Welcome back to Lending Leadership

In this episode, we’re diving deep into the ever-evolving world of online presence for mortgage professionals. Whether you’re trying to “own your zip code,” boost your visibility in Google, or show up on emerging AI-powered search platforms, we’re unpacking what loan officers and real estate pros need to know for digital success.

We’re joined by Laura Quinn and Caitlin Marino, two leading experts in digital marketing for the mortgage industry and Marketing Account Executives here at HMA Mortgage. Together, we demystify the terms everyone’s hearing these days-SEO, AEO, and GEO and break down why they matter more than ever as consumer behavior shifts toward AI-driven search.

We discuss practical strategies for making your online profiles work for you, staying consistent across platforms, leveraging your everyday work as content, and why building your authority is more about answering the right questions than simply creating more content. Plus, we get into the technical details of how web crawlers see your site and the ways even small actions add up to big digital wins.

Key Takeaways:

1. Consistency Across All Platforms is Essential: We explain how critical it is to ensure your name, contact info, credentials, and business details are exactly the same everywhere online Instagram, Facebook, your website, and more. Consistency helps search engines confidently identify you as a legitimate, authoritative presence, raising your chances of showing up in both search and AI results (00:00, 07:30).
2. SEO, AEO, and GEO: What They Mean and Why They Matter: We break down the difference between SEO (Search Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). SEO and AEO get you found for basic business info and traditional queries, but GEO is about showing up with authoritative, well-researched answers when people use ChatGPT or other AI engines to find “the best loan officer in X” (02:06, 02:14, 02:34).
3. Start by Answering Your Customers’ Real Questions: A smart first step is to make a list of your top five or ten most frequently asked client questions. By writing down and answering those, you’re creating the content that search engines and real people are actively looking for. This approach takes the guesswork out of content planning (13:24, 14:10).
4. Don’t Forget the “Why” Authority is About Value and Specificity: Generic claims like “the best loan officer in Pennsylvania” don’t cut it. We emphasize getting specific about the products you offer, the communities you serve, and the real needs you address. Authority comes from providing detailed, helpful, and context-rich answers across platforms and using the kinds of “long-tail” keyword phrases real clients use to search (10:32, 12:24).
5. Embrace Repetition, Repurposing, and Team Effort: It’s not always about more content, but about the right content posted in multiple formats (blog, video, social, etc.) and repeated across platforms. We urge officers to make use of AI tools for planning and checklists, work incrementally, include captions for searchability, and lean on both internal teams and outside partners. Every branch and team effort compounds the credibility and authority of the entire company (16:05, 17:48, 32:24).

We also remind everyone that learning how to navigate digital marketing and AI-driven search is like learning a new language. Take it step by step, give yourself some grace, and remember that it’s not optional if you want to stay competitive in today’s mortgage market. If you’re ready to take action, connect with us for resources, support, and to join the conversation!

Update your information on your platforms to be the same across the board. Instagram, Facebook, your website, all of the same information should be shown so that it's very easy to pick up on who is this person. That's the same person. They're in lots of places. They must be an authority because they're the same person in lots of places. It is simple as that. Do not overthink it.

Hey, loan officers, have you ever wondered how to get your online presence presence up to speed, maybe how to own your zip code, how to show up in Google, which is SEO, and on AI, which is AEO, all the hot button topics that everyone's talking about. If you've been wondering how to beef up your performance online overall, this is the call for you.

This is the podcast. So glad to have you here.

Welcome to Lending Leadership. I'm Rach. We've got Karim, we've got Laura, we've got Caitlin. Our maze. Dive into it.

Let's go.

Hi guys, excited.

If I could start off, Rach, and ask a question. Yes. I would love to just kind of define this. I think it is a bit confusing for professionals maybe in real estate, in the mortgage world that are just learning bite-sized pieces, you know, playing with AI, working with it on their content. It is kind of an open landscape of understanding the definitions and the difference between SEO, AEO, and GEO. And our marketing account executives here have elevated training that they have taken in these, in these categories. But I think where I'd love to start, Caitlin, Laura, if one of you could just jump in and tell us the difference in definition of how you're being searched online, just for a baseline understanding that our audience can kind of Jot down or have, obviously we're going to send out this recording first and then we can go into each of them.

Yeah.

Caitlin, I know you just did a really great video on this on social. Do you want to do a recap of that?

Let's popcorn it. We can popcorn it to each. So SEO is helping somebody find you online in places like Google. So search engines. Popcorn Laura.

Yes. So AEO is answer engine optimization, and that is basically when you type some sort of query into search, it's going to give you the information it's finding online, but that's also within your AI search engines, not just the traditional Bings, Googles, DuckDuckGo, those kind of places.

And then the third tier. So you stack one, the SEO, on top of the AEO, and then you get your GEO. And GEO is helping generative AI answer real questions with multiple pieces of information taken into account. And then it puts out an answer for a consumer, whoever is asking the question.

Is it fair to say, because the one I was— I, I've been least familiar with and learning in more recent times is GEO. Is it fair to say that it's more an all-encompassing look at the performance of the search or the individual or the, the way that the person's asking a question to pull all the information together? Does that more kind of define GEO and separate it from the spec— Specificity— I don't know if I said that right— of SEO and AEO.

Exactly. And that's oftentimes why we'll see them stacked as SEO first, AEO second, GEO third. There's a reason for that tertiary setup.

Yeah. And I mean, if you want to look at it this way, AEO, SEO, they're more the basics, just finding out like the information about you, your business, where you're located, contact information. But then GEO is more diving into the context clues, the authority that you might have, the backlinking, any information you are putting out there. It's looking at all of that and coming up to its own conclusions and thinking for itself more so than just, oh, this is the question, here's the quick answer of a few words. Like, it's putting together a larger analysis with GEO.

GEO would be like that librarian that went and looked at all of the information, put a document together, and then sent it off to you with the response. It is a well-researched response with multitudes of different books or websites taken into account and then given a response.

Yeah, this is so smart. And, and how cool that we live in this era where it is helping us with, you know, kind of killing 5 birds with one stone. I mean, take this podcast for example. We can have this podcast one conversation, take that, create reels from it, take it, create part of a drip campaign, put it as part of a blog post. And all, you know, the ideas are endless, but all of those kind of filter back into that GEO that you're talking about to help people become more searchable. And when it comes down to it, when people are— people are not going to Google as much. They're going right to their favorite generative AI platform, ChatGPT or fill in the blank, and saying, give me the best loan officer in Yardley, Pennsylvania, you know, you have to have the tags out there and feelers out there so that your name pops up. And that's exactly what you guys are helping our loan officers do.

And it's really cool.

Yeah.

And you have to say why you're the best loan officer. You have to give tells so that these search engines and AI platforms are able to take the information, sort through it, and then respond with it.

The why is honestly the biggest addition, I think, nowadays with the AI search engines, because it's not like SEO is new. It's been around for a very long time. And if you haven't been making sure your information is consistent and prevalent across the internet, like, you're already behind, uh, before the launch of all these AI search engines. So at the bare minimum, you need a lot more information out there just about the basics of what you do. But the why with, with the authority building of, oh, I know about FHA loans, here's everything you could possibly need to know about an FHA loan.

And that buyer's confused about it.

Yes. Having different webpages answering very specific questions, getting very nitty gritty, that is the authority building. And that's what's gonna set you apart as like why you are the best, because you're providing way more context than your competitors are at this point. And if you're not doing that, it sounds so tedious. Some of it's fun. The blogging and, and the content building is fun. I know making sure your website is accurate across all, all websites is not fun to add all that information in, but it's necessary and you're literally losing deals if you don't have the information on there.

So to that point, if we have, you know, loan officers watching today, folks in the real estate community watching today, to break it down, slow it down, because we've got a lot in there and I can see how it can feel overwhelming when your profession and your specialty is not this.

Okay.

It might not be, you might, you might love marketing, you might, you know, do marketing because, you know, you have to, but not like it. We have industry professionals that fit into all those, those subcategories. Where do you get started? How do we break it down a little bit like you guys would do in a learning session for industry professionals, which we do for our loan officers? But how could we break it down for this podcast so that they can have some key takeaways from this 30-minute session that they can apply right away on their computers or on their phones?

Step 1, update your information on your platforms to be the same across the board. Instagram, Facebook, your website. You want your title to be the same, your name to be spelled the same. So if I'm Caitlin, I should go by Caitlin across all platforms and not Katie. Then you are having the same contact information, email address. If you have to have your licensing information included, the same licensing.

Mm-hmm.

All of the same information should be shown so that it's very easy to pick up on who is this person. That's the same person. They're in lots of places. They must be an authority because they're the same person in lots of places. It is simple as that. Do not overthink it.

Mm-hmm.

And if you don't have it consistent, it muddies the results and the search engines are just going to look at other competitors and say, this information is consistent. I can confidently say this person does exist. They're at this location, they know this sort of loan product, I'm going to provide them because— to the consumer because they have their ducks in a row essentially. And I've actually run into this this past week because one of the loan officers we support has multiple locations. And I was talking with another SEO expert. We've been really digging in on the performance of his content. And we found that because he has 2 different locations, that can confuse the search results.

Mm-hmm.

So making sure it's very clear, like if you have a Google page, you might need one for both locations. Well, just so when the search engines are looking for somebody in a very specific town, it has all that information consistently. And then your other location would also have that consistently across the board. There are ways to do it. Just make sure you're listing all of the information accurately because it can throw it off. And I think address and, and name, like Caitlin said, Caitlin versus Katie, that can really throw off search engines. As well.

That's such a great takeaway because that's a very simple thing that people could look at right away and just look for inconsistencies, right? That, that's a great first step. I love that. And I like tangibles, keep it really simple.

That's—

that was a great idea, Corinne, because yeah, all of this can seem overwhelming.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so that's step 1. Where do we go from there? We did that, everything checks out, we're happy with how everything looks across the board, it is consistent, we're making sure that all of the The ducks are in a row. Every box is checked. Now where do we go?

I feel like once you get your information completely accurate across the board, just explaining in a little bit more depth what you actually do is—

or to answer all questions.

If people don't know what you do, they're, they're not going to reach out to you. I mean, as simple as that. I mean, people know you're kind of in finance, but do they know that you're a mortgage lender? Do they know what sort of products you provide. They know that you maybe service multiple states and can help them move across state lines.

So you have a referral network of agents across the country too that you can have assist those consumers.

Yep. So getting a little bit more specific, not saying, oh, I'm a mortgage lender, saying, hey, I do FHA loans in Phoenix, Arizona, or something like that is going to be a lot more helpful to search engines than just saying, hey, I'm a mortgage lender. in Arizona. Great, lots of people are. So yeah, what makes you special?

I was just gonna say that, saying the best loan officer in Arizona or the best loan officer in Pennsylvania, it doesn't cut it, I guess.

I think as marketers too, and even as, you know, real estate professionals, mortgage professionals, you want— you have that instinct to try to say, well, I can do this in the entire state of Arizona. To the point of your example, that's the natural instinct is, oh, I want to cast a larger net because I can help somebody that's 4 hours away from me in the same state because I'm licensed in the state. However, having said that, that's not the answer in this situation. The answer is to get more local, right guys?

Right, exactly. You want to tell people where you service, who you help, the communities that you work with.

Yeah, and it's okay to be repetitive. I think that's the other thing— have that information repeated. Those towns, those counties, Those specific loan products that are your bread and butter, have it repeated in every situation on your listings online, on your microsite. Maybe you're listing it in, in social captions as well with graphics you're sharing on social media. Maybe you're talking about it in your video presentations, right? It's okay to be repetitive.

Yeah. And the, the point of being a little more specific too is that when people are searching, they're not just searching mortgages, they're searching conventional loans in X location. It's the long tail keywords, not just the keyword of mortgage. So the long tail keywords are more of like the full on questions that people are typing into search.

Yeah.

So literally having the content, the question of what can I do with 3% down? Like, can I get a loan under 20% down? And then answering that question just flat out, that's going to show up in search results more because you're giving them the exact answer that they need. So playing into those long tail keywords by getting specific with your content is going to help a lot.

Yeah.

And thinking about what are people asking or what questions do people have that they might not want to just post on socials and ask the general world?

Mm-hmm.

What are they Googling or using their search engine, their AI search for that they don't want to ask their friends? They might be a little embarrassed about. How do I— or because they want to be private with their life. How do I buy a house before I sell? How do I buy a house with poor credit? How do I work towards changing my credit score profile? Those are—

2 pieces of that I love, though, that you guys shared on our recent learning session for our loan officers is that you actually had our loan officers write down what are your frequently asked questions? Because it might be hard for them to identify, even though we're recognizing we want to know what people are searching that we don't know. They're gonna say, well, I'm not sure what people are searching, Laura and Caitlin, where do I start? And your answer to them was, let's just make a list of your top 5 or top 10 most frequently asked questions by customers.

Mm-hmm.

Let's go there first. What are they asking you on a consistent basis and how do we answer those questions consistently across the map so that you're positioned as a trust expert with those answers? And that's an easy way for them to grasp on or anyone listening here to kind of grasp on and get started. Sitting there writing down, what are my top 5 most frequently asked questions by a customer?

And if you don't even want to think, go ask your AI of choice, what are the most popular trending questions?

I was just going to say that.

Yeah, and even Google now has its AI feature summary at the top, so it will give you as well. Don't just completely abandon search results from your traditional search engines. Honestly, asking multiple of them might give you slightly different answers, but if they're all the same, it at least tells you, Those are the questions you need to be answering. I know we talk about in conversations with loan officers as well, like when you're being asked specific questions during the day, just write down whatever that question was.

Pull up your notes app, guys. Yeah, yeah.

Like write down what you were asked and that's your content. You don't have to think about it. Like you literally already answered the question at some point that day. Just write it down so that you can go back to it later. Make a social post about it, make a blog post about it. Maybe it's something that warrants an entire web page on your site if it's something specific enough about a different loan product. But yes, you can just simply go to a search engine and say, what are the most common questions? And start there. I mean, you don't have to think that hard about it anymore, which is great.

So then where do they go from there? So they're getting a list of questions and a list of— and then, like you said, maybe taking those questions, putting them into chat. putting them into Google, expanding on them, maybe even asking other loan officers too, because let's face it, it's the same questions that come up all the time. So then would you suggest that loan officer take each of those and, and make a video about them, make a blog post? Where, where do they go from there and what kind of medium should they use?

Yes, all of the media, all of the above, because you should reuse and recycle all of your content because that takes out some of the mental stress and load of what am I doing next?

Mm-hmm.

Get your phone, get your notes app out on your phone. You work in your job every day. What you're doing at work, that is your content. And the answers that you're answering at work, that is your content. Your content is blogs, it is reels, TikTok, posts on socials like Instagram. And something very important to keep in mind when you're making your Instagram posts are the captions.

The part that nobody really wants to do because they're like, I did the hard part, I don't want to put the words in there either. Caitlin, why do I have to do that? I don't want to do that. I did the video, isn't that enough?

Why did you start indexing Instagram? Darn it.

And it's not even just Instagram. I mean, search engines now look at Reddit, they look at LinkedIn, they're looking a lot more at these social platforms for the authority and for the social proof to say, yeah, this person's legit and they're really good at what they do. But the captions are where it really matters because these search engines aren't necessarily pulling the data from a social graphic with text on it or from your video. It's a lot easier for these engines to be able to pull the information from the text within your post copy. So putting the context clues in there, even if it seems repetitive to what you're saying in the video, having that information in your post is going to be a lot easier for those to show up in search results.

That's a really good point and not something that everyone's thinking about. Um, that how, how it's looked at in the captions specifically, how the keywords are pulled from the captions specifically. And again, guys, plans— whether you have a team member that's working on this for you or whether you're doing it for yourself, you can put all of this into Claude or ChatGPT to come up with a full-fledged plan. And then I always like to say, you know, 20 minutes a day on your marketing, or maybe a couple sessions a week, but knock off one thing a week. We know it's overwhelming to do all of this at once or try to produce all these assets at once. But even if you can knock off a couple a week and kind of work through a checklist format, which is how we really position things to our, to our team members, work through a checklist, make it a little bit easier, a little bit more digestible. Little actions add up over time and they accomplish really big results.

Yeah. And if you need the checklist, AI is your friend with that too. I actually recently built an AI agent who basically went through and identified different opportunities to improve SEO. And I told it, can you build me a checklist so that every week we're knocking out one bite-sized task? I was very specific, something that's going to take 5 to 10 minutes tops that will move the needle. And I told it to prioritize the things that matter the most first so we can knock that out of the way. So in addition to the projects I'm already working on with website building, blog content, optimizing the Google Business page, talking through social content strategies. We're doing all of that, but there's always things that you're gonna miss. And so having that little backup AI bot on the side to say, hey, you know what you should fix? Um, your zip code on this one page isn't consistent with the rest of your pages on your website.

You should go fix that. That's huge because again, those are the tedious things you're not necessarily looking at. Um, or it'll ask for things that like, this is already on the site and we'll have a conversation and go back. And what happens especially on websites, kind of similar to the social graphics where it's not able to read everything within your posts unless you have the post copy.

Yeah.

On the website, the, the search crawlers on Google and AI can't read some of the content if it's built into JavaScript a certain way or if it's within imagery, it's not reading it. So even like your reviews, for example, you have maybe the pretty 5 stars sitting at the top of your review. the search engines have no idea what that means. Like, you actually have to write rating equals 5.0 for it to have the context to know that you're actually getting a good review. So making sure, looking at even the back end of your, your website to make sure the content is showing up, because it's nice to have all the pretty functions, the, the, uh, like the cascading things that, that you can flatten, like the accordion type of, uh, Uh, pieces on your site or, um, like dialog boxes where you click on something, it pulls up more information. You need to make sure that information in there is actually being registered on the backend of your site.

Not always.

And it, it isn't. I found that out recently with a loan officer that, that did one of these dialog boxes. And I went back. If you right-click on your website, website, like whatever page you're looking at, you can view source code. And you can just do a quick search, like hit Ctrl+F to search for some wording that you're looking for. If it doesn't show up, because that code's gonna look crazy.

Sure.

But doing a quick search, looking for a couple of keywords, if they don't show up in your code, then the search engines are not going to find it. So just work with your web developers, like put it on the people who know what they're doing and say, make sure that this is searchable. Otherwise, the content you're actually putting on your website is doing no good. It's helping maybe the consumer, but it's only doing half the work it could be doing for you because it's not showing up in any search results.

Yeah, and, and to your point, Laura, lean on your web provider or contact. This is technical, guys. We know it's not something, oh, I'm not going to remember this, or I'm going to be confused to do that. This is to help you guys pull out questions that you want to ask. So whether it's something you're doing with AI to make a plan for yourself that you've learned here, or it's as simple as, oh, I want to ask my web provider about that. I'm not sure that my site is meeting the criteria it should be, but that's a good point, Laura. Then you're taking it as— to Laura's point, you're taking it to the expert, allowing them to either give you a recommendation back or do a scrub, do a check on it. You're, you're becoming more knowledgeable in this space to ask the right questions.

It doesn't mean that you're not going to delegate something out or that you're not going to rely on an expert that maybe you're already working with. to help you with it. That's what marketing professionals are here for. Yeah.

And crawlers, you brought up a great word there, Laura. Crawlers, you can think of them as the internet's librarians. They're all over, all looking at things all of the time, every little piece of info out there, reviewing, filing, putting it in places. And then they are using all of that information and giving you your answers. So the crawlers are like the World Wide Web librarians. Looking at everything. If the info isn't there, they're not gonna find it. Or if like the info is hidden under a black Sharpie, they're not going to find it.

It needs to be very easy for them to see it so that they can deliver the information.

Yeah, this is great. And I, I really love that, that we all said this, right? I mean, Carl White loves to say, if not you, then who? So don't think that everything that we're sharing today is something that you personally need to do. But yes, you have the knowledge to then tap your, uh, your vendors and make sure that they're doing the work that they need to be doing. So knowledge is power here. And, and I want to dive into the content itself a bit because you said something in our recent, um, our recent information session with our loan officers that, you know, years ago it was more content, more content, more video, more, more posts, more, more, more. But it's not necessarily more, it's, it's the right pieces of content, it's the right Positioning. And I think—

Not just signals. Signals all over the place, whatever. Yeah, right signals.

Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I think that can be a misconception of people. Like, I've put all this stuff out there, what do you mean it's not doing what it's supposed to do?

What did you put out there, guys? That's what— what question did you answer? How did that help somebody? How did that bring someone enjoyment? Or how did it stop a scroll? Why did somebody find value in this? You have to start thinking about other people. You're not marketing to yourself. A lot of us get stuck in this, I'm marketing to myself or my friends or my sphere.

Mm-hmm.

No, especially as a lender, you are marketing to everybody. There's buckets of people, all types of people, and I'm sure you'd love to do all of their loans. Think about all of the people you're marketing to. And start having them as your audience because that's who it is on social media. You're a speaker. Who's your audience that you're speaking to? You're not speaking to yourself. It's not a journal. You can, you can do that.

You can start a journal, but your audience, it's not you. Start catering to who you want your audience to be as well. Who do you want it to be?

Great.

It doesn't have to be your audience at this point in time today. You can start working towards making that your audience over time. And you can start today. The only days that you cannot do anything and you're not allowed to get stuff done is yesterday and tomorrow. Today you have time to do it. You might as well.

I like that.

And a big piece of that too is talking about the audience, speaking to the audience, what they care about. They don't care that you know all these loan products until they actually need you. They do care about what's going on in their community. They care about free things they can take their kids to in the summer to wear them out. Like, you, you need to also show you're an expert in other things in your community if you want to truly build the authority. Um, and, and going beyond the mortgage process as well, you need enough educational information about the process, about the products, so that if they have questions, to Caitlin's point, they might be embarrassed to ask or They don't want to reach out to a lender right away because, you know, they don't want to get hit with a million calls and emails. Like, I get it. Like, that's a big process.

You don't want to call until you're truly ready. So having that information is important on your site, but also having more info about your local community, things going on, events, different spots to visit, that also helps build your local authority. And that's also searchable. People are Googling that. And if they do that, They're gonna potentially show up on your website because you have content related to that as well. So make sure you have a good mix of informational, like educational and entertainment essentially. Um, otherwise people aren't gonna wanna follow you cuz they don't wanna hear about loan products on a daily basis in their newsfeed.

Think about who you follow and then start to bring up your notes and say, why do you follow them? What is it that you're enjoying? What is it that they're making you feel inside? What value are they bringing? And then start to try to emulate that in your own sphere of influence through your own socials, website, etc.

That's great. That's great. I'm really curious because you guys are on the front lines with our loan officers. We have a really unique setup here at HMA, and I'm so proud of the work that everyone is doing. And you guys are really Working hand in hand with the loan officers every day, what kind of questions have you gotten from the loan officers, or what kind of excitement have you gotten? I'm really curious. After this informational session that, that we had with them, were people intimidated? Were they excited? Did they have a million questions? Talk to me about that a little bit.

Um, I, I think it's a range. It depends on where they're at at this point. Some of them are like, they watched our, our recent webinar together and they're like, oh my God, where do to start? And I'll refer back to the basics, our worksheet that we handed out to them, and say, start with your basic information and let's build content from there. Other—

a loan officer that wants that sheet, drop a comment below, we'll send it to you.

We will. Yes, absolutely. Or just join us at HMA and you can have all of that and us and Caitlin and Laura.

Come hang out with the 4 of us.

Yeah, you're gonna get the most support if you're at HMA. But then there's others that I've been working on this for a while, and they are actually being recommended, not just within AI search results, but have been the number one result because they've been putting in the consistent effort, making sure their information is accurate, getting all the content across the board. So they're saying like, what's next? What do I start doing?

Mm-hmm.

So some of the ones that are more advanced, or they're even saying, why am I still not showing up the way that I want to? We get a little bit more nitty-gritty on those details as well on their pages. And a lot of it I'm doing with some of those more advanced people are the pillar and cluster pages. So a pillar page is like a basic layout of a big piece of information you'd be searching for. And then there's links, which is the cluster of content kind of around that main page that you link out to that gets really nitty-gritty on the details of a specific loan product or something of that sort so that there's more web pages dedicated to one particular subject so they can niche down a little. Or one thing I've been doing with them that we haven't truly trained all the LOs on because it takes a lot of effort is doing backlinking, which is making sure that their industry partners, which is probably the easiest one to start with, are linking back to you on their own sites or their own social pages so that they're building your credibility because it's another business saying, I know these people and they're legit. And that link basically sends that signal to the AI search engines. And in addition to the industry partners, like once you have those conversations with them, starting to answer journalists' questions can help. So some of them, even Dave, our president here, we've been starting to do this with where I keep an eye on journalists' questions that come in.

And if there's something that's mortgage related and I think he can answer it, I'll just send them a quick message and say, hey, send me an answer to this and we'll submit it to the journalist. So then there are websites that basically provide those questions to you and you can get them right in your inbox. And then if you see something you know you can answer, go ahead and send them a message. Do not AI it. If you ChatGPT this, they have filters, so you can't do it that way. But asking, having them ask the right questions and sending in a quick reply, don't think too hard about it. Um, if they use you, they quote you, they can link back to your site. And having that media link is, is huge in AI right now because AI can only build so much credibility for you through the content you're building on your site.

But being able to have some of those contacts in your industry and in the media also basically back you up, that's stuff that you, you authentically need to build with different relationships. So it honestly just runs the gamut with my loan officers. But that's a lengthy way to say start with the content, like the information about yourself. Start content building on your webpage to build some educational information and then go and build the credibility with external sources.

I love that. Caitlin, do you have anything you want to add to that?

I say everybody's excited. They've started building web pages and talking to their chatbots about what they should do next, trying to take the extra steps off of themselves. Um, we have already started showing up in search results, AI search results. Um, we've had a total of 3 so far, and we only had it about a week ago. So people are implementing. They're excited and they're moving on to the next steps, which is exciting because we have another Taco Tuesday about this coming up soon.

I love it.

Anybody wants to join, you're welcome. Just let us know.

Yeah, and I love this. And I just have one more question because this, this goes more to like the metaverse of whatever company you're at. How important is it for not just one loan officer to do this, but when we have these these pods of loan officers, branches all putting forth this effort, does that really make a difference to the company that you're at? Does it make your company itself show up more, more prevalently, or, you know, just as a thought leader in itself?

Absolutely. Absolutely. The more high-ranking people that are attached to you— or not high rank, high-ranking through SEO, AEO, GEO with authority, and they're attached to us as a company, as a brand, the higher that that brand is going to be viewed in authority as well, because all of the signals are that that is the parent company of all of these smaller branches.

And that's where sometimes, I mean, I hate to send people to a different site off of your own website, but sometimes even linking to the main company page is helpful because you're basically borrowing some of the credibility from the main site that has a good SEO boost to it. And it can give your page that you're linking that on a little bit more of a boost as well. But yes, the more the loan officers have a presence, the more they're pushing the brand, the better it is for everybody as a whole.

And loan officers are tied to their company brand and the company brand is tied to the loan officers. There's no individual like, oh, you know, why does this benefit me? But me to tie things to corporate, I want everything to stay with what I'm working on here in this specific region. No, no, no. The company brand and reputation absolutely supports your individual brand as well. So there's great advantages to making sure that we're all working on these same measures together.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And hey, loan officers and realtors listening out there, if your company's not doing this, We're really excited to do this, and we're always looking for rockstar loan officers that want to plug in and learn more. Hey, even if you're not looking to change companies, if you want to pick our brains a little bit, we're always open to that. Um, but anything else before we close here? We covered a lot. There's, there's a lot of great content, great ideas, more to come on this because it's only going to compound. And, you know, the snowball has started.

Yeah.

Um, but anything else before we close?

Cut yourself some slack because this is learning a new language.

Mm-hmm.

There's gonna be some muscle memory that you build up, but eventually you're gonna look back on all you've done. You're gonna be very proud of yourself. You learned a new skill. Learning is good for your brain across the board, but take your time. Don't beat yourself up if it takes a minute. It's better done than not.

Mm-hmm.

And honestly, it's not optional. I know you don't wanna put in the effort, chip away at the easy things first, but if you're not doing it, your competitors, even locally, are doing it. So make a list, check off what you can from it. Anything you do is going to help, so do it at the pace that you need to. And if you need a place to start, you don't know where to start with your content, go to ChatGPT or Claude or wherever and say, hey, Give me a sitemap of my website. Tell me what, what's missing. Tell me where the gaps are and start there. You have an assistant right there in your pocket as well.

So definitely use it to be intentional, intentional about what you're updating first, because if you're not doing it, somebody else is.

I like that. It's not optional. It's not optional, guys. Rach, you want to bring us home?

Yeah, I think that was great. And guys, again, anyone listening, please make sure you're connecting with us on All the spaces, but definitely LinkedIn and Instagram and, well, all the spaces. But, um, we're everywhere. Everywhere. We will have tags below. We want to hear from you. Comment, let us know how you're doing in this new frontier that we're in. And, um, we're excited to hear from you.

We're excited to help you grow. Make sure you like and subscribe to Lending Leadership, and we'll catch you next time. Thanks, guys. Thanks so much.

This was awesome.

Thank you.