yet. We are not going to pretend the gaps do not exist.

Where Central Lending Solutions is winning

  • Branded broker searches. Anyone Googling "Keeley Rodgers", "Aoife Farrell", "Dave Phelan mortgage broker" now lands on their own dedicated profile page. Competitors have no equivalent.
  • AI assistant citations. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a Perth mortgage broker, the site is now structured to be parseable and cited. Almost no competitor has shipped this work.
  • The Keystart and FHOG corner of the market. Most national brands ignore WA-specific lending. You own this content.
  • Review-driven rich snippets. 307 5-star reviews with structured data starts showing as gold stars under your search listings within weeks of re-crawl.
  • Trust signals. ACL 497 950, MFAA membership, $1.2B settled, Dave’s Top 100 award, are all machine-readable, not just on a page.

Where we still trail, and why

  • Backlinks and domain authority. National franchises have a decade head-start. This is closeable but it takes 6 to 12 months of dedicated outreach, partnerships, and digital PR.
  • Sheer page volume. Long-tail blog content is where competitors quietly outrank us on smaller queries. Solvable with a content engine once the higher-leverage moves are done.
  • Internal link density. Easiest of all to fix. One generator pass and it is done. Currently blocking a few of our new pages from being indexed.
  • The head term "mortgage broker Perth". Page 1 belongs to incumbents until backlinks compound. We are not going to chase this directly. We are going to win the surrounding battles first.

06 / The game plan

What we work on next, in priority order.

Each phase is sequenced by leverage. The first three move the needle inside this quarter. The last two compound over the next twelve months.

01

Internal link mesh and indexing nudge

Closes the indexing gap on the new pages

  • Contextual "related pages" components across all 47 pages
  • Reviews link to the named broker, suburbs link to brokers, calculators link to services, services link to calculators and suburbs
  • Re-submit the four currently unindexed pages for crawl
  • Outcome: every page becomes 30% stronger without writing any new content
02

WhatConverts call and form tracking finalised

Closes the attribution loop so we can see exactly which sources convert

  • Get the live tracking snippet directly from your WhatConverts dashboard
  • Provision the tracking phone number and dynamic number insertion rule
  • Wire form tracking on the contact page
  • Outcome: every call and form fill is attributed to the source that delivered it (organic, ad, suburb page, broker profile)
03

Backlink and digital PR engine

The single biggest lever to close the head-term gap

  • Outreach to Perth property and finance press for broker commentary placements
  • Partnership-page exchanges with non-competing professional services (buyers agents, conveyancers, accountants)
  • Citation and directory cleanup across the 30+ AU finance directories
  • HARO-style journalist sourcing for monthly press mentions
  • Outcome: domain authority climbs from high teens toward the 30 to 40 range over 6 to 12 months
04

Programmatic content engine

Captures long-tail volume the franchises currently own

  • Two evergreen pieces a month around WA-specific lending, Keystart, suburb deep dives, and rate environment commentary
  • Each piece written for both Google and AI assistants, with structured data, named broker quotes, and internal links to the relevant service or calculator
  • Outcome: 24 new high-quality, broker-attributed pages a year that compound traffic without diluting the core site
05

Monthly reporting and ongoing optimisation

Keeps the engine accountable

  • Monthly dashboard covering ranks, traffic, calls, forms, and attribution
  • Quarterly competitor refresh against the same scorecard you are reading right now
  • Continuous content QC so nothing on the live site degrades
  • Outcome: every quarter you see the exact deltas, with no spin

07 / What to expect

What this looks like from your seat, month to month.

SEO and AI-engine work compounds quietly. Most of the wins are not visible the day you ship the work, they show up weeks or months later when Google and the AI engines re-crawl, re-index, and start citing you. Here is the honest read on what you should see, when, and what is out of any agency’s control.

What you should see, and roughly when

  • Inside the first month. The 8 new broker pages get indexed by Google. Search results for "[broker name] mortgage broker" start returning their dedicated page. Direct calls to brokers tick up as the new pages get found.
  • Inside two months. Real Google reviews start appearing as 5-star rich snippets under your search results, with the gold stars and review count visible directly in search. This is the highest-impact visual change in the SERP.
  • Inside three months. Long-tail rankings improve across Keystart, first home buyer, refinance, and the 12 suburb pages. Calls and form fills attributable to organic search rise as the foundation work compounds.
  • Inside six months. AI assistant citations start showing up. When clients tell you "ChatGPT recommended you", that is when you know the AI engine readiness layer is live in production. Backlink work begins to bend the head-term curve.
  • Inside twelve months. The page-1 fight for "mortgage broker Perth" is realistically winnable. Brand-search owned. Named-broker search owned. Keystart and FHOG owned. National franchises start looking dated by comparison.

What is not in any agency’s control

  • Google’s crawl schedule. We can submit pages and request indexing. We cannot force Google to re-crawl on a specific day.
  • Algorithm updates. Google ships core updates every few months. We build the site to thrive across updates, not chase any single one.
  • The rate environment. Search volume for "refinance" rises when rates move. We capture the demand, we do not create it.
  • Competitor moves. If Mortgage Choice decides to spend $200k on Perth ads next month, paid results will shift. Organic and AI citation positioning is more resilient, which is exactly why we are investing there.
  • The way clients describe you. Reviews keep coming. The more named brokers your clients mention in their reviews, the better the broker entity graph compounds.

How you will see progress from us

  • A short monthly report. Ranks, traffic, calls, form fills, and the new work shipped that month. No vanity metrics, no theatre.
  • Every change documented. Anything we ship to the live site is logged with a one-line plain-English description. You will never have to ask "what did you do this week".
  • A quarterly competitor refresh. The same scorecard you are reading right now, re-run against the same five competitors so you see exactly where you closed gaps and where they moved.
  • An open Slack channel. Real-time visibility into what we are working on. Not a ticket queue, a conversation.

08 / The bottom line

The site you have right now was built to outlast the algorithm.

Most of the work you are looking at is invisible to a human visitor. It is the structured data, the schema, the named-broker entity graph, the AI-readable summaries, the technical hygiene under the hood. That is what determines whether you get cited by ChatGPT, whether you get a 5-star rich snippet in search results, and whether Google understands that Dave Phelan settled $700M in WA loans without us having to say so on the page.

The brand-search and AI-citation moats are already yours. Backlinks and blog cadence will close the head-term gap as they compound. The plan is to do the work in the order that wins.